ЯРОСЛАВ МУДРИЙ

Дата добавления: 2015-09-15; просмотров: 770

1. Do you agree that there is a lot of misinformation in the Internet? If you do, can you give examples?

2. How can you determine if the information you find in the Internet is credible?

3. What do you think of “virtual high schools” mentioned in the article?

4. Do you agree that virtually schooled children are socially disadvantaged? Can online interaction substitute real face to face communication?

5. What do you think of projects like “The President’s Dilemma” described in the article? Are they just interesting but time-consuming games or do they really develop the mind and make children find out a lot of useful things? Give your reasoning.

15. Read Article 2 and do the multiple choice task given below.

Article 2

PASTING THE GRADE

Bilver Singh has his own name for cheating in the digital age: “A and A”, or “alteration and amendment”. An associate political-science professor at the National University of Singapore, Singh grades hundreds of papers each year. In every batch, he says, there are always a few that are less than original. Nowadays, the suspect source is usually the Internet. “I’ve caught students quoting chunks of paragraphs,” says Singh. “But they are getting smarter.” Hence the rise of A and A: cutting a sentence here, pasting a phrase there, all the while using the on-screen thesaurus to replace suspiciously complicated words with more age-appropriate ones.

For all its benefits, the rise of technology in the classroom has made it far easier for students to cheat – and get away with it. In the pre-Internet days, plagiarism meant painstakingly copying paragraphs out of the encyclopedia; today kids can simply highlight the text, copy and insert. The practice is rampant around the globe; last month in Australia, the University of Newcastle was criticized for covering up a scandal in which the grades of 15 students, who had copied from the Internet were changed from failing to passing. According to a survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, 74 percent of US high-school students cheated in 2002. And those are just the ones who admitted it.

Fortunately, the same technology that makes it so easy for students to cheat is aiding teachers in catching them. The most popular antiplagiarism service, Turnitin.com, compares a student’s term paper with everything on the Internet. Turnitin.com has clients in 51 countries; in Britain, nearly 700 public universities – including Oxford and Cambridge – have signed up for the service. Even schools in the notoriously law-abiding nation of Singapore recently adopted the program.

Educators are trying to upgrade their in-class tactics as well. Experts say teachers should make it more difficult for students to “cut and paste” by changing the assignments every year and requiring more analysis than description. And teachers shouldn’t assume that kids even know what plagiarism is, as many just aren’t taught how to source or reference properly.

But even when they know better, kids can succumb to the intense academic pressure and mounting time constraints they face. Critics blame parents and educators for emphasizing results over academic integrity. For many school administrators, it’s easier to ignore the problem than deal with an irate parent calling to ask why they are paying $30,000 per year for Jimmy to get a failing grade. Nobody wants to get an F for effort.

(From ‘Newsweek’)

Choose the best answer to the following questions.

1. By saying “in every batch … there are always a few (papers) that are less than original”, Professor Singh means that

A. the papers are not so original as he would like them to be.

B. the papers were copied from the Internet.

C. the papers are shorter than the original materials.

2. The information given in paragraphs 2 and 3 proves that

A. cheating has become quite widespread.

B. teachers can’t determine whether their students’ papers have been copied from the Internet.

C. cheating has become quite sophisticated.

3. Which of the following is not the reason why children cheat?

A. Many of them do not know what plagiarism is.

B. They are pressed for time.

C. It is more important for kids to get good grades than knowledge.

4. The implied meaning of the article is that

A. cheating leads to lower quality of education.

B. students should be taught to use the Internet properly.

C. teachers should ignore the problem of cheating.

V Read the article over again, find the following words and word combinations in the text and learn their meaning. Make it a particular point to use these words in the further discussion of the problem.

Cheating, alteration (to alter), amendment (to amend), plagiarism, painstakingly (to take (great) pains to do smth), to highlight a text, (students’) grades, to aid smb in doing smth, to sign up for a service, notorious(ly), law-abiding, to assume that, to source (a source), to reference (a reference), to know better, a passing / failing grade

Discussion

1. How do Professor Singh’s students cheat? Do you do it, too?

1. What is the difference between plagiarism in the pre-Internet days and at present?

2. Is it easy to get away with cheating? Why?

3. What do you think of the Turnitin.com service?

4. Why do you think school and university administrators prefer to cover up cheating scandals?

5. What is the difference between plagiarism and proper sourcing and referencing?

6. Is it possible to resist the temptation of cheating?

Professional Reading

Read the following article very carefully. You must achieve complete understanding of the text, so use a dictionary by all means. While reading pay particular attention to the meaning of the following words given in bold type.

1. ‘… a private entrepreneur reportedly contracted with …’

2. ‘In other parts of the country faculty have been known to …’

3. ‘The enterprises are not entirely frowned upon by authorities.’

4. ‘… and insurance company enlisted local schools … to act as insurance agents, forcing policies on …’

5. ‘It is rare for entire classes to be dragooned into moonlighting.’

Dereliction of Duty

A deadly explosion casts a harsh light on the state of

China’s desperately poor rural school.

After a massive explosion blew apart a primary school in Jiangzi province last Tuesday, killing 38 children and four teachers, parents reported seeing the tiny hands of corpses still clutching fuses. The kids, they say, had been forced to assemble fireworks illegally to make enough money to fund their school. “We have been protesting to the local authorities for the past two years, but the complaints were ignored at higher levels,” says villager Ding Mingxung, who lost his 9-year-old son in the blast. Beijing has a different explanation. The Prime Minister insisted the destruction had been caused by a deranged local nicknamed “Psycho”, who had walked into a classroom with two sacks full of explosives and detonated them.

Parents have hotly disputed that theory. “The government is covering up,” says one father who lost his 11-year-old son. The tragedy has destroyed any illusions citizens might have had about the state of schools in China’s countryside, where three quarters of the population lives. Although the national government promises every child free education for nine years, the burden of funding primary schools is left to local governments. “So if the local government is poor, then there is no money for education,” says Sophia Woodman, Asia director for Human Rights in China. That has led to fly-by-night operations like the one in Fanglin village – where a private entrepreneur reportedly contracted with school authorities to have kids assemble firecrackers, with profits going toward school expenses and local authorities.

Despite high-flown rhetoric about the value of education, Beijing devotes only 2.4 percent of China’s GNP to its public schools – less than India and one of the lowest levels in the world, according to the World Bank. By comparison, Taiwan spends nearly 7 percent of its GNP on education. “It’s very common for rural teachers to take money out of their pockets to pay for individual students’ fees or classroom supplies,” says Woodman. They don’t have much to give: teachers in Fanglin are paid $12 a month, when they are paid at all. In other parts of the country faculty have been known to organize students as day laborers, helping farmers harvest crops in return for a little grain or vegetables.

The enterprises are not entirely frowned upon by the authorities. In the 1980s, when Beijing urged all work units to launch side-line business in accord with Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious”, schools took the cue as well. As a result, schoolhouses have been known to rent space to factories, restaurants, mom-and-pop shops and even karaoke parlors. In a case uncovered last June near Wuhan, an insurance company enlisted local schools and the education commission to act as insurance agents, forcing policies on hapless parents and students. One 12-year-old girl tried to kill herself swallowing poison after exorbitant “insurance fee” bankrupted her family.

It’s rare for entire classes to be dragooned into moonlighting, as apparently happened in Fanglin. But child labor remains common in China, especially in the countryside. Underage workers are rife in the rural retail sector. They work in restaurants, beauty salons, metal works, karaoke bars and saunas (some become sex workers). Last year a factory near Shenzhen was caught using kids to manufacture toys for McDonald’s Happy Meals. “The students were working there because their school fees are too high,” says Parry Leung, a researcher with the Hong Kong-based Christian Industrial Committee. (Production of McDonald’s toys was halted due to “violations” of its code of conduct, though its auditors could not confirm the child-labor reports.) Around the same time, 35 people – half of them children – died when a fireworks workshop exploded in a village 30 miles from Fanglin.

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)

Problem Solving

Suppose the events described in the article have just taken place. The parents whose children were killed tried to sue the local authorities but they failed and the matter was hushed up. However, mass media reports initiated a campaign in the country against violation of children’s rights. The parents decided to appeal to the UN Commission for Human Rights.

Imagine that you are an assistant attorney who must help collect evidence for the case. Being just an assistant, you needn’t know any particular laws, but you cannot misinterpret facts thus presenting false data. Give short and conclusive answers to the following questions.

1. What facts given in the article can be considered fool-proof evidence?

2. What facts can be used as evidence on condition of their further investigation?

3. What information is dubious?

4. Who can be held responsible for the violation of children’s rights?

Schools? Local authorities? Both?

Read the article again, find the following words and word combinations in the text and learn their meaning. Make it a particular point to use these words in the further discussion of the problem.

To report (seeing smth), to be forced to do smth, to fund smth, to ignore a complaint, to dispute smth, to cover up, faculty, in return for smth, to urge smb to do smth, an insurance agent, exorbitant (fees), to be halted due to smth, a code of conduct, an auditor, to confirm smth

Vocabulary 2