Drafting And Response

Requiring drafts of an essay that receive a teacher response can be one of the most effective ways of avoiding plagiarism for all students because it both lets you see work-in-progress and helps break down the difficulty of the task for students who are less likely to feel pressured by shortened deadlines. Responding to drafts, more importantly, provides an opportunity to address how well students are meeting the requirements of the assignment, including how they are using sources. Many international students (and some American students), for example, may see a research paper as a task of culling together quotes from many sources, without including much analysis or discussion of their own. Others may be confused about appropriate paraphrasing. Working with drafts allows faculty to deal with such questions as opportunities to learn rather than the more punitive response elicited by such work turned in for a grade.