I disagree with your headline, More money will not fix higher learning (December 19). Your columnist flags the problems of "students who cannot even string sentences together, most of whom plagiarise extensively". The University of the Western Cape solved the plagiarising problem in an educational, not punitive, style though turnitin.com. All students have to feed their essay drafts into this search engine, which highlights the cribbed bits in red, and paraphrased bits in green. Students then have to revise their draft essay, inserting adequate referencing, until the search engine is satisfied. But this requires the university to annually fork out for a hefty campus-wide site licence to this internet provider in forex. So more money is indeed essential to fix higher learning. To teach students to "string sentences together" — five-sixths have English as their second language — our politics department avoided multiple choice questions and insisted on 10-, later five-page essays in fu...
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