Cinnabar and Alabaster

3. distinction made: btw "permitted collaboration and unpermitted collaboration"
4. "there is little doubt that unpermitted collaboration is pervasive on college campuses" & while faculty might object, "most students do not see such collaboration as a serious issue"; teachers want students to "accept personal responsibility for their work"; "acknowledging the contributions of others to one's work product is a fundamental tenet of scholarship, and we should not be afraid to teach that lesson to the next generation of scholars."
5. our job = to "help students to clarify the issue: to understand why collaboration is appropriate on some assignments and not on others; to understand how standards on collaborative work vary from one discipline to another; to understand how the expectations for individual versus collaborative work change as one moves to more advanced work in a field and engages in more in-depth research; and, in general, to understand why collaborative work is educationally valid in some settings and not in others." (i don't think i feel qualified to tell them why--i can tell them what the expectations in my field are, and encourage them to find out their own, but they "whys" are often entrenched & arbitrary, there because they've been there & nobody's thought to change them rather than because they in any way serve the disicplines' purposes of creating and disseminating knowledge. & i resent this charge, because to say "it's our job to teach them why" without proposing a "why" (or any ideas for where to get one from) is just pedantic & frustrating); my favorite: on the list of negatives, of "many factors [that] encourage students to collaborate with their peers" like how it's a timesaver & ensures right answers when they turn things in, is "it can enhance learning, as students share their experiences and talents with one another in a synergistic way." yes, people, that's the point!
5. one good suggestion: "recognizing that students are likely to collaborate to some degree on any assignment they are given, [one teacher] requires students to document any help they have recieved on an assignment and who provided it"--this "mov[es] the problem from the mire of unpermitted collaboration into the relatively easier domain of plagiarism" b/c "establishing whether sources have been correctly cited is much easier than determining whether two or more students collaborated without permission" and, presumably, a much more sound pedagogical use of both the students' and the professor's energy, since they'd be learning something valuable here instead of just sneaking/spying.
6. useless injunction: "faculty must remember that collaboration is a difficult issue for individual students to resolve on their own and that in the absence of clear guidance, unpermitted collaboration will be widespread." this doesn't exactly help in the "clear guidance" department. me, i'm always trying to guide them to collaborate. if i ignored the issue completely, would it be more widespread?