'The term paper is dead'

As I flew back from a visit to Washington D.C. yesterday, I browsed through The Washington Post and found this interesting commentary on what may be the biggest problem facing teachers... how do they know how to best determine whether their students have learned something? Internet plagiarism is becoming so rampant, he writes, that it has effectively rendered the term paper method useless.

Schools have responded by upping their use of academic integrity pledges and search engines such as TurnItIn.com, which checks student work against a large database of previously written material. But the rise of such measures hasn't reduced plagiarism at all; in fact, students and teachers are more likely to spar over plagiarism than ever before.

Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers.

One main problem is students using Wikipedia, more of a public forum than a credible information source, as if it were the Encyclopedia Britannica. While there are some ways to detect cutting and pasting in papers -- the writer mentions the change in tone of a paragraph -- I can only imagine how frustrated teachers are with this.

I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of readers who are teachers either in our Catholic schools or public schools. And if there are any students reading this who want to debate this commentary, be my guest.