A Decent Paper?

Capability to write a paper means you have more competence in the field of your study. Well, that's true, I won't oppose to that. What really droops my mouth and makes my teeth grit is the conduct of our colleges that compel undergraduates to squeeze a paper from our poor knowledge acquired in school. That gets even worse when this onerous task, under most circumstances, should be finished outside school, usually when you are supposed to enjoy a colorful vacation, when the library is far far away, and when there is little references at hand.

The paper assignment is far too demanding for us. That's not an exaggeration or a conjecture.

Undergraduates in China seldom have a flexible schedual to concentrate on a specialty. In most of our time, we have to battle with a tremendous assortment of curricula, no matter what major one is in. And perhaps the most compelling challenge faced with us is the fact that if you can't work out an appropriate blueprint about your after-graduating time, you are done for. In light of this, our college time is already rather limited. What we are longing to do is to assorb knowledge as various as possible, and we can't afford to gamble all of our time on some narrow subject(which is actually what a graduate should do), or we will not broaden our horizons as a whole to lay us an unshakable fundation to make further progress, whether it be in an academic research or in a practice of work. So how can our schools demand that we write satisfactory professional papers while we still hardly digest enough knowledge?

This mode of forcing a paper can never serve its purpose. While most of us can barely attained the great height of academic standard during college time, we have more or less to adulterate some falsification in the paper. For one thing, our store of knowledge in a special field deserves no optimism, for we can draw an enough amount of time out of our own schedual with little possibility; for another, limited experience with real practice is certainly not a pledge for a promising paper. Consequently, plagiarism has its time. Dare you say that the evil aura of plagiarism pervailing in the academia of China has no bearing on this kind of plagiarism pervailing in the mass of undergraduates? Probably these two kinds of notorious trends just contribute to each other. A decent paper, from this perspective, would be a Utopia.

Imposing a paper burden on undergraduates in order to turn the tide of a slack higher education in China prove a sheer overcompensation. If our universities really crave a substantive improvement, please reflect more on their own systems, more on the morality of the faculty, and more on the nature of a decent education.