Thursday, October 22, 2009

The Essay Judge

So I volunteered to judge essays written by local teenagers about the importance of the 4th of July to U.S. citizens. They are all hand written and had to be at least 1000 words. Why hand written?
To prevent flagrant plagiarism, one would just need to copy and past from the Internet, mix it up and they're done.

I was told to expect out right plagiarism and pretty much just pick the top that wasn't so obvious.
This would turn out to be harder than I thought.

Each and everyone reads as if it came out of a history book. I picked up one that had a small American flag glued to the front page, what an attention getter! I start reading it, and after a paragraph about the Boston Massacre it says, "see Boston Massacre". Okay, I'll check the footnotes.

One thing I will have to admit is that their handwriting is very neat.

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