I’m sorry to put it this way, but high school and college term papers, 99 percent of the time, have little value as completed work. They will never be remembered or read again. Generating them, in and of itself, is worth essentially nothing, particularly when they recapitulate existing work.

But the point of a term paper is supposed to be not for the student to generate some deep insight, but for them to learn about how to write and how to put their thoughts together in a coherent argument. I didn’t care if my students remembered anything about their topics in a week.