I continue to be amazed (five years into teaching) by some of the things our
students come to us having been taught. I had a student in a master's level
developmental psych class who thought that the best way to summarize an
article was not to rephrase each sentence, but to use a series of quotes on
every important point. This was a good student, who was by the way offended
that I objected to this after no one in his undergrad program had (all the
more galling to me because he was a grad of our program!).
Kris Lewis
Saint Michael's College
Colchester VT
> ----------
> From: Paul C. Smith[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Monday, February 01, 1999 8:20 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'tips'
> Subject: RE: Looked like cheating
>
> Sue Frantz wrote:
> > After a bit more probing, I discovered they both
> > had been taught (by separate teachers in separate school districts in
> > separate decades) that to summarize something, you take each sentence
> > and reword it. No wonder they looked alike!
> >
> > I explained that's not the best technique for summarizing. :-)
>
> In one of my sophomore-level courses I regularly ask the entire
> class about
> this. Large percentages (I'd guess around 40%) report that they had been
> taught to summarize that way, and in fact that a perfectly acceptable
> paper
> could be made by doing nothing more than that. Remember that I'm asking
> the
> class as a whole, when the class members have no reason to say that if it
> weren't true (i.e., I'm not asking AFTER having discovered that a student
> did that, and I'm asking after having made it clear that they won't be
> doing
> it that way in my classes). I'm convinced that _many_ students come to us
> honestly believing as a result of prior education that one writes papers
> by
> rewording original sources a sentence at a time.
>
> I suppose you might argue that skill is a necessary developmental
> step in
> learning to write papers, and obviously there's the strong possibility
> that
> students are learning that, but their high school teachers aren't actually
> TEACHING it (in other words, that the students are misinterpreting the
> teachers).
>
> Paul Smith
> Alverno College
>
