Plagiarism Inc.

Confession by eldavojohn · 2010-07-01 05:09 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

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 ... I teared up during his re-enactment of the ending of 300. Frank Miller would be proud.

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.

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My work here is dung.

Huh... by Anrego · 2010-07-01 05:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:Huh... by Wonko+the+Sane · 2010-07-01 05:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think that wives of men that go to strip clubs feel that it is wrong in both ways
What about the wives of men who go to the strip club along with their husbands?
Re:Huh... by Surt · 2010-07-01 05:55 · Score: 2, Funny

Men who have both husbands and wives and leave their wives behind when they take their husbands to the stripclubs are the worst sort of immoral douchebags in the world.

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"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking

Ethical ? by alexandre · 2010-07-01 05:11 · Score: 3, Insightful

And you wonder why capitalism is going down the drain when CEO argue like 6 years old ...

Re:Ethical ? by Dystopian+Rebel · 2010-07-01 05:27 · Score: 2, Funny

And you wonder why capitalism is going down the drain
Quick, buy drain stocks!

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Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.

Plagarism, Inc. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-01 05:14 · Score: 5, Funny

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.'"

Yes, but can they fix my Karma? by dimethylxanthine · 2010-07-01 05:16 · Score: 5, Funny

I wonder if they can write 5 point comments for me?

It would seem by teflaime · 2010-07-01 05:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

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...

Re:Yes, but can they fix my Karma? by Tekfactory · 2010-07-01 05:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

What plagiarism? by John+Hasler · 2010-07-01 05:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.

Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by gmezero · 2010-07-01 05:21 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by Tekfactory · 2010-07-01 05:24 · Score: 3, Informative

Well the claim its your own work, when its the work of somewone else is where its plagarism.
If you're desperate enough to use a service like this, how likely are you to know or care if your work for hire ghost writer is copying from some other PHD candidate's paper that he sold after he graduated?
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-01 05:52 · Score: 2, Informative

To claim someone else's work as your own, that you paid to commission, is not plagiarism... as the GP said, its Ghostwriting.
Does a company plagiarize your work by claiming ownership when you leave the company? No, that work was commissioned for them, and it is now their work. They are not the author, but they are the owner.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by Surt · 2010-07-01 06:10 · Score: 3, Informative

It's not plagiarizing if you have permission, which having purchased the paper, you have.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plagiarizing

--
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by ktappe · 2010-07-01 06:12 · Score: 2, Insightful

To claim someone else's work as your own, that you paid to commission, is not plagiarism... as the GP said, its Ghostwriting.
Does a company plagiarize your work by claiming ownership when you leave the company? No, that work was commissioned for them, and it is now their work. They are not the author, but they are the owner.
And just as the post to which you replied said, how do you know these el-cheapo papers are not being plagiarized by the ghostwriters from whom you're purchasing them? It seems very likely they are given the sleaziness of the owner, and considering the price so low and time-turnaround so short, it seems unlikely that that much research could or would actually be performed.

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"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by hedwards · 2010-07-01 06:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

It's plagiarism, you're claiming that you wrote the work when you didn't. Most companies don't claim to have written the materials, they only claim to own it by virtue of paying for it. This isn't a matter of ghost writing, this is a matter of paying somebody to write something that you can then pass of as your own to pass a class.

Any guesses what's going to happen to any student that gets caught doing it? Well, there'll be words thrown around like scholastic dishonesty, cheating and expulsion.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by misexistentialist · 2010-07-01 06:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

All unattributed writing counts as "plagiarism," even if you are reusing something you wrote.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by PopeRatzo · 2010-07-01 06:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

To claim someone else's work as your own, that you paid to commission, is not plagiarism... as the GP said, its Ghostwriting.
Ghostwriting it may be, but unethical it definitely is.
As an academic, I've had numerous cases over the years where a student submits work that he did not write. Just because he may have legally engaged a "ghostwriter" to provide this work does not mean I won't flunk him just the same, and in some cases, see to his expulsion.
When a celebrity, say Sarah Palin, writes a book, everyone just assumes that it's a ghostwriter actually constructing the sentences. Nobody who buys such a book is going to be outraged because it's actually the work of a ghostwriter, because the entire enterprise is more of a cultural badge than a meaningful bit of literature.
If a student submits a paper however, there is the solemn contract between him and the institution that the work presented is his and his alone. It's all over the student handbook and the institution's rules. When you try to play fast and loose with that, you've crossed a line and should be punished. Of course, in many cases it's impossible for a professor to determine whether the student that he's seen a handful of times, out of a class of a hundred or more, was actually capable of writing what he submitted. Since part of my expertise is in the analysis of literary styles, I could usually accurately determine whether someone has written a submitted work, as long as I've exchanged at least a few sentences with him in the course of a semester. Over 20 years, there was only one circumstance where I had an incorrect initial opinion about a student's work, and in that case a brief meeting with the unusually quiet, shy student confirmed that he indeed was the author of the wildly expressive roman candle of a paper he submitted. He got off the hook, got an "A" and ended up as my advisee when he got his well-deserved PhD. Today he writes a most impressive and successful political/cultural blog (Hi Roy!) but really ought to be writing fiction because the motherfucker's a pistol. Now that I've retired from academia, he is one of the students of whom I am most proud.
In closing, let me just say this to anyone thinking about buying a paper online: It's totally lame, so write your own goddamn paper. You're a student dickwad, so you really don't have anything better to do, and if you think your Economics paper is more important than the paper for my class, which you are only taking to satisfy some Humanities requirement, so it's OK to let some bogus bullshit through to me since you don't plan to ever care about literature or composition once you are trading derivatives, I can assure you that you will be found out and that your parents are going to kick your ass when they learn you were thrown out of school for being a douchebag, and your plans for being one of the gods of finance will be shredded into little tiny pieces. And yes, you'll still have to pay off those student loans.

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You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by TubeSteak · 2010-07-01 07:33 · Score: 4, Informative

It's not plagiarizing if you have permission, which having purchased the paper, you have.
Plagiarism is about citing your work, not about copyright or permission.
If you use someone else's work without citing it, you have plagiarized.
How is it that people don't know WTF plagiarism is?

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[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by rah1420 · 2010-07-01 07:37 · Score: 3, Interesting

I was going to mod this but decided instead to comment. I faced a similar situation in my freshman year in college. My English professor's only comment for my final paper was "This paper gets an 'A' if you answer my verbal question correctly, and an 'F' if you do not." Needless to say, I did answer the question correctly and in the process learned a valuable lesson about how I should attribute sources more completely in my subsequent papers. (Thanks, Mrs. G!)

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Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by Xaedalus · 2010-07-01 07:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

I take it you've had some run-ins with business degree students then?

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Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing? by shimage · 2010-07-01 08:13 · Score: 3, Informative

I agree with your sentiment, but not your conclusion. As a TA, I caught no less than 10% of my students literally copying text off of the internet and pasting it into their essays. None of them were punished in the least. The lesson I learned from the experience is that if you don't have any pull in the department, you let cheating slide because it is not worth the hassle. And this wasn't at some no-name school, either. It's one of the top research universities on the west coast.

Porn and Strip clubs unethical? by sirwired · 2010-07-01 05:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

He can be shut down rather easily. by blcamp · 2010-07-01 05:27 · Score: 2, Interesting

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

Re:He can be shut down rather easily. by The+Great+Pretender · 2010-07-01 05:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

Reading the article suggests that he might try to sue himself, if he thinks he could make some money from it...

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A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

Re:Porn? by Locke2005 · 2010-07-01 05:29 · Score: 2, Informative

It depends. If you give them a dollar hoping to see tits, but then you don't see tits, then that is unethical. If, however, they deliver tits as expected, then that is perfectly ethical.
In the case of a reports-for-hire service, it is the customers that are being unethical, not the report writers.

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I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.

Garden Variety Narcissist by Spazntwich · 2010-07-01 05:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

The wave of the future by jcohen · 2010-07-01 05:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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"Imaginary solutions to real problems."

Plenty of blame to go around here... by sirwired · 2010-07-01 05:36 · Score: 3, Interesting

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

Re:Porn? by Pollardito · 2010-07-01 05:38 · Score: 4, Funny

I guess you could say that the dancers/actresses with fake breasts are committing fraud, but that argument won't hold up without support

Re:Porn? by russotto · 2010-07-01 05:40 · Score: 2, Funny

I guess you could say that the dancers/actresses with fake breasts are committing fraud, but that argument won't hold up without support

You've got that backwards; it's the real ones which won't hold up without support.

Re:Yes, but can they fix my Karma? by noidentity · 2010-07-01 06:06 · Score: 3, Funny

He's writing the current comment for me. So, don't mod this beyond a C (Score 3) or I'll have to pay.

Re:it's like doping in sports by bdcrazy · 2010-07-01 06:07 · Score: 2, Informative

why do people want to go to university? There were told the piece of paper that is a diploma is worth lots of money. That is the only reason.

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Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning

yea, this is clear, but what about.... by jp102235 · 2010-07-01 06:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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jp

Difference between morality and ethics by DragonWriter · 2010-07-01 06:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

Can someone please tell me the difference between morality and ethics?

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.)

So... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-01 06:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

Re:Yes, but can they fix my Karma? by Unkyjar · 2010-07-01 08:16 · Score: 2, Funny

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.

Ethics vs. morality by iliketrash · 2010-07-01 10:21 · Score: 2, Insightful

"...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.

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