From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Feb 28 13:22:52 1999 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.1+UW98.09/8.9.2+UW99.01) with ESMTP id NAA16718 for ; Sun, 28 Feb 1999 13:22:51 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id NAA24312 for ; Sun, 28 Feb 1999 13:22:50 -0800 Received: from [192.220.223.68] (aestivus.ups.edu [192.220.223.68]) by mail.ups.edu (8.9.1/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA25127 for ; Sun, 28 Feb 1999 13:28:16 -0800 (PST) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 13:25:12 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: dlupher@ups.edu (David Lupher) Subject: "hot" Euripides My Sunday morning rag (The Tacoma New Tribune) ran an arresting story by one Mark Fritz, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, and I assume that the LAT is the source for the story. The article begins thusly: Suppose you were rambling around the Internet and stumbled across a Web site devoted to the works of Euripides, the ancient Greek dramatist. Maybe you'd think this was the obscure hangout of professors or something, exchanging ideas about things written on scrolls. [Isn't it heartwarming to see an obvious allusion to our own Classics list in the national media?] You would be wrong. You would find typical yet tightly wound college students, burdened with homework, pressed for time, cheating their hearts out with amorality. You'd find scholars such as Jeremy, whose last name is being withheld to spare him a scowl from his instructor, in deep research. "SAVE MY LIFE!!!" he yowls across the yawning void of cyberspace, his pathetic plea posted on an electronic bulletin board. "Send me a 1,000-word essay on morality in Medea now! I WILL DO ANYTHING FOR IT. I need it by Sunday." And somebody responds. "Malika 21" offers a report on Medea---Euripides' most heavily assigned play---that she assembled from the Internet a semester before. The students disappear into the privacy of e-mail, leaving onlookers to only wonder what sort of transaction was taking place in the name of a passing grade. This sort of exchange is standard dialogue in the Euripides Lecture Hall, which bills itself as a literary cafe for intellectual discourse on the works of an ancient dead guy. Instead, it has become a veritable souk of suspect scholarship, swapped back and forth among students like a campus cold virus. Later on, Fritz writes: The Euripides site is part of a lavish virtual community known as the Jolly Roger, which was created by Elliott McGucken, a physics professor at Elon College in Burlington, N.C. The aspiring writer built a richly detailed maze of discussion boards and chat rooms devoted to classic works of Western literature. McGucken envisioned the site purely as a gathering place for literature lovers, not corner-cutting college kids, and he's been forced to create some password-protected parallel rooms for the true afficionados. Yet he's stoic about the invasion of the term-paper trollers. On one hand, the trafficking shows that teachers are still assigning the Western works he holds dear. On the other: "Not everyone is reading them." And a bit further on: Some cyber-surfing students show no evidence of having glanced at the play [the "Medea"], let alone made it to class much. "I need help!!!" bleats one. "What are the main themes in Medea and how do I go about writing an essay about them?" Another student obviously gave the topic some thought, but he didn't want to do the heavy lifting on his hypothesis. "I want to write about how you can't really get much historical info from this play but that you can get some idea about the political structure since Euripides was obviously a male Susan B. Anthony radical type propagandist," he writes. "...please e-mail me an essay on this stuff if you have one around and If I get it by 3:00 I'll send you a $100.00 if I use it. Thanks." This student, who asked to be identified only as Joey, said he was on a scholarship at a prestigious Jesuit university, studying history because it was a good springboard to law school. The difference between research and cheating, he says, is "getting caught." The key to passing off a pieced-together term paper is concocting a bogus but authoritative-sounding bibliography, he says. "The Romans copied the Greeks so why should we copy the geeks? Everybody does it," Joey says. Still, nobody sent him a report on Medea in time for his deadline. "I wrote the damn thing myself that night and earned a fat B-," he says. I'm surprised that someone clever enough to generate that excuse about the Romans and the Greeks could only pull down a B- on a paper! Fritz also mentions a posting to the list by an English teacher at Nogales High School in La Puente, Calif. This fellow, Sean (actually, he calls himself "Buddy" on the list) Cowley was asking for ideas about how to teach "Medea" to high school students. On the list itself, Cowley's request sounds legal, if lazy. But Fritz contacted him off-list and elicited this engaging (enraging?) confession: last year, when Cowley was a college senior, he successfully wrote a paper on Joyce's "Ulysses" without reading the book. "I went on the Internet. I synthesized everything I found into a general concept. I just got the chapter synopses and spun it out. I used a lot of information that wasn't mine just to get by." The intriguing thing here is the breezy way in which this fellow confesses this to a journalist who is going to use his real name and place of pedagogical employment in an article that is going to be printed around the country. That barefacedness strikes me as more newsworthy than the method he used. (As for Cowley's method of writing a paper on Joyce's "Ulysses," it's really just a technologically enhanced variant on older techniques. I vividly remember the evening in 1967 or 8 when a fellow undergrad burst into my room declaring, "Hey, Loof, put the books away. We're going to the movies." "Movies?! You have a paper on 'Ulysses' due tomorrow, and you haven't read the book yet!" "That's right. But the movie 'Ulysses' just opened, and we're going." "But, Louie, that's cheating." "This isn't cheating, Loof---this is research." Need I add that Louie---not his real name, though his real alias---got an "A" on that paper? And I guess I aided and abetted, for I did go with him to the movies that night.) In case you're morbidly interested, you may find the Euripides Lecture Hall by turning over the rock labeled: http:mobydicks.com/lecture/Euripideshall/wwwboard.html Fritz's story is a pretty good indication of much of what seems to appear on it. Here's another recent posting: "If anyone has past essays, work or research about Euripides Medea it would be so appreciated. I need to both thematically and technically anylise [sic] the play and I don't have a clue what to do. Please help me ASAP." Sometimes, however, the postings seem to be more or less genuine attempts to get a point clarified. Here, for instance, is a posting that appeared under the title "nomo [sic] vs. physis": "Is it thought that euripides was more in line with thinking of the classical or hellenistic period?" Hmm. Tough one. This list seems like an inevitable devlopment beyond the more familiar "Schoolsucks" kind of cheat site. Here you have a clearinghouse for student-to-student plagiarism contacts, bypassing the "established" sites---and, of course, making it even harder for a suspicious prof to track down a fishy paper on the web. There you have it. Depending on whether you are Democritean or Heraclitan, I leave you to laugh or weep. David Lupher Classics Program Univ. of Puget Sound .