No more essays?

I'm not sure if this is a subtle April Fool's joke (and an early one, since it's dated March 31st). This article reports how one university is considering getting rid of asessed essays because of excessive student plagiarism. This makes me feel like the kind of retired colonel who writes irate letters to The Times along the lines of "When I was a boy, any of us who were caught plagiarising were thrashed soundly on our bare buttocks then sent on a fifty-mile cross country run, and it never did me any harm!" Seriously though, if they know this much plagiarism is going on, they must know which essays were plagiarised, so why don't they just through the students in question out of the university? That was the policy when I was a boy - oops, student - and plagiarism was accordingly rare.

Other faculty members are disturbed by this proposal, since, they argue, it will contribute to the already alarming phenomenon of undergraduate illiteracy.

Judith Golec, associate chairwoman in the sociology department at the University of Alberta, said professors in her department are resisting the move away from take-home papers. "We haven't abandoned essay writing because it's critical. It's critical to critical work."

Like, uh, yeah - critically critical. In, like, a critical kind of a way.

Added David Rampton, chairman of the English department at the University of Ottawa: "That can't be mimicked in an in-class context. In humanities, there should be confrontation with the blank page, and that means giving people a chance -- days, even weeks -- to think about a problem, think about their take on it."

Well, in a critical context, my take on this, blank-page-wise, is that English professors should -- even if it takes days, even weeks -- practice more of what they preach.