I suppose the fact that Alexander Berezin teaches in the engineering physics department at McMaster may explain some of the comments in his letter "Plagiarism Program Panned" (Bulletin, Dec. 2003), and they certainly hint at the two solitudes of the humanities and science in their failure to understand what goes on outside of his discipline.

The statement "in the computer age" class essays "have very low educational value and are generally almost meaningless" is ridiculous. Have computers rendered prose analysis obsolete, or is the suggestion meant to be that because cheating is now easier we should abandon a crucial tool for evaluation? As an English professor it is my job to gauge my students' ability to analyze texts cogently and to write up that analysis effectively, and that certainly cannot be done through Berezin's preferred methods of "direct tests, class colloquiums and face-to-face examinations."

Tests have very low educational value in my discipline, while colloquiums and face-to face encounters hardly indicate writing skills. The fact that the Turnitin program cannot capture every imaginable form of plagiarism does not disqualify its usefulness, and the line between originality and theft is not nearly as blurred as Berezin suggests. Indeed, I would argue that given contemporary online resources it is crucial to reinforce the importance of dealing properly with secondary sources of information.

The tone of Berezin's letter seems to imply that professors are at fault for trying to detect intellectual dishonesty, while students who cheat should remain free from such Orwellian intrusions as checking whether they actually wrote the assignments they pass in. If this is the lesson of the computer age, I'm glad I still operate in the apparently passé world of essay writing.

Richard Nemesvari
Chair, English, St. Francis Xavier University