Education Articles from College Matching Service

Here are some references that distance learners http://collegematchingservice.com/ can use when doing their online class thesis.

• Weblogs and personal/corporate Web sites. Some are absolutely brilliant. Others are dismal. One can use the information, but it must be approached with care and extreme caution.
• Term paper repositories. Needless to say, we have not mentioned termpapers.com and other places that will sell you a term paper, or will allow you to share term papers with others. These are not the only unreliable sources of information in the Internet. It goes without saying that you should not use these, unless you’re just determined to commit academic misconduct. You could cite them correctly, but they probably aren’t the best source, unless your paper is about the traffic in term papers online.
• Summaries, overviews, and study guides. I, like everyone else, love Pink Monkey. However, I would think twice before actually citing it in a paper. I think that the best way to use Pink Monkey, Cliff Notes, Wikipedia, etc. is as a point of departure. Use them to gain an appreciation of your subject and to orient yourself. However, the information can be very imprecise and inaccurate, particularly in their plot summaries. They leave out details and discussion points that may be precisely the ones that you need.
• Student postings, peer-to-peer downloads of notes, texts, etc. These are excellent if you’re interested in seeing how students write papers, and they can serve either as guides or as cautionary tales.
• Parody Web sites. Believe it or not, some students have actually cited information from parody sites as fact! The Onion.com comes to mind. This is a site that masquerades as a legitimate news site, but is, in fact, pure parody. How can you tell if a site is a parody, or so biased that the information it contains is unusable? Compare the information with others. Does it seem outlandish or extremely biased? Look at least three or four sites.