Assessment: More 'go make it' and Less 'go find it'
Sharon Flynn presented a lively, interactive workshop on plagiarism at last week'sCELT Conference on teaching and learning. She started by giving a tour of essay mills and bespoke writing service websites. There is a preying, vampirish feel to these sites and the 'writers' who live there. I can't imagine this being an occupation of choice - though we were reminded of the Chronicle of Higher Education profile of just such a ghostwriter who claimed to 'live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created'.
A fellow attendee, suggested that a useful approach to counter this effect, might be to build assignments that have a real-world component to them. Or as Paulo Freire put it: "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it". I agreed and shared a story of a student in my Database class who recently submitted a project for a deadline. The following week he submitted another draft, because he had made further improvements, after getting feedback from his workplace colleagues. There was no credit for this extra work. It was a heartening display of agency and praxis. How do we create these assessment spaces where students take that kind of pride in their work?
Sharon provided a number of other very useful and practical approaches to designing plagiarism out of the learning process - best summarised by one of her slide post-its which read:
More 'go make it' and Less 'go find it'
Can we create assessment spaces where students are supported and encouraged to be critically engaged producers - not consumers? I think we can - and education will all the richer for it.