Econ project

About the Paper and Presentation

1) The paper and project are your report on your own project of research. Your research may be based on reading, evaluation and summary of research in the literature or may include your own statistical analysis or other gathering and analysis of data. You will choose a topic for your project during the first week. (See the document “Choosing a Topic.”) This year I am requiring groups of four students to speak on topics from the same area on the same date. These groups will be formed at the first class meeting or assigned by me. You are required to choose (in consultation with me) a research paper from the literature to be assigned for the other students to read in preparation for your presentation. While you should explain the assigned paper in your presentation, your presentation and your paper are on the topic you chose, not on the assigned paper.

2) This is a Writing Intensive course and satisfies part of the requirement for three

Writing Intensive courses to graduate. The objective of Writing Intensive courses is for you to practice writing using the writing process of successive revisions. Accordingly, you are expected to turn in three drafts of your paper: the first to accompany your presentation, the second a revision in response to comments from students on your presentation and the accompanying first draft, and a final revision tenth week. Failure to comply with this requirement will result in grade penalties. Dr. McCain will act as a consultant both on writing and on the economics of your project. Since consulting is “work done for hire” (and Dr. McCain is modestly paid by Drexel for this) Dr. McCain’s help needs not be acknowledged in your bibliography of references.

3) Plagiarism is grounds for failure in the course. Material copied from an internet

source and pasted into a term paper is considered plagiarism (and is usually pretty easy to find with a search). Even if some words in the pasted material are changed to make it a “paraphrase,” Drexel policy considers this plagiarism. Papers for Dr. McCain’s classes are to be turned in BOTH in hardcopy AND electronically by the indicated due date. The electronic copy should be a WORD or RTF document and will be used for screening for plagiarism and kept on disc for the long-term record, while the hardcopy version will be marked and returned to you. Keep both versions in your own records for at least a year.

4) For this course, you are not permitted to paste any text into your paper that is

copied from an electronic source, without exception. There are two reasons for this.

a. The point of a Writing Intensive course is for you to get practice in writing, not pasting.

b. Pasting is a slippery slope that may leave you with plagiarism despite your intention to “clean it up” by putting in quotation marks or “paraphrasing.” You may forget, and anyway “paraphrasing” is still plagiarism (see above.) Students have been failed for this reason.

c. There may be good reasons to use quotations, though you should limit the number of quotations. I want to see your thoughts in your own words. If you do use quotations, type them in, as I did in 1965.

5) Using Online Sources: The Web offers a very large range of sources for

presentations and papers, but it is a mishmash of sources that range from excellent to appallingly bad to deliberately misleading. You should not use an online source for any purpose in this course without first verifying that it is:

a. Substantive for the purpose intended. For most purposes a

document that is only a few lines long will not be useful. This does depend on the purpose. To be used as a reference for the paper or presentation, for example, the source should provide at least a few pages of information on the topic. By contrast, if the purpose is to define a term, then a line or two may be sufficient. Message boards and blogs should not be used. There are some quite authoritative blogs but blogs as a group are not predictable enough to be used.

b. Reliable. Much of the content on the web is no more reliable than the opinions you may hear in barroom conversation. Among the things that make information reliable are

i. Institutional Authority. Is the site sponsored by an institution that is recognized as an authority and that would exercise oversight, such as the United Nations or the National Bureau of Economic Research? Personal websites (including mine) are less reliable.

ii. Personal Authority. Is the author identified? If so, is the author recognized as an expert in a field relevant to the topic? What evidence is there of this recognition? Does the author have graduate degrees in the field? Has she or he published articles in recognized scholarly organs relevant to the field? Books?

iii. Internal evidence. Are there misspellings, grammatical errors, and other evidence of unscholarly writing? Are there logical errors and inconsistencies? Are there representations of fact you know to be false? If you find any evidence of these failings, DO NOT USE THE SOURCE.

c. Unbiased or biased in known ways. Two of my students a few

years ago used economics citations from Communist web-sites. There is nothing particularly wrong with this – I know at least two very good Communist economists, and Communists are more likely to be interested in economics than, for example, Methodists – but the material may well have had a slant and you should not use material that could be slanted without knowing

how much slant there is and what it is. (The same cautions apply with equal force to conservative websites). i. If there is an institutional authority, it may be biased, and

may make the bias known. If there is an “About Us” page or equivalent, check it. Examples would be the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which supports free market economics, and Marxists.org, which doesn’t. These are both excellent sources for some purposes but should be used with caution. The Center for Economic and Policy Research is a little more difficult to assess. Hint: somewhat lefty.

ii. If the author is known, and has or announces a known slant, that may be useful.

iii. Internal evidence may be found. For example, The Center for Economic and Policy Research “about us” page lists an advisory board including two economists who were high- profile supporters of Kerry in ’04.