Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

Here's an article I found in the "Oddly Enough" section of Yahoo News yesterday: And the grad students most likely to cheat are...

"Students have reached the point where they're making their own rules," said lead author Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "They'll challenge rules that professors have made, because they think they're stupid, basically, or inappropriate."

Shouldn't students be allowed, at least to some extent, to make their own rules? I was observing in a class today, and as part of a demonstration of "intelligent behavior," two teams of students were to be building towers out of index cards. Now, of course, they were supposed to come up with their own architectural techniques. In every class period, though, without exception, one team would accuse the other of "cheating," and always for the same reason: a member of the opposing team would spy on them and share their good ideas with his/her own group. They called it cheating, I called it ingenius. How better to get an idea of how to create your tower than by seeing firsthand how someone else has already succeeded? I was so happy that my host teacher did not punish anyone for cheating, no matter how much information was stolen from the other team. I say, it's a collaborative world: so long as one person comes up with a good idea, the rest of us are set to take it and, if we feel so compelled, expand on it.

Just like the business students in the article are paraphrased as saying: "what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important." I could not agree more. This is a world where any information you need is at your fingertips. Why waste time creating a unit plan when you can find them posted all over the Internet? Why waste time making handouts when you can copy some off someone's website? Why not spend all that creation time coming up with better ideas of how to reach individual students?

These are the thoughts I have when I go into classes where I have to create those sorts of things. Of course, I always end up creating my own things (which usually aren't any good) because I'm afraid of getting caught. But as we get further and further into the age of Digital Natives, and we get students who are more and more comfortable with locating information online (I substituted in a 7th Grade class Wednesday in which many students had no idea how to properly use Google, but that's another story), we are going to face the potential that they can find anything they need for our classes online.

While I am of course not advocating plagiarizing (it is important to have individual thoughts and feelings in essays, after all), I am advocating that students should be allowed to borrow information from wherever possible, if it helps them meet the greater goal of learning something, somehow. Am I crazy? Perhaps. Do I need to think this out more, before I'm labeled as a radical? Absolutely. But I know what I mean, and I hope it came through it some way.