Some students probably feel like they're learning to feed the machine rather than learning to WRITE even with human assessors.

What bugs me is that even though the guy received $100,000 from the NSF (in other words, tax payers), he's looking for commercial distributors instead of realeasing the product via a GNU public license. Money, money, money.

Ken "Caesar" Fisher explains over at Ars Technica that,

The academic now speaks: this is not a replacement for peer-reviewed writing analysis. As Brent himself told CNet, "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms." And that's what this looks to be: a very basic attempt to see if someone is saying the right kinds of things. This is, of course, not synonymous with good writing. Good writing works to convey a message in an effective, compelling manner. And more importantly, good "grading" means you get your paper back with loads of comments, preferably typed, with hand written notes all over your work. When I grade written work, for instance, students get a typed, single-spaced page of comments for roughly about every 5 pages (doubled spaced) of comments. Of course, I'm teaching in the Liberal Arts, where writing is extremely important, and students aren't really being asked to just vomit back memorized data. However, I would be massively disappointed to turn in written work only to get an "89" back, with no comments.

My first thought was "not a F*^%#$G thing. It's only my problem when it's my student in my class. After that, it's up to you." Of course, I didn't say anything like *that*. After collecting my thoughts, I told her we did what we could, but it was up to her to let her students know about the expectations of her dispipline, what was okay and what wasn't. You know, yada, yada, yada. Something about "learn[ing] the terms" of the discipline sparked this thought in me.

Unlike Charlie, I don't give my students quite the feedback he gives. But I think he's working with students in upper division and graduate courses. I'm working with students who are just beginning, the typical fyc writers. I mark their papers minimally, and then focus on three or four major concerns that I think they can manage in one round of revising. I guess I could be replaced by a machine, but it's a good thing my college can't afford it!

Plagiarism can be an issue, and of course the stock response when someone asks what "we" are doing about it is to ask what "they" are doing about it. The underlying assumption the question functions upon is, of course, that students come to their first-year Composition classroom in order to learn a lifetime of ethics. Your inquisitor was a Psychology professor, why isn't she delving into the emotional need of the plagiarist to steal?

I'm being glib, but clearly the question of what first-year Comp. is doing about plagiarism is reductive. What is first-year Political Science doing about voting rates and reducing the deficit? What is first-year Sociology doing about the rate of violent crime in the country? These, like plagiarism, are collective issues that require a cultural response, not hermetic training over a year (or 16 weeks, in my case) inside of the Composition classroom.

- J. Tirrell