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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."
This story was already posted three times.
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.'"
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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
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.
Most of the time you don't retain copyright on works you submit for assesment (Its in the fine print), so in all likelyhood its no longer your copyright but the university's, and they can do what they want with it.
Having been a professor for 4 years, it still amazes me to the length that students will go to, and the time they will waste in trying to get out of having to do the work assigned to them!
It amazes me that people bother paying for such education in the first place! I mean, if you're not here to learn, why bother coming?
I also teach, and my solution to cheating is to allow students to bring in 1 sheet of notes to tests. Write anything you want on it. I've noticed that many students spend a lot of time preparing that sheet than actually studying---but while preparing the sheet, they tend to read through the material, etc., and during the exam, tend not to use that sheet ('cause I'd never ask questions that just require a simple right-out-of-the-book answer).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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 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.