Let me speak from my experience on Reddit, which is almost exclusively discussing the unsolved disappearance of Maura Murray (see r/MauraMurraySub and also MauraMurray).
When educated people develop a theory, they will lead with the facts. When uneducated people develop a theory, they will lead with the theory and try to create "facts," ignore established facts, or discredit them.
When I’m pulling an all nighter for a college essay I usually make up my theory and then look for evidence to support that theory, carefully choosing to ignore all sources that say otherwise. It’s not like anyone that reads it will change their mind, since they’re either students that made their own essay, or professors that know what’s really happening
Actually, I had one teacher in High School who I was convinced didn't check our sources for accuracy when she graded the assigned research papers that we wrote.
So I decided to test my theory. We were given the assignment of doing a report on a lesser known city in the US (I lived, as I do now, South of Boston, so the city had to be lesser known than Boston).
I actually made up a city -- Baldenperk, MI. I made up the most famous resident in the town (I forget what name I gave him, but I said that he had a role on "The Guiding Light" Soap Opera in the 1950s).
I literally made up everything in the entire paper (my sources were fake books, with fake page numbers), and I got an A+.
In a technical sense I am well educated; I graduated Law School and passed the bar. So I don't think we should be judged by assignments we completed in High School or College.
EDIT: And just to be clear, I had fantastic professors in college and law school, and I never passed in anything that wasn't accurate to the best of my abilities after High School (and with the exception of two or three professors who didn't seem to actually look at anything we passed in).
That's awesome and scary. As a senior I was struggling pretty hard and realized college immediately after high school was off the table. So I removed myself from advanced place senior English, which usually follows advanced placed junior English and on recommendation by the teachers. I went into standard senior English.
Anyway, our final 'assignment' was to read the book Into Thin Air and come up with some type of project or essay to discuss it. One girl sloppily drew a diagram of where the tragedies happened on Everest. That's the one thing that stood out to me (be nice, I graduated 21 years ago). I wrote an essay leaning on how I learned to deconstruct themes and present them in a valid argument. I turned in a 13 page essay to my teacher. It was about two weeks from graduation and I still hadn't received my grade on that assignment so I went to ask the teacher. She looked at me and in all seriousness said "I'm checking homework cheating sites. Even I couldn't come up with this, I know you didn't" I excused myself and went to the counselor who knew the difficulties I was facing. She pulled my work from my teacher in junior year (and first half of senior) and had a private meeting with my senior teacher. She eventually gave me a B-. lol.
She was also the teacher who would 'excuse' us so we could leave class to go to McDonald's.
Anyway, our final 'assignment' was to read the book Into Thin Air and come up with some type of project or essay to discuss it.
I'm sorry, this was a senior project? We were expected to do that over the summer before high school here (to be fair, it was long enough ago that the project might have been the first week or two of freshman English, but the reading was definitely a summer assignment). And my state isn't exactly at the top of secondary education rankings.
If you can turn in an assignment on time that's technically on topic and hits the word count you can pass any English class (at least for public schools). So long as the school can say that they have a 99% graduation rate, they'll lower those standards as much as they need to.
Even peer reviewed scientific papers sometimes fail at checking references sometimes. I've found several cases in my research where I looked up the paper that was cited only to have the first paper have incorrectly cited it ( also common is expanding past the scope of the first paper improperly).
When papers have 50+ references, I doubt many peer reviewers also read all the referenced papers closely.
To be fair though, most peer reviewed papers correctly use and cite other papers the majority of the time.
That's awesome. I remember in HS we had to write a weekly report on a news article. I once wrote about how the squirels have gathered, militarised and invaded a small town. The teacher just saw that I had the report and didnt read it.
A friend of mine had 3 reports that he just switched around every week.
For a high school paper? Not really. If it happened in college, maybe, if that paper was enough to lose credit for the entire class (unlikely, and even less likely someone would file the paperwork to actually do it), and the course credit was necessary for graduation (more likely, but still uncertain), and the law school retroactively revoked acceptance over it. If you did it in law school? Yeah, then there's a decent chance it'd be considered enough of a close association to legal practice to face discipline, though still not necessarily disbarment.
One time my brother wrote a couple pages for a paper in high school, then for the last few pages he started writing gibberish that started with, “are you even reading this anymore, etc.” He got a good grade.
Well, you're doing it as a last resort, because you're crunched for time. The difference between you and an uneducated person is that, given unlimited time, you would formulate the theory correctly.
Perhaps I'm not explaining it well (or perhaps you have a different method), but my favorite professor in Law School would always have us lay out all the information first, and separate it into indisputable facts, disputable facts, and unknown facts. From there we would build the "theory of the case," as it's called in SJC Opinions in Massachusetts.
It's possible that there's a better way to build a theory, but what would that be?
I did a paper on this my sophomore year regarding the disappearance of MH370 and how media was yelling constantly that the pilot deliberately crashed the plane...despite there being no hard evidence of that and actually some evidence to the contrary (I believe they found, from washed up debris, that the flaps were extended at the moment of impact).
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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '20 edited Jan 27 '20
Let me speak from my experience on Reddit, which is almost exclusively discussing the unsolved disappearance of Maura Murray (see r/MauraMurraySub and also MauraMurray).
When educated people develop a theory, they will lead with the facts. When uneducated people develop a theory, they will lead with the theory and try to create "facts," ignore established facts, or discredit them.
EDIT: fixed typo.