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Plagiarism Inc.
Here's an interesting article on the life and times of 24-year-old Jordan Kavoosi, who has made a business of plagiarism. His Essay Writing Company employs writers from across the country, and will deliver a paper on any subject for $23 per page. In addition, his company will get it done in 48 hours, and he guarantees at least a B grade or your money back. From the article: "'Sure it's unethical, but it's just a business,' Kavoosi explains. 'I mean, what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical, and city-approved.'"
I asked Jordan Kavoosi if his business was a scam. If he had failed to pay writers. If his tattoos made him look like a dbag. He sent me a YouTube video response.
... I teared up during his re-enactment of the ending of 300. Frank Miller would be proud.
And in case he decides to take down his brilliant acting resumes (complete with sunglasses) like he did with other videos, here are some mirrors. I
Hilarious article though, well done CityPages. I liked the dialogue with the judge and the story of Kavoosi's tattoos at the end. Clear infatuation with himself, I'd avoid.
My work here is dung.
I don't think I'd call a strip club or porn shop unethical. By some standards immoral for sure.. but what is the ethical violation of a strip club or porn shop?
The ethical implications of this are pretty direct though. You help someone get credentials which they are not qualified for, they become a civil engineer and end up building a bridge that falls on your head, cause someone wrote the paper on "building bridges that don't fall on people" for them.
Obviously that's a much oversimplified and unlikely scenario. And ethical concerns aside, I think this is hillarious. This guy has some stones!
While I'm on my soapbox, I'd like to say I think it's pretty sad that this kind of service is useful. If education was done properly, or specifically if students were evaluated in a meaningful and practical way, this service would be useful to maybe a handful of smart but lazy students.
And you wonder why capitalism is going down the drain when CEO argue like 6 years old ...
Here's an interesting article on the life and times of 24-year-old Jordan Kavoosi who has made a business of plagiarism. His Essay Writing Company employs writers from across the country, and will deliver a paper on any subject for $23 per page. In addition, his company will get it done in 48 hours, and he guarantees at least a "B" grade or your money back. From the article: "'Sure it's unethical, but it's just a business,' Kavoosi explains. 'I mean, what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical, and city-approved.'"
I wonder if they can write 5 point comments for me?
that given Mr. Kavoosi's lack of basic vocabulary knowledge, it's a good thing that he hires other people to write the papers he sells. Someone one who doesn't know what the word 'ethical' actually means would probably have a hard time writing papers that use other large words. Unless, perhaps, they were writing papers for business classes...
Maybe the comment could be worth 5 points, but at 48 hours turnaround time, you'd never get past a +2 informative even over a long weekend.
If you don't specify, though, they write a 5 Funny comment.
While strip clubs might well be unethical, from at least some points of view, the word for this is dishonest.
It's no surprise he conflates the two.
I thought strip clubs were considered "immoral", not "unethical", no?
Sounds like this guy should look up the difference between ethics and morals.
Academic fraud, yes. Unethical, yes. But where's the plagiarism? As far as I can tell the papers are original.
> what about stripclubs or porn shops? Those are unethical...
Not by my ethics.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This sounds like a ghost writing service more than plagiarism. Plagiarism is where you steal someone elses work and take credit for it. Highering someone else to write your academic paper is unethical yes, but plagiarism? If it's an original work... no. It is not plagiarism.
How is a strip club unethical? It may be immoral depending on your view of morality, but it's a legal business that doesn't misrepresent itself. Plagiarism is a lie: it is unethical and probably immoral, depending, again, on your view of morality.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
On second thought, adapting an expression I'd heard quite a few times - "fix your karma before helping others". So my conclusion is that it would be unlikely. Interesting insight though.
I hope this guy isn't one of their essay writers. Porn shops and strip clubs may be seedy, nasty, and often run by unsavory people, and they most certainly are often run in an unethical manner or carry unethical merchandise (and are not my cup of tea), but the concept of a porn shop or strip club itself is not unethical.
Running a shop whose sole purpose in life is to write papers for students to (unethically) pass off as their own work IS most certainly unethical.
They promise at least a B, but with grade inflation isn't a B now equivalent to a D in my day?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
How are porn and strip clubs unethical?
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Probably, but I have a startup that recruits /.ers with moderator points that I pay from people hiring my company to mod down highly rated comments. Find a need and fill it.
Wait, what's unethical about the sex business?
I mean, sure it traditionally attracts the bottom scum of society, but so does the military, construction work, truckers, bars, the dollar store, goodwills, walmart, tattoos, booze, gambling, etc. etc. Where the lower-class are involved you have to keep an eye our for abuse, as it's so fun and easy to abuse the desperate, but there's nothing inherently unethical about it.
When I was in school, I posted copyright notices on EVERY single paper I ever wrote. That was my way of ensuring no one copied my work and allowed me to defend any potential charge that I may have been a plagiarizer myself.
Texts of term papers posted on other sites (whether university or a forum or by a student) are typically copyrighted works themselves, or represent a portion of one.
DCMA, anyone?
Even a handful of violations can send this guy packing.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Ah Jordan. Spoken like a true third-grade dropout!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
In the early 1970s it was just $3.50 a page per Robert Silverberg.
Interestingly I read Dying Inside just last night, and ghost writing class papers is the protagonist's "profession."
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
'I mean, what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical, and city-approved.'
Well, thank you very much for the ethics lesson then, Mr Puritan! Unfortunately, you're wrong: there is nothing with either strip clubs or porn shops (as long as nobody is being exploited, but that's a given anyway and applies to ALL industries). Your business, however, very much is.
Fuck off.
Justifying his own shitty actions with the "everyone else does it" cliche while enabling his clients to avoid accepting responsibility for their own actions.
Talk about epitomizing everything wrong with the world these days.
It is possible to foresee an educational model in which ghostwritten papers are sent straight to the outsourced graders, eliminating the inefficiencies that students and educational institutions bring to the process.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
While this scumbag's business is about 100% pure fail, anybody involved deserves exactly what they get.
I am having a hard time mustering up sympathy for his writers that aren't getting paid on time (or at all.) They knew going in that the entire concept was scuzzy, and it should not come as any sort of surprise that the CEO of this fine example of capitalism is himself a little lacking in the ethics department.
Interesting that there aren't any complaints from customers in that article... I wonder if Mr. Scumbag-in-chief actually has sufficient "boss" skills to avoid hiring lazy employees that would produce plagarized product?
SirWired
Don't know what your ??? step is, but I hope you're making profit ;-)
yeah sure, if you take steroids or you bank your blood, you can win the cycling race or hit the balls harder
but why do people watch sports? because of the thrill of identification with the human being in the physical endeavour. but if its not the athlete doing the performance, just some drugs actually performing, then this undermines the basic premise for why sports are appealing to anyone at all in the first place
likewise, if you hire someone to generate your intellectual output, you undermine the very concept of a university education
why do people want to go to university? to broaden their minds, with the knowledge that success or failure at university is a product of your intellectual output. but if instead you cheat, and succeed, at university, then what is destroyed is the notion and validity of higher education itself. it makes the whole endeavour illegitimate and unappealing, like cheating in sports
sports governing bodies and institutions of higher learning are put in mortal danger by cheaters. if they let these cancers grow, they will find that their reason for being is discredited, and no one will go to sporting events or go to college anymore
either its an honest endeavour, or the endeavour ceases to be appealing or attractive to anyone, and fades as less are willing to support the fakery by sitting in stands or toiling for a diploma
so go ahead and support this asshole, if it is your desire to discredit and destroy the notion of a university education
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You might think so, but not really. There's nothing past A. So while more people might be getting "B" and "A"'s, a "B" is still a "B" and an "A" is still an "A".
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
Mod parent up! (sid?dimethylxanthine-940&plagincid?49052)
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
It's not a bad business idea and I'm not sure you can argue what he does is unethical or cheating. The users of the service are cheating but isn't that what sites like bugmenot, mailinator, and others are about short cutting someones system so we can get personal pleasure without sacrifice. TFA seems to be more about a young knuckle head trying to run a business he neither understands nor is able to run. It almost reads like a warning about the future of business.
Strip clubs and porn shops are immoral, not unethical.
But lots of self-proclaimed "moral" people seem to get kind of confused about that... things are either good or bad and black or white.
If someone is on stage in a strip show, I think we can be sure it's them.
Porn shops, strip clubs, neither unethical or immoral. But lying about who you are, faking and cheating you way through life, possibly getting a position you aren't qualified for and putting lives in danger? Fuck no, that is wrong.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
"In one case, an author asked Kavoosi's crew to write a book to be published in his own name." I'll take a guess. Was it Sarah Palin?
Any professor (or TA) that is more than minimally aware of the abilities of their students should be able to spot a ghost-written paper a mile away. The typical student who hires one is lazy and shows no aptitude whatsoever for the subject matter in class. These students can be sussed out with a simple one-on-one meeting asking them to clarify or expand on some of their ideas. If this short meeting was made a major part of the paper's grade, buying a paper would be a lot less useful since it would still require you to master the subject matter.
I've encountered plagiarized stuff in my professional work and it was trivially easy to spot.
SirWired
You can tell that he is but a child, what kind of repression and ignorance was he raised amidst that caused him to believe his complete lack of honesty and morality can be throw away by attacking businesses with MUCH more integrity than he will ever learn to possess. He must be a christian.
I hear BP is gonna need a new Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure plan soon for the gulf coast... maybe he can write it for them. I mean as long as they turn it in to the EPA on time what could possibly go wrong if no one at BP actually knows what it says or why?
He's writing the current comment for me. So, don't mod this beyond a C (Score 3) or I'll have to pay.
That's right. As long as there's places for grown men to see naked boobies, I'll be damned if anyone tells me what to do...
90% and up = A
80% and up = B
70% and up = C
60% and up = D
Everything else = F
Now? 50% is an F.
And if you give too many Fs, you'll be sued.
I'm not sure I agree with the analogy he presents. At a strip club, you're not pretending to be something you're not; you're just paying for a service and the workers are paid for their performance.
ok, so this is unethical,
but lets look at this with more grainularity:
at what point have I reached unethical in the following situations
1. I hire a typist to type my thesis (this is before computers)
2. I hire a graphic artist to draw my figures
3. I hire a presentation firm to do my powerpoint slides (beamer for me please)
4. I 'hire' (read: give the honor of doing my research) master's students to run my experiments / write code.
5. I 'hire' (read: give the honor of doing my research) phd students to draw conclusions on those experiments
Is the difference between buying an essay and being a research professor that thin? jeesh
jp
Strip clubs are either both or neither. Well, or a shade between those two levels. Moral and ethical are mostly the same thing, the main difference being connotation. The only difference is that people tend to reference religious dogma with morals and philosophical dogma with ethics, but they're essentially the same thing.
At $23 per page a standard college level English class could cost over $1000, possibly more than the tuition.
...because it will make sure that lazy students don't ever have the initiative to turn their work ethic around. Thus, when they get to the real world and are found out they won't make it. Since I have very good work ethic I won't have to compete against these bozos (well, not for long anyway).
There's no such thing as grade inflation. It's a myth that just won't die. The closest thing to grade inflation out there is the tendency of what used to be F work to become a C or D grade. But it doesn't affect the B or C grades. What's changed is that teachers have less room to evaluate students than in the past, more of the grades are on a standardized basis and students are expected to do a lot more work than they used to. Consequently, you do see higher grades, but you also see smarter people as well.
Probably not, but he can make incredibly stupid videos for you .
http://www.youtube.com/user/jordan4604
Which is worse - that he made the videos, or that he posted them?
That sound you hear is parents throughout the land going "I should charge my kids more! All I ever get is half a pizza!"
There isn't a well-defined one, but there is a common, somewhat fuzzy, distinction often made with "ethical" wrong as the subset of "wrong" that deals ith behavior that fails an obligation to some particular other person (excluding any God or similar divine entity) without license, and "moral" wrong as the subset of "wrong" that deals with behavior that is wrong independent of any obligation to any other person (except, again, any God or similar divine entity.)
Under this model, fraud is often characterized as unethical, while recreational drug use is often characterized as immoral. (Both, obviously, presuming they are seen as wrong at all, and in general terms; its possible even under this general framework to construct an argument that either of those examples falls into the opposite category in some or all cases.)
For $23, can I get a page on how his service is ethical that will get me a "B" in my ethics class?
I'd pay for that.
Grades are still:
90% and up = A
80% and up = B
70% and up = C
60% and up = D
59% and below = F
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
I'm not sure where these "smarter people" are you're referencing. Seems to me that most people these days haven't gotten very good educations (due largely in part to politics destroying educational institutions/systems), resulting in dumber people, if there's any change at all.
Bite my shiny metal ass!
Cheater!
This isn't actually plagiarism - plagiarism is ripping off the work of another writer. This is simply paying someone to write something for you; in that sense, you might as well call a politician a plagiarist because the letter he sent you was written by his secretary.
What it is, is cheating - which is really, really pointless. You might get better grades in classwork, but you won't learn anything: so you will lose out when it comes to the exam, and in 10 years time when you are being asked questions in an interview your lack of ability to construct a decent argument will lead to someone else getting the job.
That's the only counter I can think of. Only problem is that it won't work for classes where they need to get as much lecture time in as possible, or for on-line classes.
Lots of CS100 classes have the same problem.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
What's crazy is the people he hires to write the papers don't seem to have any sense of the ethical issues involved. At least two of them are interviewed using their real names, and they act like the only thing wrong with this whole shady enterprise is that the fool didn't pay them on time. One of them is apparently an established writer for the Star Tribune; another one seems to be an award-winning teacher in Orlando Florida. I'm glad these individuals are no longer working for this douchebag, but it doesn't seem to bother them at all that they are cheapening their own professions.
Looking at the photo accompanying the article, it would be hard to think that anyone would pay those clowns to do anything in which smarts are (supposed to be) involved, much less put one's name on it and turn it in for a grade.
You might just as well ask them to take the MCAT for you; you'd be better off just checking off "C" on every question.
This is straight from 1982's forgettable Grease 2 movie, where the uncool guy makes money to buy a motorcycle by writing papers for the other kids. This is why they say those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Maybe someone should write a paper about that?
Somebody give them $23 to write a 1-page paper on the difference between ethics and morality!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Yeah. All those dumb people have horrible sentence structure.
Consenting adults going into a strip club or porn shop hardly does any damage to society, beyond maybe causing some reactionary prudes to get angry and violent, though in that case it is the prudes that are destructive. Plagiarists getting ahead is definitely damaging to society as it rewards dishonesty and incompetence.
Of course grades don't get inflated. The rate the teacher's charge is still $100 per grade over a D. Same as it was when I was in school. Silly teachers, not charging more for the cost of living increases.
This is plagiarism both by my university's definition and the one that's included in my syllabus.
This kind of activity is also why I don't allow free-choice essays and require students to submit work in progress during the term as they "workshop" major projects. It's all about deterring plagiarism and trying to get the students to, you know!, actually complete the course requirements. Crazy ideas.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
I'm almost certain that they hired someone else to write out their website's copy.
It may be a violation of the academic honesty code of your school, but I'm not convinced that hiring a ghost writer constitutes plagiarism ("1. The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft."). In particular, purchase is not theft.
Really, would you say that any of the many biographies of famous people are plagiarized?
They are probably just outsourcing the work on some garbage freelance site and paying some foreigner a pittance to do it. Why would you go for an education in the first place if you didn't actually WANT to learn? Oh well, there are a few employers out there that might hire for outsourcing skills. /rant
Never trust a guy with a soul patch.
"...what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical..."
He confuses ethics with morality. Dude--write a 1500 word essay on the differences between morals and ethics.
He's writing the current comment for me. So, don't mod this beyond a C (Score 3) or I'll have to pay.
You're currently sitting at (Score:3, Funny) - I wonder how many people were going to mod you up but didn't. :-)
u r sold
just that simple
"'Sure it's unethical, but it's just a business,' Kavoosi explains. 'I mean, what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical, and city-approved.'"
I don't think that word means what you think it means. "Unpopular in some circles" or "considered immoral by some" is not the same thing as "unethical".
It's not plagiarism if the author encourages you to pass off the stuff as your own. It's not theft if you pay somebody for something and then call it yours, right Slashdot?
Nor is it plagiarism to reuse your own work in a different academic contribution.
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