So the U.S. is falling behind on college graduation rates.
Okay that's interesting and all but meanwhile at the New York Times
I admit, I don't go to an super elite top 10 university but I've never had to plagiarize in order to get a good grade. Writing, comprehending texts, and forming original ideas is easy, at least for me.
Anyway, I'm fairly certain on a long enough time line that post high school education is going to become a 'right' in the United States and the federal government is going to start subsidizing everyone's college education. I feel that if the coming generations of students are fine with plagiarism and not actually putting in the effort to make a good paper or grade the government should probably focus their attention to doing something else with the resources it'll eventually spend on making the U.S. #1 in higher education rates.
On a sidenote, Am I the only person, from my age group, who thinks college is a bit overrated? During my day job, I've met some pretty damn successful and intelligent people who blow the people I met at Rutgers, NYU, New School, Pennstate and a bunch of other universities out of the water in terms of intelligence and success. Seems like people put a college degree on an undeserving pedestal sometimes and think a college degree automatically means better at life, the universe, and everything.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor … =128725711A new report warns that the United States is falling farther and farther behind other countries in the proportion of adults with a college education. Researchers say the decline could have devastating economic and social consequences for the country.
According to the College Completion Agenda, no more than 40 percent of the U.S. adult population has a college degree, and even though most high school graduates enroll in college, only 56 percent earn an undergraduate degree in six years or less. The completion rate drops even more in community colleges, where only 28 percent earn a degree in three years or less.
"It's a very serious problem. People like never before in the United States understand how critical it is to get an education," says Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, which commissioned the study. He says the U.S. is losing its competitive advantage in the world because it's not producing nearly enough people with the level of education necessary to keep high-paying jobs from leaving the country.
Okay that's interesting and all but meanwhile at the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/educa … gewanted=1At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
...
But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
...
In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.
Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.
I admit, I don't go to an super elite top 10 university but I've never had to plagiarize in order to get a good grade. Writing, comprehending texts, and forming original ideas is easy, at least for me.
Anyway, I'm fairly certain on a long enough time line that post high school education is going to become a 'right' in the United States and the federal government is going to start subsidizing everyone's college education. I feel that if the coming generations of students are fine with plagiarism and not actually putting in the effort to make a good paper or grade the government should probably focus their attention to doing something else with the resources it'll eventually spend on making the U.S. #1 in higher education rates.
On a sidenote, Am I the only person, from my age group, who thinks college is a bit overrated? During my day job, I've met some pretty damn successful and intelligent people who blow the people I met at Rutgers, NYU, New School, Pennstate and a bunch of other universities out of the water in terms of intelligence and success. Seems like people put a college degree on an undeserving pedestal sometimes and think a college degree automatically means better at life, the universe, and everything.
