Confederacy of a Dunce - Analysis of Literature

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

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Today on the bus ride to work, I overheard two undergraduate students complaining about the way their English literature essays had been marked. The main problem (in these students' eyes) related to the totally unfair and arbitrary manner in which their instructor used her own personal judgement in determining which kinds of sources were relevant and which were not. The phrase "books and papers by dead old white men" was bandied about, and it was suggested that this instructor's pro-dead/old/white/male attitude was having a drastic negative impact on the educational validity and relevance of the class, and therefore to their educational experience as a whole. I (mentally) nodded along at first; after all there's no shortage of current authors writing on the topic, placing the work in whatever sort of context one might imagine as being possibly relevant (and many that are frankly a stretch even for the stretchy mind).

But then, it turned out they were not actually contrasting dusty old tomes by long-lived, long-dead, long-white, long-males to spanking new ultra-relevant works complete with ISBN-13s which the instructor had unfairly discarded due to her irrational love of the long-everything publications mentioned above. No, the instructor's main beef with the essays was that a number of the students had made the same rather unusual point, mostly using a rather unusual turn of phrase, which happened to originate from Wikipedia. Now I'm not saying that Wikipedia is the devil, but merely that university students should probably rely on more than encyclopedias to write their papers. And if they do write their papers mainly from encyclopedias, they should suffer accordingly. Maybe Wikipedia's authors and editors are alive, and often young (erm, I'll have to get back to you on the "white male" business. I have my suspicions), but Wikipedia should hardly be considered as a primary source (Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought). It might be an entirely reasonable starting point to get some ideas if you're totally devoid of them, but it's never a good idea to pass off the ideas, or worse, the words, of Wikipedia as your own. It's particularly bad if you don't acknowledge the source and are not even clever enough to change the words around.

Frankly, I'm surprised that university students were caught by Wikipedia in this way, and they're lucky they were only downgraded instead of being swatted across the room for incompetent plagiarism. But it must be really terrible for teachers of slightly younger students, trying to get them to actually read assigned books in this day and age of instantly available summary information of all kinds. Back in the olden days, of course, the main way of doing this was through Cliffs Notes [sic?], whose distinctive cover design marked you out as a cheat from a hundred paces, and which were (allegedly) kept by most teachers for comparison with unusually insightful essays. Or by re-using a very good paper from someone else in some other year, possibly changing a few words here and there to hide the paper's origin (or at worst, just using White-Out to replace the original author's name with your own). This, however, required access to (a) a good paper, (b) from someone older, (c) on the right topic, which were seldom available. The Dunce family library, however, contained a number of highly abridged classic novels, which I understand were rented out to classmates by a certain relative of mine for book-report purposes. Shameful indeed. But not as shameful as university students cutting and pasting from Wikipedia!

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Tuesday, March 04, 2008 12:58:17 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)