Guest Post: Four Reasons to be Happy About Internet Plagiarism

by Russell Hunt
St. Thomas University

[This column is reprinted (with the author's permission) from http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/www/4reasons.htm. Teaching Perspectives (St. Thomas University) 5 (December 2002), [1-5]. Repr. Teaching Options Pedagogiques (University of Ottawa) 6:4 (August 2003), 3-5; repr. [as "Let's Hear it for Internet Plagiarism"] Teaching & Learning Bridges 2:3 (University of Saskatchewan) (November 2003), 2-5; Teaching Matters Newsletter (University of New Brunswick, Saint John) (January 2007) 6-9; in Think: Critical Thinking for Everyday Life, ed. Judith Boss (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010): 367-368. Note: this is an excerpt from a longer project, which can be found in draft form at http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/www/plagiary.htm ]

The "information technology revolution" is almost always presented as having cataclysmic consequences for education—sometimes for the better, but often, of course, for the worse. In postsecondary circles, perhaps the most commonly apprehended cataclysm is "Internet Plagiarism." When a university subscribes to turnitin.com, the local media invariably pick up the story—"Students to Learn that Internet Crime Doesn't Pay" -- with the kind of alacrity usually reserved for features on political sex scandals or patronage payoffs. When the newest cheating scandal surfaces at some prestigious southern university known for its military school style "honor code," the headlines leap across the tabloids like stories on child molestation by alien invaders.

It's almost never suggested that all this might be something other than a disaster for higher education. But that's exactly what I want to argue here. I believe the challenge of easier and more convenient plagiarism is to be welcomed. This rising tide threatens to change things—for, I predict and hope, the better. Here are some specific practices which are threatened by the increasing ease with which plagiarism can be committed.

1. The institutional rhetorical writing environment (the "research paper," the "literary essay," the "term paper") is challenged by this, and that's a good thing. Our reliance on these forms as ways of assessing student skills and knowledge has been increasingly questioned by people who are concerned with how learning and assessment take place, and can be fostered, and particularly with how the ability to manipulate written language ("literacy") is developed. The assumption that a student's learning is accurately and readily tested by her ability to produce, in a completely arhetorical situation, an artificial form that she'll never have to write again once she's survived formal education (the essay examination, the formal research paper), is questionable on the face of it, and is increasingly untenable. If the apprehension that it's almost impossible to escape the mass-produced and purchased term paper leads teachers to create more imaginative, and rhetorically sound, writing situations in their classes, the advent of the easily-purchased paper from schoolsucks.com is a salutary challenge to practices which ought to be challenged. One good, clear example of the argument which can be mounted against generic term paper assignments and in favor of assignments which track that writing process and / or are specific to a particular situation is in Tom Rocklin's online "Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?" Many other equivalent arguments that assignment can be refigured to make plagiarism more difficult—and offer more authentic rhetorical contexts for student writing -- have been offered in recent years.

I'm unconvinced that we can address the problem by assuring students that "they are real writers with meaningful and important things to say," or invite them to revise their work where we can see the revisions, as long as we continue giving them more decontextualized, audienceless and purposeless writing exercises. Having something to say is—for anybody except, maybe, a Romantic poet—absolutely indistinguishable from having someone to say it to, and an authentic reason for saying it. To address this problem, I believe, we need to rethink the position of writing in students' lives and in the curriculum. One strong pressure to do that is the increasing likelihood that empty exercises can be fulfilled by perfunctory efforts, or borrowed texts.

2. The institutional structures around grades and certification are challenged by this, and that's a good thing. Perhaps more important is the way plagiarism challenges the overwhelming pressure for grades which our institutions have created and foster, and which has as its consequence the pressure on many good students to cut a corner here and there (there's lots of evidence that it's not mainly the marginal students in danger of failing who cheat; it's as often those excellent students who believe, possibly with some reason, that their lives depend on keeping their GPA up to some arbitrary scratch). An even more central consideration is the way the existence of plagiarism itself challenges the way the university structures its system of incentives and rewards, as a zero-sum game, with a limited number of winners.

University itself, as our profession has structured it, is the most effective possible situation for encouraging plagiarism and cheating. If I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, or improve my golf swing, or write HTML, "cheating" would be the last thing that would ever occur to me. It would be utterly irrelevant to the situation. On the other hand, if I wanted a certificate saying that I could pick a jig, play a round in under 80, or produce a slick Web page (and never expected actually to perform the activity in question), I might well consider cheating (and consider it primarily a moral problem). This is the situation we've built for our students: a system in which the only incentives or motives anyone cares about are marks, credits, and certificates. We're not entirely responsible for that—government policies which have tilted financial and social responsibility for education increasingly toward the students and their families have helped a lot -- but the crucial factor has been our insistence, as a profession, that the only motivation we could ever count on is what is built into the certification process. When students say—as they regularly do—"why should I do this if it's not marked?" or "why should I do this well if it's not graded?" or even "I understand that I should do this, but you're not marking it, and my other professors are marking what I do for them," they're saying exactly what educational institutions have been highly successful at teaching them to say.

They're learning exactly the same thing, with a different spin, when we tell them that plagiarism is a moral issue. We're saying that the only reason you might choose not to do it is a moral one. But think about it: if you wanted to build a deck and were taking a class to learn how to do it, your decision not to cheat would not be based on moral considerations.

3. The model of knowledge held by almost all students, and by many faculty—the tacit assumption that knowledge is stored information and that skills are isolated, asocial faculties—is challenged by this, and that's a good thing. When we judge essays by what they contain and how logically it's organized (and how grammatically it's presented) we miss the most important fact about written texts, which is that they are rhetorical moves in scholarly and social enterprises. In recent years there have been periodic assaults on what Paolo Freire (1974) called "the banking model" of education (and what, more recently, Tom Marino [2002], writing on the POD email list, referred to as "educational bulimics"). Partisans of active learning, of problem- and project-based learning, of cooperative learning, and of many other "radical" educational initiatives, all contend that information and ideas are not inert masses to be shifted and copied in much the way two computers exchange packages of information, but rather need to be continuously reformatted, reconstituted, restructured, reshaped and reinvented and exchanged in new forms -- not only as learning processes but as the social basis of the intellectual enterprise. A model of the educational enterprise which presumes that knowledge comes in packages (one reinforced by marking systems which say you can get "73%" of Renaissance literature or introductory organic chemistry) invites learners to think of what they're doing as importing pre-packaged nuggets of information into their texts and their minds.

Similarly, a model which assumes that a skill like "writing the academic essay" is an ability which can be demonstrated on demand, quite apart from any authentic rhetorical situation, actual question, or expectation of effect (or definition of what the "academic essay" actually is), virtually prohibits students from recognizing that all writing is shaped by rhetorical context and situation, and thus renders them tone-deaf to the shifts in register and diction which make so much plagiarized undergraduate text instantly recognizable. The best documentation of the strangely arhetorical situation student writing lives in that I know of is in the work done as part of the extensive study of school-based and workplace writing at McGill and Carleton Universities (Dias, Freedman, Medway & Paré, 1999; Dias & Paré, 2000).

4. But there's a reason to welcome this challenge that's far more important than any of these—more important, even, than the way the revolutionary volatility of text mediated by photocopying and electronic files have assaulted traditional assumptions of intellectual property and copyright by distributing the power to copy beyond those who have the right to copy. It's this: by facing this challenge we will be forced to help our students learn what I believe to be the most important thing they can learn at university: just how the intellectual enterprise of scholarship and research really works. Traditionally, when we explain to students why plagiarism is bad and what their motives should be for properly citing and crediting their sources, we present them in terms of a model of how texts work in the process of sharing ideas and information which is profoundly different from how they actually work outside of classroom-based writing, and profoundly destructive to their understanding of the assumptions and methods of scholarship.

When you look at the usual set of examples of plagiarism as it occurs in student papers, for example, what you see is almost invariably drawn from kinds of writing obviously and radically identifiable as classroom texts. And how classroom texts relate to or use the ideas and texts of others is typically very different from how they're used in science, scholarship, or in other publications. There are many such explanatory examples in print and on the Web; let me take one from the Northwestern University "The Writing Place" Web site. They offer the following as an explanation of how to do an acceptable and properly credited paraphrase:

Original

But Frida's outlook was vastly different from that of the Surrealists. Her art was not the product of a disillusioned European culture searching for an escape from the limits of logic by plumbing the subconscious. Instead, her fantasy was a product of her temperament, life, and place; it was a way of coming to terms with reality, not of passing beyond reality into another realm. Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (258)

Paraphrase

As Herrera explains, Frida's surrealistic vision was unlike that of the European Surrealists. While their art grew out of their disenchantment with society and their desire to explore the subconscious mind as a refuge from rational thinking, Frida's vision was an outgrowth of her own personality and life experiences in Mexico. She used her surrealistic images to understand better her actual life, not to create a dreamworld (258).

Key words and phrases in the original are in boldface. The changes in wording and sentence structure in the paraphrase are underlined.

What is clearest about this is that the writer of the second paragraph has no motive for rephrasing the passage other than to put it into different words. Had she really needed the entire passage as part of an argument or explanation she was offering, she would have been far better advised to quote it directly. The paraphrase neither clarifies nor renders newly pointed; it's merely designed to demonstrate to a sceptical reader that the writer actually understands the phrases she is using in her text. Without more context than the Northwestern site gives us, it's difficult to know exactly how the paragraph functions in a larger rhetorical purpose (if it does). But published scholarly literature is full of examples of writers using the texts, words and ideas of others to serve their own immediate purposes. Here's an example of the way two researchers opened their discussion of the context of their work in 1984:

To say that listeners attempt to construct points is not, however, to make clear just what sort of thing a 'point' actually is. Despite recent interest in the pragmatics of oral stories (Polanyi 1979, 1982; Robinson 1981), conversations (Schank et al. 1982), and narrative discourse generally (Prince 1983), definitions of point are hard to come by. Those that do exist are usually couched in negative terms: apparently it is easier to indicate what a point is not than to be clear about what it is. Perhaps the most memorable (negative) definition of point was that of Labov (1972: 366), who observed that a narrative without one is met with the "withering" rejoinder, "So what?" (Vipond & Hunt, 1984)

It is clear here that the motives of the writers do not include prevention of charges of plagiarism; moreover, it's equally clear that they are not -- as they would be enjoined to do by the Northwestern Web site -- attempting to "cite every piece of information that is not a) the result of your own research, or b) common knowledge." What they are doing is more complex. The bouquet of citations offered in this paragraph is informing the reader that the writers know, and are comfortable with, the literature their article is addressing; they are moving to place their argument in an already existing written conversation about the pragmatics of stories; they are advertising to the readers of their article, likely to be interested in psychology or literature, that there is an area of inquiry -- the sociology of discourse -- that is relevant to studies in the psychology of literature; and they are establishing a tone of comfortable authority in that conversation by the acknowledgement of Labov's contribution and by using his language --"withering" is picked out of Labov's article because it is often cited as conveying the power of pointlessness to humiliate (I believe I speak with some authority for the authors' motives, since I was one of them).

Scholars -- writers generally -- use citations for many things: they establish their own bona fides and currency, they advertise their alliances, they bring work to the attention of their reader, they assert ties of collegiality, they exemplify contending positions or define nuances of difference among competing theories or ideas. They do not use them to defend themselves against potential allegations of plagiarism.

The clearest difference between the way undergraduate students, writing essays, cite and quote and the way scholars do it in public is this: typically, the scholars are achieving something positive; the students are avoiding something negative.

The conclusion we're driven to, then, is this: offering lessons and courses and workshops on "avoiding plagiarism" -- indeed, posing plagiarism as a problem at all -- begins at the wrong end of the stick. It might usefully be analogized to looking for a good way to teach the infield fly rule to people who have no clear idea what baseball is.

References

"Avoiding Plagiarism." The Writing Place, Northwestern University. http://www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html (November 2001). Archived http://web.archive.org/web/20011119211908/http://www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html Dias, Patrick, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Paré, eds. Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts [The Rhetoric, Society and Knowledge Series]. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

Dias, Patrick, and Anthony Paré, eds. Transitions: Writing in Academic and Workplace Settings. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000.

Freire, Paolo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1974. (Translated from the original Portuguese (1968) by Myra Bergman Ramos).

Marino, Tom. "Re: How many minutes per class day does the typical student study?" Professional & Organizational Development Network in Higher Education , 28 May 2002. http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0205&L=pod&O=D&P=14486.

Rocklin, Tom. "Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?" University of Iowa Center for Teaching. Tools and Resources: Teaching Ideas from the Center for Teaching and Around the World. n.d. http://www.uiowa.edu/~centeach/resources/ideas/term-paper-download.html

Vipond, Douglas, and Russell A. Hunt. "Point-Driven Understanding: Pragmatic and Cognitive Dimensions of Literary Reading." Poetics 13 (June 1984), 261-277.

Turnitin.com and Student Plagiarism

I have recently come across instructors using Turnitin.com to teach students how to cite and reference scholarship. I find this practice completely wrong-headed.

First, Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. It was not designed as a teaching tool. I remain dubious that it can serve a purpose for which it was never intended better than other forms of instruction. One could easily focus on the most common mistakes students make on their in-text citations without having to resort to Turnitin software—the money spent on the software and the time spent providing students a visual walkthrough of the system would seem better invested in explaining the purpose and principles of scholarship, than teaching students one particular software package.

Second, as an editor and author as well as an academic, I feel strongly that student copyright and confidentiality is routinely violated by Turnitin retaining copies of student work in (an American) database. Instructors may not have an issue with this, but many authors and students feel this is a violation of their rights.

Third, instructors using Turnitin software as a teaching tool by having students run their first drafts through Turnitin.com, adjusting their papers until they get a better Turnitin score, ends up mandating a particular writing process—a common but deeply mistaken approach to teaching writing. My commentary on my frustration with such writing instruction is in this earlier post on this blog.

Fourth, focusing on "catching plagiarism"—which I would argue is more than implicit in a software package called "turn it in"—is in my view a wrong approach to teaching the importance of citation scholarship. Students learn that they must follow certain (to them bizarre and arbitrary rules) to manage the score delivered by a software package and does not, I would argue, properly socialize students into the philosophy of scholarship. This approach does not seem to acknowledge that students come from other cultures/philosophical positions that may view the universe very differently. For example, the mashup artist who takes a hundred different film clips, edits them together with some other person's soundtrack to create a new YouTube video that gets a million likes and a monetized video feed is going to need more than Turnitin software to understand why that same behaviour in university gets them a 0 and a yelling at. Effective instruction is not about explaining the rules, it's about converting students to our worldview. I do not perceive Turnitin software as a useful tool in this process.

I realize mine is a minority view. Turnitin software is 'easy' for instructors and allows them to pretend to be addressing the issues of academic integrity which large classes and a host of other structural issues have made more difficult to manage. That 'easy' or 'widely promoted' equates to 'best practice' or 'best outcomes' remains to be demonstrated to me. I argue there is a difference between 'trained' and 'educated' and using Turnitin to teach rules strikes me (and I dare say most students) like a punitive training exercise rather than an effective approach to socializing students into a new and better worldview.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, the more appropriate approach to issues of Internet plagiarism is to scrap the sort of assignments that allow for 'off-the-shelf' responses, and instead shift to authentic assessments that require original thought and personal commitment. If one asks students for a paper on McBeth, one should not be surprised if students go online to find them one. Instead, ask students how they interacted with the text to relate it to their own lives and or something of that ilk. If your students can't be bothered to actually do your assignments, that likely has more to do with it being a bad assignment, than about having bad students.

More States Opting for Robo Grading of Student Essays.

This article from NPR on the use of software to grade student papers refers to a trend that is so appalling, I almost don't know where to begin. I was for a decade the person responsible for one of the standardized test programs in Alberta, and we were very proud of our involvement of classroom teachers at every stage of the development and marking process so that the exams would reflect actual classroom practice and the results would be normed accurately across Alberta. We trained teachers to use rubrics to mark accurately and consistently so that it wouldn't matter which marker the student got or what time of day the marking happened, or other chance factors. We did not train them to be robots, but designed rubrics that allowed them to award excellence, even when the student's answer did not easily fit within the rubric. If more than a few answers didn't fit the rubric, we changed the rubric. Routinely.

In social studies, we eliminated bias by making it explicit: when a marker found himself grinding his teeth over a student's stated opinions, instead of trying to grade it himself, he would hold the paper up above his head and shout "right-wing nut-job" or "left-wing snowflake" (as the case applied) and a suitably left or right oriented marker would happily swap it for its opposite, so that every paper was marked by a sympathetic marker. When a paper managed to offend everyone, it was taken off the marking floor and sent to a special committee of veteran markers who would grade it as a team. We went out of our way to not be robots.

This is NOT the case with many standardized tests, particularly in the US where it is private publishers rather than the ministry of education designing the exams. There are so many things wrong with most standardized testing programs, I will limit myself in this post to the observation that the purpose of most standardized testing programs is not to educate, nor to reward diligent learning, but to reproduce the class structure. Most tests reward the culture of the white upper-middle-class, and screw everybody else. They are there to explain inequality by saying, "Well you had your chance, but you only got a 58% on your test, so you deserve to spend the rest of your life in the underclass, unlike Frank here, who got 98%"(because we asked Frank questions in a way that makes the most sense to most white males, about stuff that matters to the professional/management class that Frank grew up in and had picked up on from his professional parents by the time he was 8, and because Frank had money for tutors, books, computers, if he happened to turn out a bit 'slow').

So...replacing teacher-markers with robots is perfect. Relying on software APPEARS to increase objectivity by removing the last vestiges of human intervention (what will be identified as 'bias' as these programs are being implemented) and keeps conscientious teachers from giving an "A" to a paper for its ideas when the student has written "ain't never" which is grammatically incorrect--i.e., has written her answer in the perfectly clear dialect of a to-be-suppressed population. A good teacher knows quality writing when they see it; a software program has the algorithms to suppress the underclass.

Not why I became an educator.

Tech Tools for Teaching

Although slightly off the topic of assessment, Scott Mcleod's post on the 10 tech tools that will make you a super teacher is a must read.

Homework Assignments

A clear explanation of why homework is stupid and why standardized testing has problems.

I have always opposed homework. Teachers should teach, parents should be family. Asking kids to take work home in K-12 system is wrong-headed because:

Homework Significantly Undermines Equality of Educational Opportunity

Homework greatly increases the disparity between family backgrounds, undermining equal educational opportunity

• Some parents work at two jobs to support their families, or work evenings or otherwise are unavailable to help their kids with homework. It is clearly unfair to pit these kids against kids whose parents can do their homework for with them.
• Some families speak white-middle-class English; some families speak lower-class English; some black dialect; others speak little or no English at. It is unfair to send home assignments in the expectation that all parents can help their children equally.
• Some families need the children to do chores to help with the farm or family business; or disabled siblings, or elder care; or other responsibilites; while other families place no such demands on their children.
• Some parents value education and school work; others—having been traumatized by their own school experiences with racial, class, religious, or other biases, and bullying teachers—think, for example of residential schools, to take just one obvious example—do not. It is not fair to demand that kids from these different backgrounds be pitted against each other on homework assignments.
• Some homes have resources—computers, books, a table/space to work at, separate bedrooms for each kid—while others do not.
• Some homes have the income to hire tutors when kids struggle; others do not.
• Homes vary (across all classes, cultures, and backgrounds) in stability. Why are we asking kids to complete work at home when their parents are in the middle of a screaming divorce, or they have bullying siblings, or there are other types of disruption?

Schools are supposed to be safe places for students to learn. Our responsibility is to teach them in schools where we can control the learning environment and make sure it represents a level playing field. Any time we send work home, we privilege some students, undermine others.

Homework Undermines Teacher Accountability

As a parent, it frequently drove me crazy to find that I was expected to teach my child reading, writing, and arithmetic, while my child's teacher devoted hours of classroom time to non-academic activities. For example, I routinely experienced that whenever the family sat down to enjoy a family movie night on the weekend, that my daughters had already seen the film at school. "Thursday afternoons are movie-day," they would tell me. Why do my kids have two hours of homework each evening, but teachers have time to pre-empt family activities? What's wrong with this picture?
I get that there should be some 'fun' times at school, to team-build, to reward diligence, to enhance learning. But what I am increasingly observing is these activities displacing learning. I increasingly see a generation of teachers who are more concerned with occupying the children than teaching them.

To cite just one blatant example from my child's education: my wife was present in our daughter's classroom as a volunteer when, in the last week of school, the teacher announced, "Oh, by the way, I forgot to teach printing this year. I'm going to hand out the printing exercise books now for you to take home. Have your parents teach you printing over the summer because you'll need that for next grade." An extreme example to be sure, but underlying every homework assignment is the delegation of teacher-work to parents, who may or may not be in a position to take on the responsibility.

Homework Encourages Racism, Class Bias, and Victim-Blaming

I hear teachers—and not just my inexperienced student teachers, but senior classroom teachers—dismiss this or that student's lack of progress by blaming the parents. "What can you expect? Ruby comes from ________(fill in the blank with "broken home" or "native home" or "trailer park home" or whatever other unacceptable bias teachers allow themselves. There is no clearer example of blaming the victim than the lowering of expectations for students based on class, race/ethnicity, parental marital status or whatever. What can I expect from Ruby? The same as every other student in the classroom because it is the teacher's job to get every single student to mastery of the subject content. There are no valid excuses for a student failing, except perhaps a doctor's diagnosis of massive brain injury, in which case they are probably not in your class anyway. Homework assignments mask teacher bias by shifting responsibility, along with a high proportion of the teacher's workload, to the family. Instead of taking responsibility for each child's learning, they accept responsibility only for those students whose parents have the social capital to do the teacher's job for them.

Bah, humbug.

Good teachers get the work done in their classrooms; they do not assign homework.

Grading True/False Questions

A student just told me that they had gotten a true-false wrong, but knew the answer. They had marked it "True" and then written in the margin, "It's true, but you made a typo: it should be x/y" (or whatever the math had been— I didn't understand the question well enough to know what she was talking about). So, as instructor what do you do with that?

Mark it correct of course. The correction demonstrates the knowledge we were testing for, and even if they missed the entire point of how True-False is supposed to work, we're ultimately trying to determine their knowledge of course objectives, not their understanding of test-format. So that's just funny, but deserves a mark.

Indeed, I would argue that all True-False should work that way. Good T/F design* includes students explaining why the F options are false. That not only catches the sort of problem above, but ensures that students choosing F aren't just guessing, and that they know the right answer. There may also be more than one way to make a false statement true...that's all okay, as long as it demonstrates the students knowledge (or lack thereof).

T/F Ice freezes at 0 degrees C

That's true; but 'false' and adding "at sea level" is also correct and tells you even more about the student's knowledge. Both answers should get the mark.

---

*Okay, that's an oxymoron: almost all T/F are useless and to be avoided, but there are a few special circumstances—memorization of definitions, names, or dates, as if any of that is ever useful—where they can be used successfully.

Found on Twitter

Found on Dr. Alex Couros (@courosa March 10, 2018) Twitter feed with the comment "Well played".

I deeply appreciate any instructor who grades the answer as presented rather than only the expected replies. Full marks here for both the student and the professor!

Teaching Excellence

Only slightly off topic of student assessment is the question of how one evaluates good teaching. Just as with student assessment, defining one's objectives and how to measure progress toward those goals is in fact a highly political activity. Why this learning objective and not that one; why is this particular standard considered inadequate, satisfactory, or excellent; why this group's (students? peers? parents? administrators? stakeholders? taxpayers?) perceptions of quality rather than some others? Do we measure excellent teaching against student expectation, student learning, student engagement, student enjoyment, student self-fulfillment; or by employer needs and expectations, graduate employment figures, graduate life chances; by political socialization or active citizenship; critical thinking or ideological conformity; or societal arts and culture, inventiveness, entrepreneurialism, the reproduction or elimination of poverty and injustice... You get the idea.

I'm very pleased to have "Excellence for what? Policy Development and the Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education," appear as a chapter in the just-released Routledge collection, Global Perspectives on Teaching Excellence. The collection is basically a reaction to recent legislation in the UK that attempted to measure and mandate teaching excellence in higher education. My wife and I wrote a critique using my discourse analysis model of the purpose of higher education applied to the new legislation to suggest that the government's definition of 'excellence' might be somewhat problematic from the perspective of students and learning.

Dyslexia and assessment.

Here is a good video on the experience of dyslexia from the student perspective.

I'm often shocked by how poorly many teachers adapt assessments to deal with disabilities, such as dyslexia. I hosted a panel on "Dyslexia, dysgraphia and the writing experience" at a writer's conference in August, and the room was filled with parents openly weeping over how their dyslexic child had been treated in the school system. The parents were immensely relieved to see a panel of writers and editors talking about how they had managed to not just overcome/deal with their disability, but actually become successful readers, writers and editors in spite of what happened in their schooling.

I keep running into teachers who don't know what dyslexia is or how to deal with it, even though research suggests it affects about 15% of the population. They're always surprised when I tell them that the reason this child can't spell is that they are dyslexic or dysgraphic.

"I just thought they were being lazy,not making the effort to learn how to spell the word."

Well, "lazy" is better than "stupid", I suppose, which is how the peer group labels poor readers/spellers.

"Why are you making this child read out loud in front of their peers? What is the purpose of this public humiliation?" I will ask them.

"Well, you've got to read out loud. It's in the curriculum."

"Okay, but have them do that at recess or after class in private. Assessments are supposed to be confidential."

"Really? But this course objective says, 'to an audience'".

"Okay, but then give them the reading ahead of time so they can decipher it at home, learn it as a recitation if necessary, so they are able to be successful. Do not make them do a cold reading where so you set them up for a public failure."

"I don't know. That seems to be giving them an unfair advantage, somehow."

And so on, endlessly. No variation from the routine, the easy; no sense that accommodations are necessary to level the playing field. Often hints that the teacher secretly believes the child really is stupid, because how hard is it to read this very elementary book? Most troublesome are the teachers that, having assigned the child to the lowest reading group (which is of no help because they are still dyslexic and now surrounded by peers who act out with various forms of antisocial behavior because they are all being subjected to the daily humiliation of being forced to attempt reading aloud; and the reading material is so far below grade level as to kill anyone's motivation to read) keep them in that group for social studies ("well, that's mostly reading too, right?") and math and art ("Well, they might as well stay in the same group all day, right? It's just easier for everyone") even though the research is conclusive that streaming isn't useful for any student, and in the long run, not even a benefit to the teacher since it leads to more behavior and control issues.

And then there was the teacher with the fill-in-the-blank worksheet. Read the chapter, fill in the (apparently random--not even key words) blanks. When I questioned why she was making this dyslexic child read and fill in the blanks when the student (a) couldn't read and (b) couldn't write, she conceded that that might be a problem.

"I'll give the child the answer sheet. That way they won't have to read the text or spell the words."

But then, why make them do it at all? What was the possible purpose, the learning outcome, of laborously transferring random words from one sheet to another, one letter at a time? How is that an authentic assessment? How exactly did that teach this student the content or the spelling, when they couldn't actually read the sheet?

"But what do you want me to do? How can I teach the course if they don't fill in the worksheet?"

If a student teacher had said that to me, I would have failed them on the spot. Worksheets are your only teaching strategy? You're done now! But it wasn't a student I was dealing with, so okay, how to explain that they had confused means and goals. The worksheet is supposed to help students achieve a learning outcome--but somewhere along the line, completing the sheet had become the goal for this teacher, a meaningless daily productivity that the teacher could point to to say, "my students are working and learning". But of course they weren't learning at all.

Well,not the content, anyway. They were learning that they hated that teacher's subject, that school is inherently boring, that work is tedious. If the purpose of schooling is to condition graduates to the tedium of the adult workplace, conditioning them to tolerate a 9-5 routine of pointless, alienating labour, then yeah, this teacher was doing just fine. But I don't think that's why we chose to become teachers.

And don't get me started on some teachers' insistence on teaching cursive, when no adult under thirty ever uses cursive writing; and dysgraphic kids literally can't do it. It is exactly like demanding the kid in a wheelchair compete in the 100 meter race or fail phys. ed., but somehow, nothing deters these adults from pointlessly torturing and humiliating children with these learning disabilities.

Schools as we know them were built around reading and writing. I think that's still important, but I'm confused why audiobooks and instructional video and the rest are not also considered valid if they help nonreaders achieve learning objectives. Why pride of place to just that one medium of print? Why steamroller over the 15% of kids who can't read or write by insisting that that is the only way to complete assignments? It's assessment abuse.

Find other ways to find out what the student knows and can do. That is the point of any assessment. If a student cannot do the default assignment, find some other way to assess their knowledge and skills. The assessment is the means to the goal, not the goal. It's that simple.