Manly Thor's Day Special

Bring back the Viva
Today's award for chutzpah goes to this young man:

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

That's courtesy of Adjunct Law Prof Blog who found this in the New York Times.
 
All sorts of thoughts come to mind here. Does the University of Maryland really assign essay topics as stupid as "the Great Depression"? Probably not. More likely NYT reporters are too stupid to make the fine distinctions necessary to describe the paper in question more accurately. (Don't blame them, they probably went to Harvard the poor dears.)

More significantly, however, this incident drives home just how important it is to bring back the viva. Make every single student, write a thesis and then (assuming they pass) stand up in front of a panel of professors and defend it for a few hours.

Real life is like that. No matter how good your written proposal might be, it's your ability to stand up and make the case out loud that makes the day. Any career that really requires a university degree requires us to develop this ability.

I'd even do it for undergraduate degree. I'd make the difference between an ordinary and an honours degree hinge on the exam. For undergraduates I'd skip the thesis. I ask those who wanted to qualify for an honours degree to appear before a committee who would assign him or her a series of questions and then allow them to pick any one and base their answer upon anything they had studied in the course of obtaining their degree. I'd allow them to take no more than twenty minutes to say it all. Then I'd make them field questions from the panel for at least an hour.

Any man who would be a man should be able to do this.

I know a lot of people would, if they read this, think, "I never could do that." But you could and if you were given three years to prepare yourself for such a thing, you'd manage it.