Below, from an end-of-semester extra-credit essay by one of my plagiarists; the blue type is mine:

I have learned a great deal in this class, especially in the proposal assignment. I never knew how to cite a paper let alone a business proposal correctly until this class. As you know, we were given a zero for our first draft of the proposal for plagiarism and not citing properly. Together we worked extra hard on the final draft to make sure we knew exactly what we were citing and how to do it properly. If not for this assignment, I probably would continue to cite improperly and the ramifications of that would probably be ten times worse than what happened in this class. To cite properly you have to put extra time and effort into the paper to make sure you give the author credit for their work you use in your paper. Citing another’s work is very important and shouldn’t be taken lightly and from this day forward, I will make sure I put that extra effort into citing when referencing someone else’s work in my own paper.

I’m sorry if you were penalized for the failings of past instructors. It’s unthinkable that American colleges and universities are not teaching students how to function within the academy’s own culture and in the larger community outside the academy. Really. It’s inexcusable.

These are things I learned in junior high school. I can remember cutting up an old National Geographic to illustrate a junior-high term paper, which had citations and a list of references—I remember it vividly because, after all the hard work I did, the teacher made a snide remark to the effect that he hoped it was my magazine to cut up. So...I know that fairly young kids are capable of learning these skills. To claim, as some do, that kids can’t learn them is pure BS; to claim they needn’t learn them, as others do, is criminal.

Freshman comp is a prerequisite for the course in which this upper-division university student encountered me. In my opinion, students who discover they have not been offered the most basic skills in a required community college or university composition course should get lawyers and sue. Then they should sue the high schools and elementary schools that passed them along and claimed their learning was adequate. I do not say this in jest.

Now please consider how this issue matters to your pocketbook and mine.

Students who are not educated in our culture’s basic skills of communication have no chance of becoming competent white-collar employees. Writing is thinking. If you can’t write clearly and coherently and you can’t incorporate other people’s facts and ideas into your writing in a competent way, you cannot think clearly, coherently, or competently.

America needs competent, clear-thinking workers if it is to stay competitive in the global economy. As it stands, we are not keeping up with what we did for our kids two generations ago. We are falling behind ourselves. And, as is widely known, we fell behind countries such as Japan and China in math and language skills a long time ago.

This is not a chicken about to come home to roost. It is a gigantic vulture. You and I and all our children will feel the consequences of our system’s failure to educate the present and coming generations of young Americans. We are in danger of slipping into a Third-World economy, and what you see above is the specific reason that is so.

If you are not already wealthy and in a position to pass your wealth to your children, you and your children will suffer economically for this massive systemic failure.

categories: education in America