A new startup, Scriptovia.com announced its existence to the world this week. Scriptovia.com provides an area where students from all over the world can ‘collaborate and share resources’. Hmm, sounds a lot like a site to where essays can be downloaded to avoid doing the work yourself to me.
Aseem Badshah, Scriptovia.com’s founder had the following to say about the site:
“The site is very similar technology to YouTube or Flickr, but for academic documents. In the Scriptovia community, students can post their schoolwork – essays, class notes, lab reports, presentations, and more – so that others can view them, discuss them, learn from them, as well as critique them,”
I have no idea how teachers are going to stay on top of sites like Scriptovia.com. Because of the reach of the internet, a good essay from a course in Los Angeles could be submitted as far away as a university in Glasgow.
In my dayit was easy to spot to plagiarism at University, as there weren’t that many sources that you could use. That wasn’t to say that we didn’t trade essays, but they weren’t traded to be submitted as our own work, they were used to work out how the best people on the course picked up more marks.
At the end of each year it was almost a tradition that the ‘essay folder’ containing all the best economics essays from the previous yeargroups, was handed down to the year below, with any good new essays that had been written over the course of the year added to the folder. In the final year you’d even find second years waiting outside exam halls to make sure that essays were handed down.
I wish I still had some of the essays in my possession, as I bet that if I did a word search, I’d find some essays that I recognise.
