Am I the only one who thinks this is a stupid overeaction to internet copying? I can think of many ways to counter it without such knee jerk reactions. One suggestion would be stop overloading teachers so they can pay more individual attention to students and not treating them like generic members of a collection.
For example here is an idea:
How weird would it be if teachers were acquainted enough with students to say, "Hmm this is not johnny's work, he does not usually structure his arguments in this manner, nor does he construct his diagrams that way or layout his papers that way". What a strange idea that! In fact those internet solutions often smack of a certain genericity or are overly mature.
Once caught plagirizing it would do to discuss as to why, offer help and give a second chance to redo it properly while making clear that you, the teacher is approachable at the slightest hint of any problem. Unfortunately this is overly ideal as students generally do not care to ask for help nor do bureaucratic engagements allow one much time to attend to students.
A way round this and done by many is to have discussions about coursework, however, rather than just have it be optional, let such discussions as well be interwoven into the class cirriculum.
Here again we see supreme ignorance of mathematics by the general community as they say, lets cut math coursework but keep everything else becuase you know, math is just rote memorization anyways and since it is so rigid and uncreative, copying cannot be detected. Plus, nevermind that math skills are not doing so well in the nation lets make it worse by making sure that people are not learning but memorizing and stressing over exams! So they can despise math more and ask such silly questions as 'but of what use is math anyway?'. Disgusting. There is no better way to learn math or anything than by doing. By offering specially formulated problems which will take the students the breadth of the topics covered, problems which require and encourage creative and original thinking (something that our culture currently discourages) all to be persued at the leisure of the student in their freetime at school or at home over some extended period of time, more would be learned by the students than by any other method. such carefully constructed coursework are of much better use in testing gained knowledge than some stylized math exam which can be done with little thought beyond that which may done by rote - this is made even easier if past papers are made accessible.
If coursework copying is truly such a problem then perhaps not only should such generic work not be given but a variety of carefully crafted problems tailored to the demographics of a class. Again an idealization where there is an assumption that the teachers have enough time to treat their students as humans, humans with interests.
Rebooted, I have not had continous internet access for a while but have finally replied here :)
