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Cheating Made Easy
jefu writes "This NY Times story talks about the kinds of papers that students might find (and buy) on the web. It also mentions turnitin.com a site that will scan papers and attempt to determine if it was copied. The article uses 'The Great Gatsby' as an example and notes that for the time it takes to read the book and write a paper, buying a paper seems a poor tradeoff. However, many books (or required papers) involve much more work on the part of the student, so the question becomes that much more difficult. If you have to do a report on 'Ulysses' it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book - let along understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it."
Check and make sure they don't copy others' work. Isn't that part of a professors/teachers responsibility? Kids are getting more sly about things, but teachers need to keep up also.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
Just have the final exam include writing an impromptu essay about your class paper, and weight it enough that you'll fail the class if you don't understand your own paper.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
When getting good grades is more important than actually understanding the subject.
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If you're ripping off a paper about Gatsby just be sure to mention where he cleaned the dried bit of shaving cream off the other guy's cheek. English teachers love that part. At least I do, and now, if I see it in a paper, I'll assume you're a /.'er and I'll give you an A for the semester so you can sneak out and go drinking.
/., I can think back of Daisy saying, "I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything... Sophisticated -- God, I'm sophisticated!"
That way, when it's 1:06am and I'm up grading papers and slacking off reading
Even if you are taking 18 credits that semester... sheesh, the professor sure thinks that's the case after he hands out a midterm paper assignment 5 days before it's due -- he did it when he was a whippersnapper, and so should you!
Karma whorin' since 1999
...the cheat I could have really used in school was a wallhack into the teacher's lounge.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I use Sparknotes.com often and it really helps you understand books and better prepare for tests. I also use myBiblio for bibliographies which works pretty well too. tutors arent consideredd cheating so why should study aids?
This story was already posted three times.
I have also seen sites that advertise (for greater expense) to write papers individually for you. These (if they are individually written) will NOT be caught by any technical means. Its still down to the professor/lecturer to make a judgment based on the persons grades.
There was an argument in a report I read recently that as the internet becomes more prevaliant that studying as a whole will become less important as information will be avialable at your finger tips. The skills that will become more useful are the ability to search effeciently and work out which sources you can trust. Of course studying helps develop these skills but why should I remeber PI to 8 decimial places when I can look it up quicker?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Rather than spending money on a paper, just run around the 'net picking up term papers on many and varied subjects. It's easy to do. Then trade with your friends and build up an immense collection. Finally, skim all the papers on your subject which you have collected, stitch together one term paper, edit it into your own personal style (even if this means it is less polished) and do minimal research to pad it out. You can do all of this research on the internet if you are careful, especially if your instructor does not demand that you provide citations for every last thing.
This will not work for a thesis, but if you don't understand your thesis, fuck you anyway.
This does take a lot longer than just buying a paper, but the risk with that is that you might be buying someone else's paper, and it might be detected. If you're willing to live with that risk, that's fine and dandy. Otherwise this should get you through it with a minimum of work expended, while producing a paper which will not show up as being copied, and even teaching you a little tiny bit about the subject matter.
I have never done this because I have never had a class which required a term paper which I found demanding. Then again I've mostly been taking applied arts classes recently, and they have had practical examinations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Then all you have to do is read and understand the the paper you bought. Seems like this would be a lot easier than reading the entire book and doing an original paper.
Pfft. Last year, I had a class in verilog. We would be given modules of his code (he would write the RAM, for instances), and we would have to write a module to interact with it (a cache, for example). His code was so damn buggy, THE NIGHT BEFORE one of the projects was due, he sent out no fewer than 6 major corrections to his code. I would have *killed* for 5 days notice.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You've made a very good point. However, understanding a paper about a book you don't understand is difficult to fake. Try it.
My wife teaches at a university, and each year many of the first essay assignments she sets are copied straight off the internet, maybe with a bit of cut'n'pasting but often just a straight copy. We spend half an hour Googling phrases that the students were unlikely to have written (look for the long words!) and i'll bet we find 9 out of 10 sources. A written warning and a lecture from the head of studies and the problem is solved until the next year. Maybe 1 in 10 are smart enough to cover their sources so we can't prove they cheated, but, hey, that almost counts as research... ;-)
If universities are concerned about cheating, they should give more weight to exams, where it is harder to cheat.
Exams alone put too much weight on memorization and performance under pressure, rather than research and long-term thought.
Therefore, tell people ahead of time what the broad area is, though not the specific topic. Let them bring in a few pages of notes, but those notes have to be submitted with the exam.
Write "Insightful" SlashDot posts for losers
...
Profit!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
> Then all you have to do is read and understand the the paper you bought.
Don't ask them to regurgitate a summary of the paper; ask them to motivate something they purportedly said in their paper.
> Seems like this would be a lot easier than reading the entire book and doing an original paper.
Yeah, I qualified it as a 90% fix because I know it isn't perfect. But if you're clever you should be able to fine-tune it until cheating and still passing is almost as much work as not cheating is.
Meanwhile, you've tricked them into learning something about the subject matter in spite of there worst intentions...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The ONE thing that really pissed me off about turnitin.com is that it gives your paper a "rating" on how many quotations you have, how common those quotes are, how many "similar" papers have been turned in etc, and it send the teacher a report that basically says whether your paper has a "green," good rating, eg you PROBABLY didn't cheat or improperly cite something, or "red," if it thinks you're cheatting.
Can someone tell me how a "green" to "red" rating can really tell a teacher whether or not you're cheatting. Its impossible to get a "green" rating, unless by chance you write something so unique, so original that no one has ever done anything even slightly similar to it. Has anyone ever heard of paraphrasing? Do you have any idea how easy it is to take someone elses work, change the sentance structure here and there and then turn in what appears to be an original piece?
Better than that, many of my classmates have found ways to completely fool the site by placing huge chuncks of their papers in quotations, when submitting to the site, and then removing them when they turn in the printed copy to the teacher.
I do not know much about term papers and other things like that in English, but in Russian there are thousands of them in the Internet. For free.
Hordes of students are downloading them in huge amounts that allows the site owners to sell not papers themself, but advertisement only. How do they get it ? Easily. Students nowadays are writing they papers using computers, so it is not a problem to share their work. Also some sites provides more detailed information - the name of the college(s) and of the professor(s) where the paper appeared, and grades it received.
It is a big trouble indeed. I do not have a diploma myself, but when I am in duty of interviewing young people looking for a job, I can not trust their diploma.
However, these papers have a lot of useful information that could be used.
That people have this attitude that "it's a waste of time," "he thinks its my only class!," "it's just too much work!," etc. My best experiences in undergrad were when I had a huge workload, knocked everything out, even the bullshit work, in incnredible fashion, and reveled in it sleeplessly the next day.
Word to the wise: this is how the real world works. No, it shouldn't be the way it goes, but it is. In upper division hard sciences and math, I pissed away more time googling for examples online that were like problems I was doing than really learning them sometimes. I paid for these times. Bide your time, do your work, but most importantly, carve out at least 5-10 hours a week for side projects you really enjoy. In an 18 credit semester where I was taking PChem, researching 20 hours a week, taking a 2 credit lab (read: 6 hours in lab, 4 hours writing lab reports, and I work quickly), I still had time to work on a software project, do sculpture, AND go out with my slacker buddies like it was my job. You. will. always. have. bullshit. work. Learn to live with it and quit bitching about the system; it's not some nebulous entity that's out to get you.
> That's great in theory, but a little impractical. This system would require the teacher to re-read each student's previous paper (or maybe she has a really good memory), and then read the exam
Just write down an appropriate exam question for each student as you grade their papers.
> and then somehow maintain impartiality when grading.
That's tough no matter what you do.
> A better system would be to mandate severe penalties for cheating and make frequent examples of people. All too often I've seen people who cheat, get caught, and get a slap on the wrist (even in university).
And I've seen students get kicked out of a university over cheating, but all the studies indicate that it's still rampant.
I suspect that lots of cheaters (and criminals, spies, politicians, etc.) think they're too clever to get caught. Or perhaps don't ever think about the consequences at all.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This shows that a paper is not a hard 'proof' you master the subject.
I allways felt that writing a paper is just reorganisation of known information, no understanding sometimes is required and is often far from creative.
Maybe it could weed out all of the dupes! :)
several of the teachers subscribed to a lot of the websites where you can buy term papers and reports.
While this doesn't stop the people who pay to have one written for them, or the ones who do a fair amount of tailoring their "store-bought" essays, it at least helps eliminate the stupid cheaters.
I actually enjoy reading, so in my opinion, it's a waste of time and money to buy your reports when you learn so much more by doing it yourself. Not to mention the fact that you know you earned your grade honestly.
I actually feel sorry for the people who short themselves by not doing the work themselves.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
...the importance of college. Middle American society is now at a state where college doesn't mean anything over just having completed some education. My college sociology class (jeez, that was 6 years ago now) touched on the phenomenon of credential inflation, wherein baccalaureate degrees become increasingly meaningless because everyone's got one.
Really, the glut of colleges in the US makes attending one the duty of anyone who wants a decent job. Students go to college out of a perceived need for the result, so small wonder that most of them want to do as little as possible in their time there.
In one sense it mimics the situation in east Asia where companies will hire any student who's gone through a good college; once you make it there, it behooves you to do just enough work to graduate, and spend the rest of the time unwinding (ok, partying) from the stress of having had to pass the entrance exams. Take the entrance exams out of the equation and you still pretty much have the same deal -- kids coming out of high school with more freedom but even less sense of purpose.
From my college experience, it's apparent that students in liberal arts majors (not sciences or engineering -- class by themselves there) really have to try to fail, in order to fail. That doesn't mean self-sabotage so much as willful negligence of requirements. It's my humble opinion that failure to attend class with semi-regularity, to turn in homework at all (not necessarily on time), and to be in class on exam days really requires a conscious effort. More than likely its conscious reallocation of time and resources to such noble pursuits as binge drinking or playing Everquest.
I think it could be time to nudge the bar of standards up, and get a handle on which students actually care enough to do the work. If there wasn't this giant push for everyone to complete college, the smaller number of college-educated people could actually make decent salaries. We've kind of lost the incentive -- now instead of going to college to get good jobs, we go to college to not get bad jobs. Hell, I'm going to grad school to get a good job. I often feel that I'm wasting my youth on it, but being as free of the machine as possible is a pretty strong motivator.
My case for bringing apprenticeship back and giving it some respect is still fairly strong. However, overcoming the five-year itch culture is an entirely different matter which would fill volumes.
One case in particular comes to mind afew years back where we set them an on-line tutorial to go through and answer some questions at the end. The questions varied, so this particular group spent DAYS going through the exercise and screen dumping all possible answers to the question, so they could answer any question given as an assignment. If they had just done the task given, it would only have taken them a few hours! I see similar examples all the time of students spending more time trying to "beat" the system, rather than just "extracting the digit" and getting on with it.
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
Thats a classic !
Maybe I don't understand but why would someone take a class where they had to right a paper on Joyce? What purpose would the paper have? How would it help them later in life? If I can read a complicated book and write down what other people through history have said how will that help me with organic chemistry? If the degree has makes that class of "skill" useful but people are cheating anyways maybe that a problem with the system that makes grades more important than learning.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
I mean seriously, what the fuck? You're willing to build up an "immense collection" of other people's papers, skim them, synthesize the pieces and bolt them together like an origami Frankenstein, but not willing to READ THE DAMN BOOK(S) AND THINK FOR A WHILE? Seriously. It's easy. If you're really lost, look up some published scholarly papers on the subject and use them to give you ideas. THEN CITE THEM.
You know all that droning on the professor did in class? All that stuff about "themes" and "tropes" and "methods of analysis?" Guess what. The professor has already given you the tools you need. Look at your notes, then look at the book. Then hit yourself in the head with either/both until you make the connection.
In the humanities, as long as your argument (you do have an argument, right? as in a thesis statement?) holds water and is even remotely logical and grounded in the book, you're golden. Oh, and at the end you'll actually understand the subject, more than "a tiny bit;" as in, you'll be able to apply the things you've learned elsewhere. I hear there are still some idealistic flower-people wandering about who think that's the whole point of college. Damn hippies.
Plagiarism is like cheating at solitaire. It's not even solitaire anymore. You might as well be throwing cards around randomly. Why the hell would you want to spend four years doing that?
You could have done all of your research papers and had time left over to watch the porn you were able to download by not wasting your bandwidth downloading papers.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
When you can just buy the damn degree! (itll take you 5 days).
"The Devil is often seen about town in a sharp looking suit."
It's entirely off topic to bring our real President, Dick Cheney, into this discussion. You liberals are all the same.
The reason we are called "the Right" is because we're right.
If I can alleviate the high stress these students are dealing with (and pocketing a nice reward) then that's one less student jumping off a building because they failed their parents/peers overblown expectations of performance. You can not get through a 4 year program cheating at every turn - by the end you won't be able to defend your diploma with a decent intellect! Either that or you'll screw up the in class exams.
Also, to those interested, writing custom papers is a great career if you like researching and learning new things. There is so much demand I get to pick and choose what essays to write and even if I make a grammatical or factual error I still get paid.
...would be to give out more original essay questions? Rather than telling students to do the same paper every other student at every other university is doing, have a little more creativity. Ask about more modern, ideally relatively recently released books. In the case of "classics", ask obscure questions.
I did a degree in Computer Science, the only essays we had were on topics that were either relevant to that point in time, or were on lectures we had attended. Getting anything close online would have been next to impossible...
Thoughts anyone?
Maybe the problem is using class papers for grading anyway. I'm not American, but my impression is that it's common to do only one or two essays a term, which then count towards grades. Far better to get practice with an essay a fortnight (though pity the poor teachers if it's a big class!) and then grading just from the exam. If students don't put effort into the term work then, that's their loss. Or, class papers plus a viva at the end of the year might do the job.
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I have also seen sites that advertise (for greater expense) to write papers individually for you
I would bet that they don't really write individual papers. They possibly have a stash of papers ready to go, and just "individualise" them to some degree.
Remember...what they are offering to do is ethically questionable anyway.
At my old New Zealand High School, the teacher's lounge, on the the top floor of the admin block, was maybe 200 yards line-of-sight from the 7th form common room. We gutted and rigged up one of those el-cheapo wireless FM microphones (you know, the kind which let you broadcast to your own radio, etc) in the ceiling above the lounge, rigged with a booster and decent directional antenna, and recorded all the conversations from the room on an old reel-to-reel tape machine while we were in classes. The most important thing we discovered was that teachers are very boring people. Aside from the odd bit of school politic-related backstabbing, they generally talked about nothing that 17 and 18 year-old students wanted to hear.
I think if you are stupid enough to submit one of those papers without knowing anything about the subject there is a good chance you will be caught.
If you are quized about part of the paper you are supposed to have written and can't answer basic questions... Well you deserve what you get..
Just the thing when you have to write a paper on some alleged classic of Western Literature. I've always felt that taking a literature class is like dissecting a puppy. You learn a lot about canine anatomy but you would rather have had the live puppy.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, the author of the article did just this - she bought 2 papers on Gatsby, one pre-written and one written specially for her. (At an appropriately higher price, of course).
The pre-written one was apparently pretty badly written (arguably like your average high-school student would write it), and the custom one was written with such excellent language that it was very well done. However, as she points out, most students can't write nearly as well as this paper was written, so in fact using an individually written paper could actually be more dangerous to the student in this case. As you say, a judgement on grades to determine if student X could actually have written the paper is needed here.
Personally, I think it's quite an innovative bit of entrepeurneership from the websites point of view, but what kind of study skills does it promote? So you prove you can find the easy way out - remind me never to drive over a bridge you built after doing all your studying by paying other people to buy it for you...
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
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I allways felt that writing a paper is just reorganisation of known information, no understanding sometimes is required and is often far from creative.
:) You'll need more proof, sorry.
Music writing is all the same notes, just reorganized...you call that 'no understanding' and 'far from creative'?
I didn't think so
That is nice enough but you still have no guarantee they did not simply download it off the internet them selves. And you also have the same fundamental problem of not knowing head nor tail of the subject come exam time. Of all cheaters I pity the ones the most who are so dumb they copy some other guy's paper word for word as opposed to using several papers as roadmap for composing their own cartload of fresh, steaming and fragrant BS.
"There is a sucker born every minute"
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
At my school (some of) the text books often times have an advertisement for turnitin.com on the backs of the books (composition class text books). This lets you know day one that the teachers are aware of this service - and makes you aware such a thing exists too.
Problem is however I once was looking up something on the Windows 2000 architecture and noticed a site had the same word for word definition of "kernel" as my book. So I googled the exact phrase.
Seems there were 100+ sites using the same exact definition. Well, by looking at the pages I noticed they all had the same author. Basically the page was on 100+ free hosts (and a few paid hosts).
Well, I wondered who copied it first. Was the book the original or the website? After further investigation I found out our books are made in India. Likely it was the same person writing the book and decided to make a web page out of his work. Then I stumbled across someone who claimed to work for the company writing the books and he said the deadline for the books is 20 days!
You must write a book on Cisco routers in 20 days too! Well, Sybex should sue the book writers because they not only stole text but diagrams right from their CCNA texts. Our Novell Netware book said that ARP was responsible for name-to-ip address resolution too!
Extra mod points to the person who can guess which crappy school I'm stuck at...
Hint: The text books are written by NIIT.
Get your Unix fortune now!
That used to be the system here in the UK: only the final exams count. However it was changed a few years ago (well OK about 20) to be a mix of coursework and exams. The driver being that exams test two things:
The idea of doing a mix of both is to reduce the impact of your ability to do written exams (well or not).
Personally I think it's quite a good idea: both the exams and the coursework is both internally (across the department within a school) and externally moderated (by the exam board across all schools doing that course).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
If a teacher submits a student's original paper to turnitin.com, doesn't that violate the student's copyright on the paper? (I believe turnitin.com stores the student's paper indefinately to check future papers against.)
"Ulysses is unreadable, illiterate crap".
There, what more need one say about that awful book?
If you do choose to give students freedom in choosing paper topics, which I prefer, at least know your students and their work. Although it can be more problematic in large survey/lecture classes, somebody should know them and their abilities - you, TA, GSI, somebody. Again, the relevance of the paper to at least some of the ideas discussed in class is an obvious tip-off, as is a comparison to the students' interests exhibited in previously submitted work. It's not hard to spot a purchased paper, at all, if the professor/teacher is doing their job of teaching properly. 'Book reports' and cliffs' notes at the university level? Pah.
All of which brings me to the point of my rant - this kind of stuff only happens at institutions that employ crap teachers. Not necessarily lousy universities, but ones that permit shoddy, sub-standard teachers who should be teaching elementary-school english to pose and parade as 'professors'. Even with a 4/4 brutal teaching load at a large public institution, this kind of thing is simply a non-issue for teachers that actually work at it, rather than treating academia as if it were some sort of sinecure. It's an ivory tower only if you let it be, and if purchased essays are proliferating throughout academia, it reflects far worse on the professors who are too thick and lazy to preclude such submissions (or identify them, without google or a paid service, on the strength of their knowledge of the student and his/her work), and the institutions employing them, than students, of whom there will always be a few willing to try and cheat their way around substandard interest, intellect, or discipline. /rant.
Amor omnia vincit. Occasionally.
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And today's award for Most Gratuitous Segue Into Politics Most Of The World Doesn't Care About goes to....
If the goal is a good grade, the issues mentioned are relevant. If the goal is to learn something, there's no substitute for spending time learning it. Keeping this in mind, the usual idea of cheating can be understood as a confusion of these two issues. There's no way to cheat the learning process, and the grading process is just an algorithm which gives useful feedback to the student when the input is constrained to a certain domain.
One professor had an even more radical method: he would only allow students to write about books that had just appeared, and the students had to structure their essays around specific questions that the professor posed. Impossible to get around this, unless you hire someone to write it to spec.
cheers, potor
Given the tons of garbage on the net, and how half the search topics give you 10,000+ blogs, clan sites, message boards, etc, if you can actually discern between the right info and the bullshit, then IMHO you already knew enough to write the paper on your own.
As a random example, if I were to write a paper about the crusades, based on info on the net, I'd be faced with a deluge of conflicting information. I'd have to discern between posts and pages by people who knew their stuff, and bogus pages and posts by gamers who got their facts from games like Lionheart.
And I doubt that any professor would appreciate if I handed in a paper saying that Richard Coeur de Lion (Lionheart) opened a rift to hell and unleashed demons upon earth. And then allied with Sultan Saladin to fight them off.
Hey, it's in the game Lionheart, so it must be true.
Or: were the crusades started really by Peter the Hermit, to free the holy land, or was it all the Pope's plan to help the Byzantine Empire against the Turks? Would the crusades have still started if the Byzantines weren't starting to take a beating? You can find both points of view presented as historical fact on the net.
Or: which crusade conquered and sacked Constantinople? Was it the fourth, the fifth, or which? And why did that happen? Again, you can find the most conflicting information on the net.
A lot of it is simply conflicting historical data, because different chronicles back then had different biases. But about 75% is simply people taking out of their ass. Just because, you know, it's the Net and you can publish _anything_.
It gets even sadder when it's about programming. Every burger flipper can get hired as one, and God knows every other of them has got to re-publish on the net some "cool tricks" he's found on the net. Half of which don't even work, or are "optimizations" which actually make the program run 10 times _slower_.
So basically it seems to me safer to just read the book and do your own research. By the time you're actually competent to discern the gold from the bullshit on the net, you've already done your research and are more than competent to write your own paper.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The onus is on the teachers to prove you are a cheater, not to prove you are doing nothing. Schools have policies on cheating, and professors/teachers have to follow them to make a case against a student that he or she is in fact cheating. They checks they make are to verify the validity of your work, and find things that could show that your work is not falsified or copied.
And your cop analogy is just way off base.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Good idea; I may use that. The thing is, where I work (large state university), most of the students who cheat just copy their shit right off the web and it's that easy to find. 10 seconds in google and your college career is over. You really think it's worth the risk? Well, for at least 5-10 students per year (out of the 300 or so that pass through my courses in a year), the answer is apparently yes, and that's just the ones I've actually caught. I suppose all cheaters can't be that stupid but so many of them are that proposals like the above are beside the point.
I visited UCSD recently, and it is possible to legitimately buy exams, lecture notes, and past papers that people have written through a student-run office. Since they mentioned it in the tour, apparently it is widely used. However, it is also immediately obvious when a student has copied, due to the limited subset of papers available. Wouldn't this be a better solution than being Nazistic about it?
All work submitted to Turnitin is checked against three databases of content:
[...]
3. Millions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin.
So the teachers commit copyright infringement by submitting their students' works to turnitin and turnitin commits grand scale copyright infringement by copying, preserving and capitalising on "millions of student papers" without the students' permission. Great business!
Unless you're getting a degree in Literature then a required course which insists that you read "The Great Gatsby" or "Ulysses" for a 'well-rounded education' is just another way for the university to soak money off of you while keeping otherwise useless staff on payroll. If I were a student today I wouldn't be terribly concerned about the ethics of the situation, since I'd see this as the university bending me over and giving me a good reaming while I was trying to learn the stuff that would actually be useful to me post-degree.
Although I always got A's on my papers. My failing was that I had a hang-up about the laughable ethics of selling papers, and so missed a prime opportunity to make a bundle selling my work to athletes and frat boys. If I could go back and do it again, you can bet I wouldn't miss that opportunity a second time.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Hell, it doesn't even have to go this far. Let's say that you did read the book, or the cliff notes and understood enough to pass a test. If you submitted a purchased term paper, your writing style would be so much different on a quiz/test essay. You would seriously be an idiot to do something like that. Someone would catch that. Especially when graders are trained to look for just that thing.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
college is not about learning its about paying for a piece of paper that says nothing. we live in a society where this piece of paper means more then the person who owns it. students go to college because society tells them too. if you do not go to college there is something wrong with you. your parents tell you to get good grades but you dont know how to 'think' because public education has failed you. so you pay for a paper or steal one under the slogan "this class doesnt matter". what does matter is getting a degree so you can get a job and consume. the universities are focused on making money, they have become a private industry. they hire sub-par professors who are products of the very same system. they assign papers and the students cheat. the professors try to eliminate cheating by treating all their students as potentinal cheaters. this only weakens the already fragile relationship of teacher and student. learning becomes a less of a goal in the classroom. its the student trying to pass and the professor trying to get paid. and in time people will forget that colleges had anything to do with learning. its just a place you go because you have to or there is something wrong with you.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Yea, I have to agree with you. Talk about lazy students...how about pointing out the lazy teachers? I only had a few teachers up through high school and only ONE professor in college where these rip-off papers would have worked.
For one, my high school teachers quizzed us in two different ways. One, our ability to analyze a story, as in term papers, in-class essays, etc. Two, our ability to read a story. Usually this was simply a daily quiz on what we were supposed to have read the night before hitting several factual minor points that no summary would include. We were told this would be the case, and we were told ahead of time that we should read with a notebook open and take notes on anything we thought might be covered (we were free to use our notes on the quizzes). Some teachers that used this technique didn't want to waste class time so they'd give us the quizzes to take home. They still worked really well.
Some teachers didn't like this because they thought it overtly communicated mistrust to the students. Instead, they opted for the multiple draft process for term papers. No paper was simply written and handed in. It was drafted, corrected by the teacher with suggestions, handed back for rewrite. This process would usually go three or four times, and you'd be asked to analyze how your thesis applied to specific small events in the book, again, not covered by any summaries. By the time you were done writing the paper, if you had tried initially to avoid reading the book you eventually had to go into it pretty deeply. Using the custom-written papers on these rip-off sites would cost several thousand dollars, one custom paper per draft. (And how would you communicate with the paper writer what they were supposed to do? Would you fax in the first draft with all of the teacher's margin notes?)
Finally, there was a teacher who I did not personally have but taught in my high school that required students to compose one essay per reading that was more or less primarly composed of direct quotations strung together. This sounds silly, but it was a very good way of seeing if your thesis held water against the actual text of the book. At the beginning of his course, something like 90% of the theses handed in were rejected and rewritten because it would be painfully obvious that the student didn't have a clear idea of what the author was saying (after all, not a lot of interpretive wiggle room when it comes to using direct quotes).
Yet another technique, the in-class creative essay. The teacher would simply ask the students to write an essay that compared/contrasted some element of two specific readings. Try to do this based on cliff notes of both works and you'll see it doesn't really work that well...the success of this kind of essay requires a knowledge of the texts more intimate than summaries provide.
These are just the ways I've actually had teachers ensure that students read the material. I could probably think of a dozen more if say, oh I don't know...it was MY JOB. What exactly are we paying teachers for if they can't solve this fairly simple problem?
Having said that, I will say that I have used what I considered to be ethical techniques that my classmates did not consider ethical (though I doubt my professors would have had a problem with it). I found it works particularly well for philosophy courses for some reason, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work just as well in literature for most people. Before I read anything for a particular college level philosophy course, I'd go to the library and do some background research on the philosopher, what he thought, what he was trying to say, and then do the same kind of research on the particular work itself. This way, I'd know what all of the later philosophers, professors, and graduate students thought about various aspects of the work. I found this much research was often sufficient to gain a true understanding of the material without having to read the material itself, which was very useful when I was in a ti
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
The really sad thing is the number of students who try to justify cheating, even after they've been caught.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And it only cost me a reasonable $20! Here's my new business plan:
Write "Insightful" SlashDot posts for losers
...
Profit!
--
Now give me my A* dammit!(Sig snipped out)
Again folks cheating is a by product of the almighty dollar, welcome to capitalism 101.
Where people compete for the best jobs/marks, you can bet many people are not going to get their on merit alone. Even assuming one legitimately got through the system. The quality of teaching and what is being taught varies so widely (even in countries that have 'good education'). Rich or popular people are especially 'favored' in academia, your marks are as good as as much money you're willing to throw at the school in question. Many teachers know that money has too much negative influence in higher education. But when the sole purpose many people pursue it is for money - you've got two competing contradictory interests at work.
When I was at College we discovered a pretty simple system. Now the staff weren't the brightest --- in fact, most of the students in my year already had degrees, whereas some of the staff hadn't even finished High School. Great teachers, bad academics.
Anyway, we'd be given a book to read, prescribed by the syllabus. If the teacher was new on staff, chances were they hadn't read it. If they had been there longer and had read it, it would have been so long ago it didn't matter.
We came up with a guaranteed system to pass those book reviews.
The problem those of us with degrees had was that we simply couldn't do that. We were trained to go in boots and all, and none of those essays were hard. But funnily enough, the system worked better than hard work and thinking.
Great staff, though. In that situation, being around people with real life and trade experience was a worth a lot more than reading a book none of them clearly cared about.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Schools should be teaching and testing rhetoric. England forbade the teaching of rhetoric to all a few centuries ago, to prevent the masses from gaining too much power, and the trend has continued ever since worldwide.
I don't know why, but I find it ironic that the only paper I ever cheated on in High school or college was the paper on Great Gatsby my Junior year of high school. Damn that book sucked and I didn't understand it at all. I didn't copy/paste the entire paper, but I was very liberal with reading another person's paper and just changed a lot of the words. Even re-reading it again and having a teacher explain it to me a second time didn't help. I guess I'm terrible at reading and getting meanings that are embedded in three layers deep. I ended up doing my paper on the symbolism of colours in different areas meaning different things, or something like that. Good thing I've paid off that bad karma by now (hopefully at least).
bananas like monkeys.
At my school there was a lot of cheating going on. There was a lot of honest students who didn't cheat, but then there was also students who cheated on just about everything. In many courses, like math and engineering courses, it's kind of hard to catch cheating on assignments, since everybody is supposed to have the same answer. Professors usually dealt with this with the rule that if you don't pass the exam, you don't pass the course, regardless of how well you did on the assignments. It's a lot harder to cheat on the exams then on the assignments, so I think this may have worked pretty well.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I never really trusted the guy, so I asked a couple of friends in his year to keep an eye out for the assignment (it had to be presented in class). Sure enough, after the presentations they came straight to see me with the class copyt of his assignment.
It was identical.
When I say identical, I mean identical. I had used the ugliest, most garish template MS-Works (it all seems so silly in retrospect) could give me (the staff rewarded heavy use of dialogue boxes and 'general creativity.') The mastheads, the page borders and everything were the same.
And the text was definitely mine. My friends were tipped off to the problem because it even sounded like me speaking. They knew he couldn't have done it.
The funny part was, though, he'd used correction fluid to blank out our names (I did it as a joint project) and every occurence of 'us,' 'we,' and so on throughout the piece and replaced it with his handwritten name and appropriate pronouns. He popped it into a photocopier, and his essay was done.
I immediately went to the staff member responsible for these things and she just about had a heart attack, not least because of the ugly template. She started an enquiry, and it turned out every piece of work he'd done up that point had been 'written' the same way. He quietly resigned from the college a week later. Not so much as an apology for those of us he'd ripped off. He still maintains that he did the work.
Great teachers, lousy academics. Not such great police, either.
Cogito, ergo sig.
I took a bunch of free hosting accounts, plus my personal site. And posted my papers online. Sometimes each word in the paper linked to another copy of the paper (which did the same thing).
So when the paper's due date had enough time to let me pull this little prank... it was normally never returned to me.
A few times the teacher exempt me from what was a terrible paper, simply because they never got it back from the librarian running the plagarism check.
Sometimes my name would be on top of the line copies, sometimes on the bottom, sometimes even in the HTML (when I wanted to really tick them off).
Other times I would break up my paper, and post a sentence on each page.
No rule against doing stuff like this. And it's a boatload of fun knowing your wasting someone's time!
If you have to do a report on 'Ulysses' it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book - let along [sic] understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it.
Of course it does, but arguably the pay off for the work you put in is much higher. The attitude that university work is merely something to slog through confuses me. You're not required by law to continue your education beyond high school. In fact, you've made the choice to go to a university or college, and you've selected your class list. If you find the material tedious enough that you have to cheat to simply to get through it, why are you there?
The Internet is an outstanding tool for finding raw data. (And 99% of it wrong, but hey.) Do you need the value of Pi? Sure, you'll find that on Google.
On the other hand, there are no jobs nowadays which require simply regurgitating memorized data. Noone will ever pay you to just know the value of Pi with 20 decimals. We have computers for that nowadays.
What a company needs is _solving_ _a_ _problem_.
1. It needs _skills_, which is something you won't find on Google. They're something you train. You can't be a chess master by just googling for "chess". And contrary to many clueless PHB's wet dream, you can't build a good, maintainable and secure program architecture by just hiring monkeys and telling the to google for "program architecture".
No, just finding 200+ patterns and tricks on the Internet and dumping them mindlessly into the program, won't actually make it a better architecture. It will just make a bloated unmaintainable monster, which has major performance issues too. Even on today's computers. Most of those cool tricks you find will be a brain-damaged liability, rather than help.
Someone needs to have the skill to actually filter and use that data. That's what study and experience give you, that Google can't.
2. The abbundance of conflicting data, or irrelevant data, is today the _problem_, not the solution. If you want to make, say, a business decision, the signal-to-noise ratio is such that you're literally deafened by noise and te signal is lost in it.
When Joe Manager wants to decide whether to do X or Y, he wants a concise study presenting the advantages, disadvantages and risks, on which to base that decision. What he finds on the Internet gazillions of blogs and posts along the lines of "X sucks", "Y blows", "X is un-american and should be outlawed", "Y will bring doom and economic crash upon us all", etc, 99% of which present no actual coherent reason.
I.e., what Joe Manager wants is _knowledge_, not raw data. Someone needs to have the skills to not just Google, but filter the noise out and extract the relevant bits.
And then not just copy-and-paste those bits, but apply them to the problem at hand and work some results out of them. I.e., not just "well, X seems more popular on the boards", but something like "for our situation, X will cost 5 million and 13 months to implement, and we're expecting to save 1.5 million per year. Whereas Y [...]"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've take over 200 exams during my 6 years college. Even the best of the best students couldn't help from cheating at some of the exams. Reasons ranged from indigestible texts to "I need a higher grade to get the scholarship". Anyway, cheating is nothing compared to seeing the "teacher's pet" getting a perfect A on a D+ paper.
This is something too many people get caught up against. Don't change the system, change yourself!
After several years in school systems I realized that most of the classes taught were pretty useless, and the classes that focused to improve my future work were basically absent.
Instead of forcing each student to read and write about Shakespeare or some other classic, how about just handling the theme at generic knowledge level. Sure, the material is good for general knowledge, but instead forcefeeding boring facts and details, how about asking the kids what do they want to do when they grow up?
At their age, most of them won't probably have the slightest idea, but they might have the generic feeling of which area they want to work in future.
One solution might be to create "classless" system for schools, kinda like the one used in universities. This could be offered as an alternative to normal lecture pattern. Those who have some idea what they want to do, when they grow up, could start focusing on fields of their interest at early age and those who don't have the slightest idea, could follow the generic knowledge line like the schools do now.
Instead of forcing kids to cheat because they're forced to study subjects they can't get any grasp on, teach them stuff they find interesting instead.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
When I was in college the internet had not matured to the point it has today but papers were always available for those that wanted them. Not electronically but physically.
What has changed? While I never used one, I always felt the authors work is their work and they are free to either license it, sell it, or distribute it in any way they see fit.
Who is a teacher to say a student isnt allowed to have options other than published text, as long as the paper has been scored in some way its now a valid opinion regardless how assinine it is.
I mean, come on. "The Great Gatsby and the American Dream"? Could you be any more cliche? How about exerting a little more originality on the part of the teacher, either in material or topic? Find things for which there won't be lots of pre-written papers.
Also, follow through with lots of revisions. One of our truly excellent English teachers had an infinite-rewrite policy. Sure, you could probably buy the first paper -- but then you were stuck with it as you went through multiple rewrites. Evnetually you learned the book anyway, by gum!
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
$DEITY help the teacher who cares but who also relies solely on papers for judging grades. Making the student defend his/her paper orally might do much better at helping to identify cheaters.
Unless of course the student is fitted with a microphone and earbud and is having the answers fed wirelessly.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
My eight years of high school teaching tell me this: As a rule, humans don't learn from the misfortune of others. Harsh penalties don't, per se, seem to have the deterrent effect you would expect -- and I say this as a fan of a serious disciplinary system. Where harsh penalties work, it seems, is where they reflect an honest community sense of outrage -- where people truly believe the infraction is significant and therefore have no sympathy for violators. In those cases, that attitude gets communicated to the kids, too.
I think it's the same for why some schools with an open honor code (U.Va.), which should lead to tremendous abuse, seem not to suffer it. (OK, maybe U.Va. is a bad example recently but historically, it has been renowned as a cheat-free school.)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I'm an avid book collector and for some stupid reason still have the books I had to read in US high school and I've read them many years later on a rainy day out of boredom and guess what they STILL suck. Easily the worst 2~3% of my collection come from either required reading lists. That's not to say that they are all bad, but the required list's batting average would put them on the bench in my team!
How about books that are more relevant to the lives young people live today?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Indeed, or, as I think I read on slashdot before.. "If it looks profesionally written, it probably is.", i.e., not by the person handing in the paper..
Unless, of course, you do this from the very beginning of the course...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
In many businesses, it is a common practice to look at the savings at doing a job in-house, or outsource. Usually, it comes down to weather the employees' time can be spent productively at a task. This seems to be the model implied here by this article. This model completely falls apart for students. Their main task is to study, and complete the course of study. There are no outsourceing options here. This would be like a programmer trying to outsource an assignment. Why keep the programmer on the payroll if you can get his job done somewhere else. I think some are missing the point of being a student here. Not everything you learn in school is going to be relevant every minute of every day of your life. Guess what. In the several jobs I hold, I'm assigned to do many things that are not relevant to the overall purpose of my position or my company. The chief idea for a student is that they are able to complete a course of study, reguardless of how relevant they deem the material to be. I currently work as a teacher (high school and community college), and I'm working on my Master's degree in IT. I hold a unique position to see both sides of the coin at once here.
People don't go to school to learn anything. They go to get prestigious degrees and for personal connections. That's why people try to get into the top schools. You can graduate as a mediocre C student from Havard and get to be President of the United States.
...did learning something new become such a bad thing, if youre not enjoying learning about things at university and such then maybe youre doing the wrong course for the wrong reasons.
Any more of this sort of behaviour and we will have a generation of people that are too lazy to think for themselves and will need the internet for basic survival tips.
But you're conflating two things here. I wouldn't argue against pre-reading some things (although that can bias your own reading) but I think you should in the end read the original as well. What's more, you say you never cracked the original books, but then say "without at least first getting some idea" -- which implies a second, i.e., actually reading the text.
I don't doubt you can get by, or even do well, grade-wise by just processing secondary sources. But your actual learning is in fact diluted, I believe.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
My High School english classes were often irrelevant and pointless. We'd read feminist literature or classical Greek myths.
College, on the other hand, was much more interesting. We read Fight Club and the Last American Man, watched Family Guy, etc and plotted their significance in society.
Really a fascinating class.
For my Junior Term Paper, my English teacher informed us that he would be using turnitin.com to check our papers. I have a fundamental disagreement with the way turnitin profits, which is by using the works of students to reference other papers. So I wrote a lengthy essay on my opinion in this matter, that I considered my works copyrighted and would not tolerate it being submitted to turnitin(whenever you check a paper there, that paper is automatically included in their database forever). He was sympathetic towards my beliefs. I think everyone threatened with turnitin(except of course idiots who are plagiarizing) should take this approach, and stop turnitin from profiting illegally from our papers.
Another problem is re-use of reports. If you give a paper on Sports Marketing to your gym teacher(I write reports for gym because I don't take it) and to your Economics teacher, and they both check it, it will come up as completely plagiarized.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Oh Man, that sounds like a horrible job. After four years as an English major, you COULD NOT PAY ME enough money to write more English papers.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
I'm forced to do that same sort of thing everday at work. You get used to it and some of us get very good at it.
"Why not just read the material, I can hear you asking. Well, because I'd get a much better understanding of the text. I never missed an A on our in-class midterm and final exam essays doing this, even though I actually never cracked the original material in at least two cases. I often found that I understood the work better than classmates who had only read the work. No one has been able to convince me yet that it's somehow more valuable to slug through Nietzsche word by word, one of the most misunderstood philosophers of all time, without at least first getting some idea of what he was saying first."
Problem being is you did the crime (Re: plagerism) by not doing the time (reading the assigned source material and passing off others ideas as your own. Having said that, at least you read something but where you ethical.. heck no. If you don't read and tackle the source material itself you can't say that you made an informed idea of your own as opposed to parroting others. Now the really interesting thing is, many professors and TA's do the same and if you look for tell tale signs you will know.
I don't think copy and paste is wrong thing, as long they do it from respectable sources and mention the source.
You can't expect "new" work from freshmen in college, that's not realistic. In research papers things are written in a compact and clear format, so why change that, just let them site their sources and let them copy a good sentence before they make a mess of it. And all scientific work is based upon evaluating previous work, so I don't think sitation is bad.
At my university they expected 1/3 to 1/2 max. to be sitations, and this to make sketch of the research theme. The rest of the essay had to be your own remarks and comments on what is known today. That's a realistic approach to things.
I had to use turnitin.com for one of my required classes. It's not horrible, but im not the one copying :)
Well let me tell you a true story in college we were reading Tess of the Durbivills (SP?) and the professor was a big fan of microanalysisation of the book. So we took the hole semester analyzing every paragraph and sometimes every sentence in a chapter. When every little bit has a meaning then the hole point of the major story is loss. Because there is so much depth that the major story lost all meaning.
Now after we finished the book and looking back on my notes there seems to be a lot of interpretation that just doesn't fit the rest of the story and should be taken at face value.
A lot of people do this to the Bible as well they choose a small bit and analysis it with out taking it in context of the rest of the bible. I remember getting some paper in the door from a baptist church trying to convince me that following an other Christian church will lead me hell. But the paper just had random sentences from the bible dealing with hell. They weren't even in complete sentences. I am a religious man but I have issues with people to point to the bible and pick out a line and go "See its there so it must be right!" Wile other religions take a more intellectual approach to it and explain the meaning in context of the entire bible, as well as recovered history from the erra.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Its funny reading through these threads and realizing that this is the same educational system that gave us our "fine" examples of business leadership we've been watching fall. One by rotten, dishonest one.
The leaders of Microsoft, HP, Enron and Tyco and lets not forget about WorldCom were noted for their resourcefulness during their student years!
This is unlikely to change while our economy and culture is measuredbe accumulated wealth - whatever the cost!
Just another view from the fringe.
Alot of the reason why plagarism or essay buying happens is because the students didn't want to take the class in the first place. Why should engineers be forced to take English classes if the student has absolutely no interest in the subject and doesn't come out of the class any better than he came in (being forced to read several books and write lots of essays does not make a better student, the student has to be interested to begin with and find something new in the course)?
I'm not going to sit here and call Shakespeare or Mark Twain useless morons with nothing useful to say. There is plenty of value in literature, but don't force it down everyone's throat and the cheating would hardly be the problem it is now!
At least in college, the professors teaching the English classes were serious enough about their work that they could talk about their subject with authority and insight. In high school, my English teachers were just mindless idiots with 'Education' degrees who read stuff out of the teacher's editions books and took cirriculum straight out of these books (which included tests, quizzes, etc) with absolutely no real knowledge or authority on the topic.
In which the only grades are two exams, 5 short papers and a final term paper. THe content is Contemporary Criticism in Social Sciences so pop quizzes and 'team projects' are out of the question. Our department has a strict rule against extra credit assignments unless said assignment is offered to the whole class. I do not offer extra credit. Here's the deal: I never have a problem catching cheaters especially on the term paper. Why? Because I use the short papers as a diagnostic tool. If Tom Fratboy tries to fuck me with a downloaded paper, I have 5 shorter examples of his writing style with which to compare it. The proposal for the paper is a short bibliography on the subject (15- 20 sources, none allowed from the Web -- you gotta go to the library). The paper is due 3 weeks before the end of the term, so I have plenty of time to grade them. I have nailed 4 cheats in the past year (out of 22 students) all of whom BTW where members of the same fraternity. Once you get the reputation of someone who can't be fooled, then either they straighten up or stay away from you classes. There is a reason these people major is psych and business. The classes are cattle calls and can't be managed like small courses. This is a good reason why class size matters when choosing a college or evaluating a university's graduates.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
This one time he was helping some students with their code, and was impressed how they had done it.
That is, until he realized it was his code! Apparently someone had stolen his code from when he had taken it and kept it archived for later.
I like how many of my professors have stated they will use turnitin.com, which basically is basically forcing students to allow their work to be profited on by others, but the same professors claim their lectures are copyrighted and anyone caught sharing lecture *notes* will be sued!
Academia doesn't want people profiting off of their work (which is fine, under the law), but hey're more than happy to force students to work under differing standards by allowing turnitin.com to profit off of their work.
How the hell did you get to college if you can't even spell "whole", or "while", correctly?
I bought papers often. It saved me time, allowing me to work, so I could pay for the degree.
Would I do it again? Probably not. I'd be wary of another kid submitting the same paper.
There is another aspect to that, of course. One of my professors, Scott Nicholson, discussed the problem on CNN. I thought there was something about it on the website, but I couldn't find it in a quick look this morning. Anyway, he did a small piece discussing how little of a phrase one actually needed to find matches on the web. Four or five words is often enough.
He took a poll in one of my classes about turnitin.com and other sites. The students were overwhelmingly against it. Not because we're cheaters, but because we agree with the McGill student who fought the system. Many of us, oddly enough, consider turning in papers to a service who will keep it on file a copyright violation.
Dr. Nicholson's solution, and that of many others in our school is to use stepped assignments. If there is a large paper due at some point in the semester, we have to submit paper proposals by a given date. For some, we need to have outlines or a short presentation for the class at a later date. Most professors will allow students to submit papers for critique in advance of the due date. All of this is to not only make it more difficult for someone to buy or obtain a paper from somewhere, but also to help the students plan and work on the assignment over the semester rather than putting it off until the last minute.
And then, if necessary, there's always the Google trick.
I checked out Google Answers(where you pay Google to have some research done) the other day. In their examples section under $150 examples there are a couple of questions like: Describe with references and annotations etc the relation between woman and her child. A pretty comprehensive answer then follows and the person who asked the question then responds with a thank you, now I have everything I need to answer this question for that subject of my masters degree.
Doesn't seem right to me that Google should be using this for promotion material.
Freedom of speech doesn't come with bandwidth.
Actually I did get away with a copy-and-paste paper. I reworded a lot of things, but the fact of the matter is, paper = you-can-paste-it-into-google. Ahahaha.
My other car is first.
These are just the ways I've actually had teachers ensure that students read the material. I could probably think of a dozen more if say, oh I don't know...it was MY JOB. What exactly are we paying teachers for if they can't solve this fairly simple problem?
My dad's a professor at UT-D, so I can take a quick stab at this. What you're probably not paying them for is the amount of time it takes to grade all of those papers, to the level that you're requesting. After all, you're talking about the teacher reading, comprehending, and uniquely marking a couple of hundred papers for every one that the student has to do. All of this typically done on their own time. Some teachers may want to dontate their evenings to this kind of project. Others may work for schools that can offer the kind of grading support that they need (although in that case its harder for them to answer the student's questions about comments on their paper, no?). But most are trying to do a reasonable job for a reasonable salary, and still have a life at the end of it. Just like most of us are.
I often found that I understood the work better than classmates who had only read the work. No one has been able to convince me yet that it's somehow more valuable to slug through Nietzsche word by word, one of the most misunderstood philosophers of all time, without at least first getting some idea of what he was saying first.
In a low level class, you may be right. Still, you're never going to get a "+4 Insightful" on any of your papers either - at least, not a legitimate one. Sometimes (although I will concede pretty rarely) going into a work like that without too many preconceived notions will allow you to make a leap of understanding of your own - the difference between being able to pass a test on how to drive a stick, and how to drive one in San Francisco without worrying about it. Of course, that depends if your reason for taking philosophy is to get an understanding, or to get an A. And that's another discussion entirely.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Our school uses TurnItIn.com but also has an opt-out option that involves extra work. The alternate option doesn't seem worth the trouble though.
It's been almost a decade ago, so I guess I can admit it now.
Somehow my name got passed around various chat rooms. It became known in some circles that I was not only a literate old guy but also enjoyed, shall we say, highly personalized verbal interaction with young ladies. Almost out of the blue (I have my suspicions about the origin of this first transaction but the story isn't germane here), I got an email asking me for assistance with a paper and offering a trade. The first transaction went very well for both parties. The word spread. For a couple of years, a substantial minority of all the English papers submitted by female students at a certain small, prestigious east coast liberal arts college were written by me.
Eventually I started turning down work from the rising percentage of young women who waited till literally a day or two before an assignment was due to call me. I simply can't turn out quality work that fast. They got pissed and badmouthed me to their friends. The work fell off. Since all my clients were at that single location, my little hobby just sorta dried up. I moved on to other outlets for my creativity.
It was fun while it lasted.
Well let me tell you a true story in college we were reading Tess of the Durbivills (SP?) and the professor was a big fan of microanalysisation of the book. So we took the hole semester analyzing every paragraph and sometimes every sentence in a chapter. When every little bit has a meaning then the hole point of the major story is loss. Because there is so much depth that the major story lost all meaning.
Hmm. You'd make a better impression - and I wouldn't mention this except that we're discussing college level English courses - if you used the word whole instead of its homonym hole.
Just a pedantic thought. Now we can cue the masses who will undoubtedly point out a typo that I made, keeping the chain alive...
As for your original point, I would say that the kind of analysis that you're talking about can be both useful and enlightening. However, I do agree that it will not help you understand the subject matter - it is useful instead to understand the author's art of writing. Both that kind of analysis and the holistic subjective analysis of the work have their places, although they are often confused, even by teachers.
Just MHO of course.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
How many of you have ever helped or been helped by a boyfriend/girlfriend? I know of several instances of advanced degrees that were really earned by significant others. (It only seems to be possible in soft subjects, like English or Social Sciences.)
Love makes people do strange (and unethical) things.
I once wrote all of the essays for a g/f in a college-level English class. I was proud of them. They were really good - too good. One time, her laziness saved her from being caught: she skipped a class after having turned in one of my best efforts, and, luckily, therefore missed having to read it aloud to the rest of the class. I'd put too many words in that she didn't know and couldn't pronounce properly. The close call told me I had to dumb my stuff down a bit.
How the teacher never caught on, I'll never know, though it may have had something to do with how hot she was. There are certainly many ways to catch this kind of thing (as the above discussions show). He gave her an A+ and a glowing recommendation that helped her to transfer to a better college. I felt bad about aiding and abetting. That g/f is long gone, but I believe her lack of a good foundation in English eventually caught up with her (I'm now married to someone who'd not have needed nor would have sought such help).
becomes the primary goal when "no child gets left behind." Now I know it is non-politically correct to say this, but not everyone is college material. Back in the day, college was intended for the cream of the intellectual crop. Now it's been watered down to job training and high school remediation. Everyone wants a college degree. Is it mere happenstance that the rise of grade inflation on the part of the teachers and cheating on the part of the students coincided with swarms of people enrolling in college?
I think you have a lot of good points, and having taught for almost ten years (mostly college freshmen), I've used some of the techniques you mention.
However, let me play devil's advocate here. I was an instructor for four different schools during my teaching career, and two of those schools would never have supported me in calling my students on the carpet in this manner. Why? Money, of course.
In one instance, I was asked to pass a foreign student who couldn't speak English. Since I was teaching basic grammar, I had a small problem with that and refused to give him the C he needed. Guess who wasn't asked to renew her teaching contract.... At this particular college, foreign students were considered "gravy;" they were brought there and virtually guaranteed a pass because they were paying obscene amounts of money. So much for academic integrity.
In another case, I was told to let a person retest because she didn't like her grade. Never mind that she just didn't study. She wanted an A, and she was determined to keep testing until she got it. My immediate supervisor accused me of not being a good teacher because I didn't want her to "succeed." Yes, I guess success means getting the grade you want, whether you've done the work to deserve it or not. That time, I turned in my resignation.
I realize there are a lot of teachers out there who just don't care any more, but remember that often administrators push teachers into giving away grades, overlooking cheating, etc. There are a lot of problems in the education system and no easy fixes that I can see.
Visit my serial fiction site at www.cornerscribe.com
I'm sure we've all plagarized somewhat, at somepoint in our lives, and in fact, I committed the most obscene plagarism back in high-school, I was utterly surprised that I got away with it. And then, a second time.
So, grade 9... the class is given an assignment to write an auto-biography. I felt with my life experiences up to that point, I really didn't want to do that. I explained this to the teacher, and he said, "OK. I'll dig up another assignment for you." And so he did. This one, a grade 10 advanced assignment, where I was to write a children's story.
Enter Stephen King.
I was reading the third installment in the Gunslinger series, entitled The Waste Land. And inside this tome of a book there's a little children's story (actually, quite large, when you hand-write the whole thing out). Well, wouldn't you know it, while watching Braveheart, I copied the thing word-for-word. It's called "Charlie the Choo-Choo", so I drew a quick Thomas-esque picture of Charlie, and handed it in.
Came back with 100%!
Then the next year, when I was actually in grade 10 advanced English, I paraphrased Charlie, and wrote Charlotte the Chevy, about a 1957 Chevy car.
Only scored 95% or so on that one, for some reason. Must have had some bad grammar or something. *shrug* That, or with the plethora of other student's papers to compare it to, it didn't stack up to much creatively.
All through the remaining 3 years of high school (in Ontario, we used to do 5 years of school) I was constantly nervous that the two teachers I had cheated would approach me on it. It never happened, but shit, that'll be the last time I do that. For sure.
Kids have always been sly. I know I was a sneaky little bastard. The internet just gives a lot more options for this sort of plagarism.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I have an old university email account. I never cease to be amazed at how much of the spam is for mail order college degrees.
I personally don't believe in writing papers. Most things in this world are multiple choice so I prefer classes whose only exams are multiple choice tests. Hell, my certification exams were even multiple choice! Essays are bullshit. Luck is all you need in this world to succeed.
Speaking as someone who actually read Ulysses, I think actually taking the time to read the book actually makes you LESS able to write an intelligent essay. I sure as hell had a better idea of what the book was about before I read it.
I thought it was just me, but then I ran accross this guy who described reading Ulysses as "...like having a rib ripped out of my body, being beaten with it, raped with it, and then being forced to eat it," which about sums up my feelings for it.
In conclusion, if there are any schoolchildren out there, there is no course of academic plagarism whose punishment is worse than actually having to read Ulysses! For gods sake, don't let it kill again.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
While grading final papers for the semester, my wife (an English professor) caught a plagiarist in her class and was inspired to pen the following:
Sentence impressive
but makes no sense. One moment --
Google has caught you.
Why bother? Pick Finnegan's Wake as your research subject, and then just write a thousand random words in stream-of-conciousness fashion as your 'research'. You're guaranteed an A, since no-one on this planet has any clue what the book is about (including Joyce, I'm willing to bet).
I didn't even bother reading your whole post. I read a few key sentences and I can easily classify it as a standard "When *I* went to things were BETTER!" post.
Whatever man - not everyone attended some private school. When I went to high school, I could have gotten away with bloody murder if the Internet was around. By the time I was a Senior, the WWW was getting there but it was still infantile and you couldn't fine *anything about everything* like you can now.
As it was, I took plenty of books and copied the text verbatim to my papers and did fine, if I was late doing the paper.
If anything, tech has allowed the teachers to be able to spot a cheater more easily then before because students have always copied from encyclopedias, papers, and books - the source may be different now is all.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I block turnitin.com and a number of similar spiders from my sites for the simple reason that they eat my bandwidth for their own profit. They're not a search engine sending me traffic... I gain *nothing* from the transaction, but I have to bear the cost of it. Yes, it's a trivial cost, but so is the cost of each individual bit of spam. Same principle.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Writers - most writers, anyway - don't live in a vacuum. Everything written has as a subtext all that has been written previously.
Some works in particular were very influential and resonate throughout all the literature that follows.
Consider sitting down to write a book about star-crossed lovers from feuding families - impossible to do without thinking of Romeo and Juliet, and all the subsequent riffs on Romeo & Juliet.
Hell, even Billy Shakespere wasn't immune from this - consider how much of his work is based on historical occurence, mythology, and folk tales.
If you don't read these works, then you won't recognise them when they are quoted, re-interpreted, or otherwise riffed on in later works. It would be like watching the Simpsons or Family Guy without knowing any of the cultural references - most of the stuff there would go right over your head.
The study of literature is in many ways a study of the _history_ of literature. You can't really understand modern works unless you have been exposed to earlier ones.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Especially since in high school kids do not have access to cliff notes or spark notes ;)
Back then, I read only books of interest to me (Ender's Game) not those that did not (The Scarlet Letter). English teacher's are well meaning but are fairly easy to fool. The first thing you do in writing a paper is say that the book epitomizes the prevailing thought of the time or represented "fill-in-the-blank" during a transitional period in "country-it-was-written-in"
I also found comparing any classic book to "The Great Gatsby" was effective.
Then throw in buzz phrases like "paradigm shift", "curious amalgam", etc. and you have got yourself an A paper.
We had to write a paper on a song by Bessie Smith. 2 hours later, I composed the entire paper without doing more than a google search worth of "research."
Not only did I get an A, the teacher suggested that I join the humanities because I "got it".
It shows that how you write is more important than what you write
Boo humanities, yay engineering!
--Joey
But the turnitin bot spiders my site regularly, so anyone copying one of my book reviews now is likely to get into trouble.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
First off, I'm tired of grading methods at universities. I've seen grades determined by 2 or 3 multiple-choice tests. Or a project and 2 multiple-choice tests. The classes were Assembler and Systems Analysis & Design, coincidentally. Now, if you have a good understanding of the concepts and methods studied in this type of class, you can still come away with a B or C if you can't memorize things that have no real bearing on the field of study. My assembler class didn't require you to be able to write any kind of program. This is what a class on programming in a language should cover at a bare minimum. Anyway, a student could easily pull off an A paper in such a class while otherwise maintaining a C for the course. Such students are often the subject of much scrutiny due to the difference in grades. If such a student were to write a paper on a subject, release it to the public domain, and ask a site to offer it two hours after the paper was due, it would be quite easy to make the teacher believe it was copied, despite its release date. A law student planning on becoming a shyster could then claim slander/libel for knowingly tarnishing his/her permanent record without doing sufficient research to prove that the paper was copied, for example by finding a paper that wasn't available before the paper was handed in.
It wouldn't be honest, but what would you expect from a law student?
As a grad student in mechanical engineering, I admit to a bit of homework "collaboration" that was shady at times during undergrad. Working with others in study groups was encouraged, but every now and then, your group would hit a question that nobody there knew how to answer. Usually the solution was to see the prof, but sometimes time constraints prevented this or the points/effort ratio wasn't worth it, and we'd just find an old homework or ask around.
I offer the suggested definition of cheating as trying to find some advantageous way to find the answer to a question you otherwise can't answer. If every question is answered this way, you do yourself a huge disservice. However, in small doses, this definition of cheating develops socail/intellectual networks, creative problem solving, research skills, and time management.
Like many things (all?) in life, cheating is a grey area. It's easy to say cheating==bad, but that doesn't allow for the real world where time and effort have value, and not everyone can be an expert in every subject.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
I've looked at these sites just to see the quality of writing of the papers they have available (often looking at sample papers they provide as an indication of what the rest of their collection will offer) and there is no way you could use these papers at a major university (or at least not mine).
Professors here rarely assign papers that lack specificity. I've never been able to write "What did you think about Mansfield Park" type papers before - topics are usually several paragraphs in length, center on *very* specific topics within a book, and always want you to relate your paper to specific things we've discussed in our discussion sessions.
Maybe I am just limited by my experience at my school... do students at other schools actually turn these papers in as-is?
What? Firstly, it's "entrepreneurship". Secondly, no it's not; it's "enterprise". I don't usually complain about spelling so you should ignore that part, but "entrepreneurship" is the single most irritating word in the English language (including "blog"). Yes, I know, it's off topic and pretentious and you can feel free to ignore me but I can't let that word slide.
Why is anything anything?
I see three related stories, but hardly the same one, especially since the NY Times article linked to was published yesterday.
As a grad student, I can say that the papers I've gotten that were stollen stuck out like a sore thumb because they are generic and repeat the same claims that have been said a million times. They are often so generic that they could apply to anything. Let's face it, if a student is too lazy to write their own essay, it is unlikely that they will bea able to tell a good essay from a bad one.
On the other hand, I work in an field where the students are usually actually interested in the topic and because my research involves the internet (and I am nearly always better at doing resesarch on the internet than they are) they don't cheat too much (or at least they are so good that I haven't caught more than a handfull!).
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Since the University OWNS the internet connection most of these kids use to cheat, can't they catch the bulk of them with nanny software at their own firewall?
"let along understand enough"
I bet I know someone who doesn't do a lot of writing...
It's been 17 seconds since you hit reply
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It seemed that in my classes some professors were able to make it hard enough to cheat that it would almost always be much harder than not cheating, and not just in courses whree you write a lot of essays.
Aside from making sure the students really do understand the material and aren't just regurgitating processes, I think this is the true value of the three question, five hour exam.
I'm wondering if that reporter really wrote that article on plagiarism himself, or if he hired one of those people who write papers to do it for him! And how about the guy who wrote the reference to it in Slashdot? And how do you know anything here is original? Come to think of it, most of the stuff here probably isn't original anyway...
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Having ghost-written papers for a Masters Degree candidate (in English lit no less) and seeing each one of them get A's. While the student's own efforts were B+ at best, only supports my theory that stupidity and incompetence is rather rampant among higher ed students. Oh, and the kicker here, the student is working toward a thesis about selling term papers to other college kids(as in its a legitamate thing), some sort of 'term-papers-for-hire" thing, and appearantly they aren't alone. I frankly don't know why this wouldn't get someone thrown out on their ass.
Why not just have open book exams with good questions?
A book report is far from research and long term thought, even for a big book.
One of my projects was "Design a suitable braking system for a Grand Am".
Everyone got different cars, and it was a realistic challenge. Even if you measured the brakes on the car you would have to justify that they were properly sized and do the supporting work anyway.
If you did the project, you can answer a similar question in an exam in a few minutes.
I'm sure that you'd want your Doctor, Lawyer, or Airline pilot to say "Don't worry I googled how to do this."
Finding the information is easy, using it isn't.
Most of my exams were open book, half the class failed out because they couldn't apply it.
How many job offers hinge on an "English Lit 101" score anyway? And if you're really worried about GPA you shouldn't be studying a subject in which your score depends on a teacher's judgement...in my opinion: if you take the course, enjoy it and disregard the score or audit it. If you're in it to compete, find out in advance how it is graded and decide if it's a broken system to begin with.
At some point in high school I realized that the skills kids learned for themselves were more important than the knowledge in the books - and sad to say, the people that were successful in high school through cheating or using study guides were likely to be more successful in work life than the kids with their studious flash cards and study groups. Think of the ladder jumpers at your workplace - it usually involves a lot of backstabbing and laying claim to other people's work.
There's also the question of sites like http://www.bookrags.com/, which have mostly accepted stuff like Cliffs Notes, but also essays and essay editing. The thing is, if a student spends hours cobbling together and rewriting other people's essays, they're probably learning useful skills--different from the ones intended, but not too different from a heavy research paper. Just a thought.
Tess of the Durbivills (SP?)
Man. Just think, if you had an internet connection, you could just look the spelling up.
Is this an example of laziness, inability to use research materials, or both?
When you turn in a 20 page paper with 100+ footnotes the bloody site, used to at least, gives you a horrible score and thinks that it is a "bought paper". At least it shows the student the pieces that it thinks have been copied and it is very obvious what had happened. But still, is this not just creating more work for Teaching Assistants who are already not paid enough for the grief that I gave them?
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan
teachers stink!!!1!!11!
I recently finished Crime and Punishment. I think that was the first book I've honestly read the whole way through. Up to that point, I would use sparknotes quite liberally, which worked out fine, but doesn't contribute to any *personal* satisfaction.
"In America, you can always find a party. In Russia, party always finds you."
Yet when's the last time your saw logic or philosophy (which is just applied logic) mandated?
These were required subjects in my college curriculum. Logic was a 3 semester set of courses, while general philosophy was only 1 semester, as I recall. All of them fell under the "Philosophy" dept. name and umbrella, but they mostly focused on logic, argument, proofs, etc, etc. The general philosophy class was more of a history type of class.
Admittedly, this was for a computer science degree. The engineering degrees had slightly different requirements. I think they had only 1 semester of logic required, except for EE which required 2.
This was late 90's, BTW.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You're willing to build up an "immense collection" of other people's papers, skim them, synthesize the pieces and bolt them together like an origami Frankenstein, but not willing to READ THE DAMN BOOK(S) AND THINK FOR A WHILE? Seriously. It's easy. If you're really lost, look up some published scholarly papers on the subject and use them to give you ideas. THEN CITE THEM.
As many people have discovered over the years, synthesis is much easier than actual work. You don't even need to be coherent, really, you just need to sound like you have a point.
I agree that it's easy to know the material and simply write the damn paper, but that requires thought, and to a lot of people, thought isn't easy. Don't ask me why, because I don't understand it either. But it's true nevertheless. People will go to great lengths to avoid actually thinking about something class related. Why? Because thinking isn't easy for them. They don't do it a lot, I guess. Many people, I've noticed, have the notion that they cannot think, and so don't even try. I'm not going to psychoanalyse them back to sanity.
In the humanities, as long as your argument (you do have an argument, right? as in a thesis statement?) holds water and is even remotely logical and grounded in the book, you're golden.
Hah! In the humanities, it's not about whether you have an argument or not. It's about whether it sounds like you have an argument or not.
One of my favorite classes was my English Lit class. I never even read the books for that one. The tests allowed you to use the book itself as a reference during the test (for quoting purposes) and basically consisted of writing a couple of essays on topics given by the prof. He'd provide like 6 topics, you choose 2, then write a quick paper using quotes from the book to support the position. If you know how to write an essay, this was absolute cake. Pick the easiest topics to support, then flip through the book picking sections at random. Quick scan for 3 or 4 quotations from various parts of the book that sound like they support your argument (doesn't matter if they do or not), which you copy down. Then you write the essay, inserting the quotes as needed. Remember, the prof is reading hundreds of papers here and is grading you quickly. As long as you sound good and have some obvious quotes in there, you get an A. If it's read by a student assistent, even better, as they probably don't know what the book is about anyway. Never read any of the material in that class, got the highest grade in the class. Prof. appearantly read one of my papers citing it as a great argument (so I heard, I skipped class that day), and I had simply pulled it out of nowhere with not one clue what the story was about.
I admit that I did get nervous on the final exam, which required a lot more essay writing, so I did some scanning of the books for like an hour before I went in, and wrote down several good quotes which could be read to support a wide range of positions. Remember, it's not what the book is actually saying, it's how it sounds and how you spin it. How it sounds is independant of the meaning behind it, and how you spin it is in your essay writing. This is the essence of the synthesis approach: to create something new from other things, especially without caring what the context of those other things may be.
Is when a Prof thinks that the work is too high quality to have been submitted by university students. My prof assumed that my work had been copied directly from a textbook.
I didn't go to University until I was 26, having worked as a software development consultant for 8 years right out of highschool.
Having actually written many reports, briefs and mounds of documentation, I had learned more about writing than first year kiddies. The only thing that saved my bacon the day the Prof thought I was cheating, is when I engaged him in a very thourough conversation about the subject (Chemistry) and demonstrated that not only did I actually understand the current assignment, but I could articulate it very well.
But, it could have easily turned the other way. He didn't have anyplace to check the text, but if he had pressed the issue, then what?
I think in the future, students may be required to either (a) do the work in class [NOT LIKELY] or (b) submit notes and outlines along with their papers. -- Troublesome, 'cause I tend to do my thinking on the keyboard, and I don't generate useless extra paper.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
I remember doing peer reviews in Composition I... I'd have much rather read a purchased/downloaded paper rather than the garbage that my peers had written. Spelling errors, first person (analytical paper), unbalanced evidence, grammatical errors, etc...
Just glad I'm not an educator... Kindof sad that meeting educational requirements is like paying someone to mow your lawn or wash your car. Then again, I remember when paying radio stations to play your songs (RIAA), bribery of public officials (lobbyists), and other things were morally wrong in the court of public opinion.
An even better solution -- make them take physics!
I'm joking, of course; I believe learning how to write is very important, and that it would be difficult to teach someone this skill without making them prepare essays.
On the other hand, maybe something can be borrowed from physics. In the classes I took, homework questions were varied enough that one could usually find near-solutions on the internet, but adapting those solutions to the numbers and situation actually assigned took a lot of work. Let's assume though one managed to find all the homework solutions. Then, come exam time, there would be problems. (Such exams would requiring five problems in three hours, or some similar ratio).
I think the answer to the plagerizing problem (beyond watching students for unusual jumps in gpa, or if you know the student's writing, unusual variations in style) is to use more exams. It isn't fun, but it remains much harder to cheat in a supervised environment with only a paper and a pen in front of you.
Back in 1996, I had to do a paper for a weed-out course Political Science on gun control.
:)
:)
Being the good student, I attacked this paper with vigor, and spent about a week on it, gathering statistics, charts and whatnot. I scored an 'A' since it was overkill for a Freshman/Sophomore course.
Well, I was a C.S. major and the web was just starting to hit full stride, and I heard this commentator talking about a web site called 'School Sucks' (www.schoolsucks.com) which gathered research papers for people to download.
"What a novel idea!", I thought.
So I submitted my Gun Control paper to it, along with my email in case anyone had any problems with it. HEY! I spent a lot of time on this paper! I didn't want it to go to waste! tee hee.
For over 5 years later, about once every week, I got an email from someone who used it, thanking me, and some even adding to it, much like an open source project.
All told, I guess my little research paper led to over 200 A's, and made a lot of people happy.
Was good fun.
++Om
As an instructor, what I usually do is make the paper assignment so specific that a stock paper bought off of the internet is easily detected as such (e.g., I concoct hyopethtical situations that they must use the learned material to address). While they could still get away with paying someone else to write the paper, it discourages many forms of plagiarism. It also helps just to be very explicit about what counts as plagiarism - sadly enough, many students still don't understand WHAT constitutes plagiarism (and WHY it's a bad thing).
IMHO my time at university I would be swamped with writing research papers and whatnot I always 'skimped' on the thick books they'd assign for me to read, I always looked at the table of contents read the chapters that would make good arguments and wrote my paper without reading 80% of the book. It was ridiculous the amount of work I recieved. There's just no humanly possible way to 'read it all', I think people at the universities or whoever is doing the curriculum needs their friggin heads read. I suspect many students do the same thing.
I think if the university professors themselves could give the students a more manageable workload they wouldn't want to cheat, especially for those that are cash strapped. Look into the causes of why such things are occuring and you'd be surprised that some students would like to do the work but they don't have the time to do it in.
I'll second that! How many more comparitive literature people do we really need these days? It's not like they have many job prospects or much to really contribute to society at large.
Space for rent, inquire within
It's "plagiarize", you know.
Its a given that many students and even professionals with take shortcuts. Professors are somewhat lazy and just ask for the finished paper to be turned in at the end of the term crunch. They should request more immediate products such as outlines and reference lists at earlier times. Or have students critue a single source. Or have students re-write other student's papers. Of course, all these modified methods can be cheated, but a more energetic professor could keep one step ahead.
Another method picking of speed is called "active learning". Something as simple as pop-quiz questions in the middle of lectures and using audience voting gizmos fro Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Or more involved web-based learning. More students will pay attention in lectures if a significant fraction of the grade is the pop-quiz. Of course students will find ways to cheat on pop-quizes too.
MIT switched its freshman physics to an active learning format, mainly to help reduce the 12% failure rate in this required course. You had brains who could breeze through high school classes suddenly unable to cope with the discipline of a college course. It three years to figure out the best techniques of active learning and the new course is much more expensive to teach. However the flunk was cut by 2/3rds. Plus professors in advanced courses are more happy with the stronger physics foundation.
I'm sorry but this is a load of shit and if that's really your work ethic your pathetic. And No your BS isn't the "truth". In life you have choices. Any like the rest of us you can choose to work for a company that doesn't treat you like complete shit.
Cheating and slacking off at a job you don't like isn't the answer. Picking a profession you enjoy and moving to another job is. I pity the company that gets you as an employee. Everyone else is going to have to pick up your slack while you just make life harder for them. Sounds to me like your the one making the work environment shitty for everyone, not the employer. Move on to another job already.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Through buying on-line papers and submitting as their own students learn the very basic skill for each CEO - how to hire a consultant/consulting company to do their job! They also learn
how to avoid being caught!
Enron's boss was a high graded student and McKinley consultant - he knew how to cheat!
Although the iParadigms corporation (the parent company of turnitin.com) likes to scream to anyone who will listen that there's nothing wrong with turnitin.com, the truth is that by using it schools are almost guaranteed to violate both copyright laws and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
When a teacher submits a paper to turnitin.com the paper is archived indefinitely in their database for comparison to future paper submissions. In nearly all cases this is done without the student's knowledge or permission, which violates that student's copyrights. Remember, YOU own the rights to any school papers that you create, even if your only purpose in writing the paper is to fulfill a class assignment. There are certain instances in which a school will require a student to sign an intellectual property rights waver that gives up the copyrights on anything that they create to the school, but this happens almost exclusively with university graduate students - not the undergrads and highschoolers that turnitin.com is aimed at. Turnitin.com is using your copyrighted material for commercial purposes without your permission.
All copyright issues aside, use of turnitin.com also violates FERPA, which is a federal law prohibiting schools from sharing student's records, coursework, or pretty much anything else with anyone outside the school system (like, say, a for-profit corporation) without the student's explicit permission. The entire turnitin.com company is based around violating federal law.
Maybe that's because he bought that post from website.
I was joking just there, but that actually gives me a great business idea... 'Our posts are +5 Insightful/Informative/Interesting guaranteed! Does wonders for your karma, so you can get back to trolling!'
~ Aero
I wonder how often this happens on Google Answers? This questions looks exactly how most computer science assignments are given. Assignments usually want a simple program using advanced knowledge like this one.
= 39 0657
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id
That's not a real fix. I mean, it solves the problem of the person who totally steals an entire paper. What happens more often, however, is that a student will plagiarize snippets of text rather than the entire thing. This quiz method doesn't usually catch them in such instances, as they are somewhat familiar with the text involved from piecing it into their own argument.
http://www.sampletheweb.com
I can see buying these online papers.
We had a teacher that would announce on Monday the book of the week. On Tuesday he would have expected everyone to have read it and talk about it in class. On Thursday we had to have a 5 - 10 page essay about the book done. On Friday he handed them back marked.
I was impressed that he (or his marking aids) could mark 50-100 essays in a single night.
But trying to read a entire book (usually 200+ pages) and write a good 5-10 pages on it in just two or three nights was next to impossible. This was especially the case if you had any other assignments in any other classes.
A little bit of unreasonable demands put upon the students. I could see buying these essays and just re-writing them a bit using info gained from the Tuesday discussion of the book.
Atlas the on-line papers were not around for me to use. Rather a small group of about 5 of use took turns reading the book and writing basic outlines that could be easily pumped up by the classroom discussion for everyone in the group. The teacher may have suspected something but we sat in different areas in the room and some attended the afternoon/morning class and never had much associated before the class started and never really saw each other afterwards.
With unreasonable workloads kids will look at creative ways of getting the job done. In this case it is downloading the paper online.
I do not believe that buying a paper and handing it in as your own is cheating. Some of you may not agree with me. So now I am going to walk you threw some sensible points about how this is not cheating.
The knee jerk reaction to someone buying a paper is to say "Hay that is not right! That is cheating!" Not so true here. Now if I were to give you a math problem that could be solved different ways, and you did not solve the math problem the way I knew how to solve the math problem. Could I accuse you of cheating? No that would be silly. Problems have many many different solutions to them. Right? So if you can view a paper as a problem and solve it a faster, better, and in a different way. Would you be cheating? Hmmm starting to make sense? Keep reading if you do not agree...
Now lets take that work you do all day long at that job you love so much. Everything you do becomes property of your employer the second it gets done. No contracts to sign at the end of a project. No agreement that the end result is 50% yours and 50% your companies. It's all theirs no if and or buts about it. They own it threw and threw. They can legally say it is theirs. Now here comes the good part. So when you order the services of those who write papers they technically work for you now. You are their employer, you now own everything they do in the time you have hired them. The paper is now legally your property threw and threw. You may do what you want with said property. Including turn it in for a grade.
You still are holding onto that last shred of "That's still not fair!" or the "I had to put my time in, so should everyone else!" attitude. Than drop it and read this again.
Just something to think about.
Has anyone considered the possibility that the essay could be out of date?
The model of "read the book - write a paper" is indicative of a society that must derive information from static sources like books. With the advent of electronic communications two things have happened that have modified this paradigm.
First, factual information and opinions can be quickly retrieved from a wide verity of people. Universities that still think that finding information at the library is a critical skill have never seen a search engine. Assignments like research papers deserve to be copied from the 'net because that is where information comes from these days. A better assignment might be a research paper that lists websites and then separates fact from fiction.
Second, long, monolog compositions are no longer in vogue. E-mail and web pages have given us a model of short opinions (take this post for example) followed up with responses. Instead of writing a 20,000 word term paper which simply shows the ability to regurgitate other peoples used up arguments, how about an online discussion. Everybody in class must post a 1 page response to the topic and then respond to 10 others. Students will also be expected to answer some of the responses to their original post and responses with the expectation that everyone write around 20,000 words. (Between 15 and 25 posts total)
This is actually the model for many online courses, but because accrediting agencies are stuck in the sixteenth century it is incredibly hard to get a degree without the worn out "reed the book - write a paper" model.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
I too, was sadly disappointed by college. But after being in the workforce for a few years, I've realized that the challenges in the profession often are far greater than the textbook problems presented in college. I realized a few years ago that going back for a masters was pointless from an intellectual perspective - there's very little in a master's program that I don't already know. Unless I needed a masters for a promotion or career move, there's little point in spending the money.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
There are also "services" for schools that will grade the papers for them. I kid you not, my mother's college does this. So would one service catch the other?
The great thing about turnitin.com is it can be used against the teachers. Just sign up for a trial account and submit your paper to see if you covered your tracks well. The great thing about the trial account is that your paper isn't added to the database of papers, hence you have the same exact tool as the teacher without them ever knowing it. I think the trial account may have a limit of papers you could submit, but what's stopping you from creating multiple trial accounts anyways. Happy cheating!
Lets hack in a little deeper! The real problem is the whole Academic Papers game. Logically if you look at the construct you are required to copy some other paper. You are not allowed to have original thought because you must support it with documentation and not with any thinking. All such papers are by definition a rip off of someone else's papers.
Under such a system I am surprised that students have not figured out that they can synthesize their own "Facts" using the internet. All one has to do is cite a source on the net that they have added to or controlled in some way. The whole Academic system for such is a fraud. Years ago such a paper had value because in copying it by hand or typing it by hand you might have learned something. Today with the high speed cut and paste, this value is all but gone.
The depreciation of college classes and teaching has threatened all of the premices for getting a degree. What a college deploma is at this time is functionally a "Visa Stamp" on the person. The problem is that there isn't even a border check of the Visa stamps much any more and if there is , the value is gone because of all the counterfits and copies running around.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
I wonder how efficient Turnitin is.
The hard and time consuming part of writing essays is not actually writing them, it's to figure out what to write. So my question is, does Turnitin detect me cheating even if I rewrite the paper with my own words, rearranging the paragraphs a bit? Probably not.
Sig Nature
Who said I plagiarized anything? I didn't pass off others' ideas as my own...I had my own ideas based on my understanding of the work through secondary sources.
Also, I wonder if your definition of plagiarism is too strict. Let's assume for a moment that I did push someone else's ideas in my in-class essays, for instance. If I understood that argument and could support it well with evidence from the primary source, and I happened to agree with that argument, what's wrong with putting it forth as long as it's in my own words? Is it plagiarism if there's real understanding behind it?
I think the standard that every viewpoint must be totally original on any particular topic is too stringent. The fact is, even most professors share a common idea when it comes to interpreting a particular work. For thinking similarly and understanding the work/author similarly, are they plagiarizing the first guy to come up with that interpretation?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Students do only what they like the most and "outsource" any other task they doesn't like. This is a very good training for real life: instead of doing something by yourself, you get other better people do the work for you. As long as some students like writing papers (and getting paid for this), everyone is happy.
Now, to be really fair, I want the posibility of cheating in physical education. I can write very good, but I perform very badly at sports.
Anyone think plagiarism checking companies might be secretly owned by a custom term paper writing companies?
Making pre-written cookie cutter papers (their competition) less useful would help them.
Just like anti-virus companies making viruses - create a need for your market.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I suppose I don't disagree that with an unbiased reading of the original work and development of my own interpretation before reading secondary materials could possibly mean I might gain some insight into the work. I suppose that would be more "legitimate" in the educational sense. But when you're in a time crunch, education for the student can be very much like a business...the idea being to get the best understanding of the source material in the shortest period of time. It would be nice to spend days and days reading word by word and pontificating on each subtle nuance of the language used, but not very practical.
Besides, I think you missed a main point of what I said. You're comparing what I ended up knowing to what I could have known had I read the primary source without influence from others' understanding, in a vacuum with no time constraints. What you ought to be comparing is what I ended up knowing to what everyone else ended up knowing about the work (that's what the professors did). Chances are, given the time I had, my understanding would actually have been more limited than it was had I not simply dismissed the original work from my reading list.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
I used to teach history and geography at community colleges, so I am very familiar with this topic. It was easy for me to catch cheaters, but hard to do anything about it. Any college instructor with more than a semester's experience can catch a bad paper. It's hard to describe how I'd know. It was a combination of several things: the information the paper contained, the writing style, and the sophistication of the language. I also was familiar with the writing styles of information sites on the internet (NY Times, Wikipedia, etc.). Catching it was one thing, doing something about it another. Community college administrators uniformly pander to students. The students can appeal just about anything. The most I could do was make them write it over again. Assigning research papers became such a headache, so unmanageable, I finally gave it up. Students absolutely need practice in writing, since we all have to do so much of it in our jobs; but how to give them the writing experience without the hassle of term paper cheating? Lots of essay tests, and when they weren't essay tests, they were short answer tests (fifty words or less), or maybe when I was in an especially bad mood, both! On a completely unrelated subject, community colleges are good for a few things, but a really first-rate college education isn't one of them. Save yourself time and trouble, go to a good four-year school right out of high school.
Berkeley has an online system to find plagurism. It highlights matching strings. I read the research paper "Winnowing: Local Algorithms for document fingerprinting". Unfortunatly it only compares 2 documents, but I suppose you could write a script to automise comparisons. The only new feature in this is comparing a document to a database of fingerprints.
Well, of course the education industry isn't necessarily more or less moral than any other industry based on making money. I wasn't really addressing in my post the corruption (if you want to call it that...it seems a little strong though) in the system itself.
I've done some thinking about this because I the university I attended was a research institution that often rewarded professors for bringing in research funds and wouldn't punish them for being terrible professors. At first I expected nothing but the highest ethical standard of judgment of my professors by the administration...but the more I thought about it, the more I was glad that there was some focus on research money. I realized that it's the influx of money that made all of the good aspects of my college experience possible.
So should you pass a foreign student that can't speak English? In a perfect world, no, but what if such a policy would mean the school simply couldn't afford to hire you in the first place? What if adhering to such a high ethical standard in the marketplace would cause the school itself to have to fold? This might be a case of the greater good (it also might not be...I don't know the details of your particular situation at the time).
I had a Russian lit prof in college that had a standard retest policy for anyone that didn't like their midterm grade in the class. All you had to do was email her with a retest request and you'd be allowed to replace your midterm grade with an essay test. The essay test consisted of one unreasonably long essay and two insanely long essays. She'd email you the topic for the unreasonably long essay on Friday at 7pm and you had until 10pm to email back the result. Then Saturday at 10am you'd receive the next essay topic and you were responsible for sending that one back by 8pm and likewise on Sunday. The length requirements were absolute and would keep you writing pretty much the entire weekend.
Needless to say, the time you had to invest to correct a bad midterm grade was not worth it to most students. The time she had to invest in grading those essays, compared to what the student spent writing them, was not very high.
So, I think the point was that the administration might want you to do x, y, and z, but ultimately you're still in control of the student. If they complain about their grade you can give them that second chance, but just make the workload so insane that they're sorry they didn't just take the fail. Sure you ultimately have to still pass them, but they don't know that. :)
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
That may be why he pushed a law through that took management of the UT endowment from a public, transparent process (that did a fine job) and turned it over to a secret, private company (surprisingly, a major contributor to W's political career!) that churned and burned like a low grade spamming boiler room operation.
by claiming your teachers were all hotties.
This explains why the superior writing and speaking abilities I developed in seminar during my BA Political Science moved me ahead of my comparatively inarticulate peers during and after my BSCS. Jesus, if you're just looking for a trade, try ITT.
I don't see why some conservatives spend so much time grousing about students being molded by commie fag profs. When students are so busy triaging "learning" out of the equation, why worry?
Luke, help me take this mask off
Or perhaps the answer is for the teachers to get together and reduce the signal to noise ratio on the term papers for their subjects by submitting lots of bad term papers. They wouldn't even need to write them themselves, just make it mandatory for all students to submit the term papers to as many of these sites as they can find. The papers get wide exposure so they are easy to find for comparison, the students get credit for the work (theirs or not) and potential plagerizers are forced to think about which paper to copy and how much of it to copy.
That might even solve the problem altogether. If you were a student who plagerized someone else's work, would you want to risk incurring their legal wrath by having to post it as your own work so publically? The legends about the students caught that way might alone be enough to deter such obvious plagerism.
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
With all the practice of outsourcing these days. I see no problem with downloading a term paper or research paper. All your doing is learning how to outsource your work. Seems like everyone is doing that now days.
Throughout my university career I've manage to avoid all english/writing classes that involved writing a paper. If you hate writing things other then i = i + 1, then give it a try! It's not that hard to plan your schedule to avoid it. Yes, I did write that one research paper for a computer science class, but then again it was on a subject that I knew really well and I actually had fun creating it. Book reports?! Yeah right....
At least here in NL that happens as well. Don't know about other countries.
Let me tell you a little story. A girl I used to know was an English grad student TAing a class and thought one of the papers she was grading seemed fishy. So, she got her husband's help digging around on the Internet, and sure enough they found that it was clearly plagiarized. She made a note of the URL.
Next class meeting, she waited for everyone to arrive, then wrote the URL on the chalkboard and left the class alone to look at it for 5 or 10 minutes. When she got back, she started the lecture with something like, "OK, first thing I want to talk about today, class, is web sites. I've written the URL of one web site on the board. I'd like to suggest that, if you decide to download a paper from the Internet instead of writing it yourself, you should avoid this web site, because I looked at it and all the papers they have on it are really, really bad quality." Then, she went on with her normal lecture, and of course later turned the student in to the professor.
Well, it would be more effective if you did not tell the students that you were going to do it!!
stealing from one person is plagerism
stealling from many is research
--once the rockets go up - who cares where they come down, that's not my department says Werner Von Brown
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Lucky you, I was subjected to the following:
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
This book bored the hell out of me and I had zero empathy for the displaced Okies. To some extent I felt they deserved their fate for being bad farmers and stewards of the land. I did like the nihilism of the dead baby moses scene, but I'm sick and twisted like that.
Great Expectations - Dickens
Dickens also bores me to tears. Also, the theme here is trite. Anyone who has survived childhood is intimately familiar with the lies about the quality and desirablity of gifts and gifts with hidden prices."
Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
I grant that most people liked Catcher. Personally, I couldn't stand it because it was so disempowering and basically said this is the only possible adolescent experience, one of pain and alienation. I hate "Lord of the Flies" for the similar reasons; the scarlet pejorative of lack of age == immaturity.
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemmingway
Boring allegorical piece with stulted grammer. However, I did like his "Hills like White Elephants" allegorical short story -- go figure.
Also, some godawful Puritan/Salem Witch trials era piece of tripe with a 13 girl narrator -- talk about inaccessable and boring. It wasn't "The Crucible" or "The Scarlet Letter"; I mercifully just can't remember its title.
Not everything from school sucked, though. The teacher who foisted the aformentioned teenage puritan girl angsty rant upon me did introduce me to Agatha Christie via "And Then There Were None". Also some teachers did push the following which I am thankful for, "A Separate Peace", "1984", "Brave New World", "Hamlet", "MacBeth", "A Clockwork Orange", "Catch-22" and "Inheirit the Wind".
Notice the nearly complete lack of genre books? That's the problem I have with the English Liturature Courses. They have no respect for Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery or Horror and no clue about the redeeming virtues of those genres either. When "The Lottery" wins best Fantasy short story of the 20th century, you know there's a problem. Granted "The Lottery" is an awesome story. However, it is not fantasy.
How about some Asimov, Tolkien, Christie or Lovecraft in the curriculum? Or at least some Wells, Carrol, Poe or Stevenson if you want to go old school.
Ah, nothing like not posting as an AC.
Btw, Kiely DID give you a very low grade on that... probably out of pity...and generosity.
I wrote a Groovy script that goes through a text file and does a Google search on all 10-word sequences. It then outputs HTML that bolds and underlines any words for which the Google search returned hits: http://wiki.codehaus.org/groovy/PlagiarismDetector
Random paragraph from Ulysses:
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
If your intellectual snobbery was a rib, I would repeatedly rape you with it, before forcing you to eat it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
My last english professor handed out an essay to my class that the department head had purchased from a very large one of these services. He gave the site a very specific, uncommon topic and said that it should be written at an English 200-level. The result was a laughable paper that wouldn't pass for a high school freshman paper. Don't trust those services to get you a great grade.
Hey i got my B-. Who cares anyway. I get to be GPPA/Honors college so whatevarrr...
:-D
Who is in the 490-level classes, again
My other car is first.
You're right of course, it was spelled hideously incorrectly. It looked wrong when I wrote it, but other things came up and I never came back to check it, I simply submitted the comment and moved on to the crisis. I am a bit of a spelling Nazi myself, so it galls me that I got it wrong - let's keep this to ourselves shall we :)
Secondly: again, correct. Entrepreneurship does not properly convey what I meant, although we don't know that the people who set up the business aren't entrepreneurs. They may well have organised, operated and assumed the risk for the business venture which they set up to provide these services, which makes them entrepreneurs. However, the phrase quite an innovative bit of entrepreneurship would function better as quite an innovative commercial service, or something along those lines.
Thanks for pointing those out, I must have had an off day at the keyboard. It annoys me as well when I come across the hideous language deployed by many people on Slashdot (excluding, of course, those for whom English is not a first language), and I am deeply shamed to have messed up so badly myself.
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
I read their FAQ and looked at their order page. It costs less than $150 for your degree. At those kind of prices, a little creativity to come up with a story about how you took your classes, coupled with the very likely verification laziness. It's probably worth a shot if you don't already have a degree from a known and nationally accredited institution. What the hell, eh? No degree vs. a BS (lol) degree.
Of course when everything goes wrong at the new job, the ensuing smear campaign may blight your reputation enough to prevent you from working in the field again. But that's also not a problem, just get another degree in a different field.
Too busy spending your trust allowance? Still want the respect of an advanced degree? Or, perhaps you're burning out on the home stretch. For as little as $110 per hour, plus expenses and IP royalties if applicable, you may relax and be assured of obtaining your wallpaper.
Custom research, analysis, and final write up, offered in scientific or technical fields excepting any in which the phrase 'qualitative analysis' is taken seriously.
Discrete response please.
Problem: marking schemes. My wife lectures in computing at a British university. Every time she writes a final examination, she has to write a marking scheme that would allow any other lecturer with a reasonable knowledge of the subject to mark the exam and get about the same results. The exam and marking scheme are reviewed by an external examiner as a quality control.
One quickly learns to write the answer first [marking scheme], then the question.
Government funding and political pressure has led to larger classes of less able students. For some reason, machine-marked multiple choice exams are becoming more common.
[Apologies for AC posting]
My main objection was simply that the word "entrepreneurship" is exactly synonymous to the word "enterprise". "Entrepreneur" is derived from "enterprise"--or from their common parent--but apparently is too different for many people to remember the relationship. So someone decided to make a word for "what an enrepreneur does", unaware that such a word already existed. I tend to object to all neologisms that are based on ignorance (e.g. "virii").
Why is anything anything?
Okay people. Let me explain.
The Odyssey was written by Homer 4000 years ago, and is about a famous greek and his trip home. It is a fun and easy read.
Ulysses is by James Joyce, it is almost 700 pages of the most ferociously post modern work ever put to paper and is simultaniously the "Best book ever written" and one of the most hated and feared pieces of modern lit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You are wrong about this. The student is paying lots of good money for a service. The teachers #1 reason for being there is to provide that service. If a student gets a 65% the first time they test, it is the teacher who should get the "D" grade. That shows the teacher did not live up to their end of the bargin. What is the difference between a teacher who inspires students and one that dulls them to death? It should not take a genius to realize teaching is a process where the facilitator of learning, -the teacher-, has to prepare the students to learn. Just like a master chef will prepare a restaurateur to eat, by creating a proper environment, the lighting, the table cloth, the smells, the stimulation of the senses. The customer is at the table with a watering mouth, and can't wait to dig in. A bad teacher is less like the chef and more like the person working the french fryers at McDonalds, who hands you a half filled container with wilted cold fries, and then blames you that your brain could not radiate enough heat to warm them back up. And then you get the worst kind of teacher. One who wants to get back at his/her students because he/she did not have a good life. They are the ones who wish to hand out the same sadistic tests where an 11% correct sets the curve (I have found these kinds of sadists tend to flock to the university physics and chemistry departments, kinda like how foriegn students all live in the international dorm and can say "i'm a virgin" in 52 different languages). Those are the sadists who set a math question value at one point, then take off half a point for not showing enough work, another half a point for a missed decimal point in the forementioned work (not the anwser), and another half a point for using (interchangable) pen/pencil when you should have used the other. That leaves a correct math anwser with a -.5 points out of 1 point.
What should a teacher be? If it was just passing facts, then a book should do the trick just as good as a teacher. But clearly there is something more that a teacher does. If it was just anwsering questions about the book, then there could be chat rooms or on-line forums. But even that is not the same as having a skilled teacher. What the best teachers do is excite and motivate. Just like an NFL or NBA coach does.
As for those on-line papers students can buy, I don't see the harm in them. Chances are the student will want to read the paper before turning it in to make sure there is not a big "Fuck You" mixed in the middle of it, so they are learning something. If a class makes for students who are willing to pay $10 bucks for a paper rather than writing it themselves, that shows the teacher is not fit to teach. Come to think of it, the teacher did motivate the students to do something, to pay money to have someone else go through the teachers discipline rather than seing that discipline as something worth examining. :P
Come to think of it, this discussion reminds me of something that happened to me. I was taking a freshman english class with about 35 students. From looking in the regsitration guide, I could see my teacher was teaching 4 sections. Doing that math, I came to the conclusion that he must have around 140 students. Anyways, back to the point of my story. We had 8 papers due throught the class, each one about 2 pages with the last one up to 8 pages. I noticed that after the first papers were graded, everyone kept getting back papers with simular grades to their first, but with less red markings (even though some people put in great effort to
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I'm not saying all teachers are perfect. You have lousy teachers, just like you have people who are bad at whatever they do. The point is, you also have lousy students sometimes.
Have you ever taught? Some students walk into a classroom with absolutely no motivation to learn. Asking a teacher to be able to motivate each and every student is unrealistic. Is you doctor a bad doctor because he/she can't get you to lose weight, quit smoking, etc.? Well, obviously yes! A good doctor could motivate patients to do what's best for them.
I spent almost ten years in the classroom, and I wasn't one of those sadistic teachers who made passing as difficult as possible. I made every effort to help my students learn -- and pass. What I wouldn't do is give grades away. When I sign off on a grade, I'm certifying that student knows the material. I won't pass off a student who doesn't to the next instuctor or to an unsuspecting employer. It's unfair to them, and it's unfair to the student.
One particular student comes to mind. She turned in an absolutely hideous essay as her first assignment. If there were a grade lower than F, I would have given it to her. I asked her to rewrite it, and she proceeded to explain that she was dyslexic and therefore couldn't be expected to write. I reminded her that she was, in fact, in an English class and writing was mandatory. After several conversations, she redid the essay. She ended up writing every essay more than once, and some three or four times. She came to me at the end of the semester and thanked me because I was the first teacher to expect her to do the same work AND believe that she could do it. I've never seen a student so proud of her accomplishment.
Had I passed her on the first essay, she would never had felt that pride in her achievement, and I would have sent her to an unsuspecting employer.
Yes, you have bad teachers, but you have good ones too. Don't lay the blame for every unmotivated student on the instructors.
Visit my serial fiction site at www.cornerscribe.com
I dunno why everwhere in american society, when someone pays for a service they can expect to have that service performed, except with teachers. Teachers can intellectualize why they fail at getting the job done. Teachers in bad neighborhoods blame the lack of funding, teachers in rich neighborhoods blame unmotivated students because they have everything handed to them. Everyone has an excuse. But it all boils down to someone paying for a service. For example, if I pay to learn how to become A+ certified in computers, I expect someone who will teach me. The example you give is like someone paying you to upgrade their computer with the newest $300 agp video card, you keeping the money and saying "well, you only have pci, tough luck idiot".
Everyone can be motivated. Everyone. Just like different people learn in different ways, some learn by watching, others learn by listening, others learn by visualizing things in their mind. So why don't teachers cover material in such a way that every learning method is covered? I can't tell you how many teachers I have had who did nothing more than re-read the book back to us during class.
There is a reason people pay for taking classes. They must want to learn. Otherwise they would not pay thier hard earned dollars.
I won't pass off a student who doesn't to the next instuctor or to an unsuspecting employer.
This is the kind of power teachers have. They decide who gets hired and gets the good jobs. I know this is not a part of the discussion, but this is why legacy admissions are evil too.
Don't lay the blame for every unmotivated student on the instructors.
I still think there is more to the art of teaching than being expert in some field. Teachers should have a personality that attracts people and makes them interested in what they are saying. I thought teachers had classes which gave them the skills they need to reach and motivate all the students.
If teachers started viewing thier students as customers instead of students, then I think the education system would be better. Teachers have become like a janitor with a city job. They know they can't get fired. They can miss garbage cans and knock others over, but their job is secure. All they have to do is show up. And it is sad that some teachers do no more than show up.
Oh, about your doctor example. I have a family doctor that I have used for a long time. Everytime I go there I get weighed. For the past couple years I have gained weight. Last time my doctor made notice of it and told me what to start eating and to walk more. Here is the kicker though, my doctor called me two weeks later to see how my new exersize program was going, on her dime. So some do care. Not all doctors have a 10 minute appointments to cram as many people through their practice in a day. Some try and take pride in their job.
One last thing. I hope tenure is eliminated. That is where the problem is. Most great teachers are new ones, who love their discipline and can't wait to tell everyone about what they studied and learned and are expert in. Ask one of those teachers a question and their eyes light up. They invested their lives in it and love it. Now ask a teacher with tenure who will get paid regardless of how well he teaches, and chances are you will get a canned response. At least that has been my experiance. If teachers knew how well they did with *this* class, and every class was *this* class, then they would be more motivated to reach their students.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I think what many of the responses to this story have shown is that many people do not want to learn, they want to pass. They want to get their diploma or degree and get a great job, earn lots of money to pay back their student loans and buy a new car, etc. They don't think that they should have to actually demonstrate that they have learned anything to get those degrees. They're wrong.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.