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Shadow Scholar Details Student Cheating
vortex2.71 writes "A 'shadow writer,' who lives on the East Coast, details how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and describes the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle Of Higher Education reviewed correspondence he had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. 'I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.'"
There was once a time, when all those essays, reports and projects were treated just as a learning aid and only added a minor percentage to the final grade, everything was basically down to tests and exams, your passed or failed based upon your ability to recall information and handle the stress.
Apparently this created a gender bias whereby makes performed better in this regard forcing a grading restructuring. Now when you think about high grades can be achieved for not necessarily doing the work but for the cheerleader set to seduce geeks and nerds into doing the work. There are courses that have no exams at all and all grades are based upon 'er' project work.
Now personalty I have found the work reflects the exam style of grading, where you were under pressure and expected to be able to produce the answers immediately and any project work was expected to be credit worthy only any higher and you were wasting time on that project when you should have already moved onto the next.
Likely I am a bit biased, as I always seemed to be able to guess the right areas to cram the day before exams, making them a less stressful experience once started.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Unfortunately, in a highly credentialed society we depend on grades to determine who is fit to do work and who to listen to.
It's the entire premise behind progressivism... that academics can give you the answer better than the trial and error of a free society.
Well who do you propose to listen to in a progressive society? The ones with the best grades in the academic system.
Personally, I'm much more of a free market person where we should have as few barriers to entry as possible. If you go to school and get your degree and it helps you be innovative or provide better services... wonderful.
Yet in the credential oriented world, your success is determined by the grades you get... thus making cheating such a key thing students need to do.
And unfortunately, all the things that test critical thinking and ability (projects/papers... )are too easy to cheat on.
So the best you can do is grind people through really really really hard regular exams and test to hopefully weed out enough people to then test them in more detail.
This is largely what things like Medschool. There are loads of exams and test... and many of them just memorization. This weeds out so many people. Then once that is done, they can go to more of the practical and analytical sections. But those are hard to test and residency is where you learn the real work... and no one is going to fail your residency.. they know you've invested too much.
A free society as messy as it is... is much better than the alternatives. Unfortunately, academics hate messiness and want everything to be systemic.
If your entire thesis is comprised of your prior works then that's just fine.
It's fine for some institutions and types of PhD. It is not fine for others, where the institution will insist that the work must be original and not previously published.