kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu (Dr Nancy's Sweetie) (04/05/91)
My wife Nancy is a professor, and we were discussing the current DH thread at
dinner last night. She said that one of the things her NT criticism class in
college has helped her with is figuring out who cheated from whom.
[ Why am I writing this article instead of Nancy? Because she has work to do
and I'm a househusband. 8-) ]
Last week she handed out homework which was to be done individually. Some of
the papers turned in were fascinating. Paper A came back in two different
handwritings, and paper B was an almost exact copy of paper A. If two papers
are identical and are completely correct, one cannot assume the students
cheated -- but if two papers contain the exact same mistakes, then we get
suspicious.
One of the answers which got Nancy's attention was as follows:
Paper A, author 1 had a symbol to indicate a blank which looked sort of like
this:
|_|
And the answer by Author 1 looked like:
A> MD|_|<scribbled out>
Paper A, Author 2 recopied the answer somewhat sloppily, so the "space
symbol" was a bit rounded; the answer by Author 2 looked like this:
A> MD|_| Homework
But the only way to be sure that the |_| was not a U is by looking at the
answer by Author 1. The author of Paper B apparently did not look at what
was written by Author 1, because in the same place he had a definite `u' (I
say "definite" because it had serifs on it), giving us this:
A> MDU Homework
and MDU is not a DOS command -- this is a very unusual mistake, unless this
student had copied from Paper A without actually reading it (no other student
made this mistake, and no other paper had a "space symbol").
Since A was the only paper to use the "space symbol", Nancy looked for other
similarities and discovered that *all* of the other answers were exactly the
same -- even the mistaken ones. Since A was in two hands and B was in one, it
seemed that if copying had gone on it would have been B copying from A (you
don't need two people to copy a paper).
As with anything which is not cut & dried, sometimes we are only suspicious of
cheating -- and sometimes we are sure. Once a person we suspected said that
the work had been done individually, but none of the students we have been
sure about has ever protested (several students have confessed on the spot and
promised not to repeat the incident, including the one who turned in Paper A).
Of course we have a limited sample space, and the texts are much simpler than
OT texts -- our results are not statistically significant. But this is a case
in which textual criticism is useful in practical situations, and we thought
that might be of interest to the people participating in this thread.
o o
()o()
kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu Darren F. Provine ...njin!gboro!kilroy
"I wonder if Wellhausen had a lot of students who copied from each other."
-- Nancy L Tinkham