Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
FTFS: "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."
Hah! I'd love to see how this guy would do a physics or calculus paper...
science and physics course work you can copy much easier by yourself as it's "absolute truth" from the course material(that's been running in any given university for couple of decades with the same problems and assigments). it's much harder to prove that you copied 1+1=2 than to prove that you copied sentences directly from someone else.
here's a nice plagiarism tip: use a source that's in another language than the one you're submitting in, then just translate. it's a method many many many songwriters, book authors, reporters, national heros etc have used with great success. the less has been translated to any given language the easier it is.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You can't really test students with projects/papers. They cheat. Even if they don't use a professional service. I spent years teaching CS students and it was always a problem. It helps to use detection software, like the system Berkeley provides. But the humanities just have to suck it up and admit that they need to give only in class exams.
Students are placing a lot of trust in these folk. What if one of the writers sells an old laptop on eBay and the recipient posts the hundreds of essays on the interwebs. If you were to wait twenty years before doing so, you would probably find at least a few of the clients now hold well paid jobs. Similarly, these folk are at very great risk of future blackmail when their job, family and home are on the line.
Students will eventually suffer if it becomes too much of a problem. Courses will simply revert back to 100% final exams.
I suspect a combination of two factors:
1. Humanities and soft sciences, in my experience, tend to be taught in courses whose grading depends much more on take-home essays than in class exams. Unless you have a smartphone with a nice camera, and a very on-the-ball internet cheating service, you can't really cheat in class over the internet; but doing so on a take home is absolutely trivial. Math and hard sciences often have take-home problem sets, some even worth a few points; but those are mostly just drill/practice for the exams that will curb-stomp you if you haven't done the work outside of class.
2. I'm sure that internet cheating is a large enough business to support specialization of labor. The writer of TFA clearly specializes in writing. He/she probably has a good academic prose style, and good research skills, along with a jstor subscription or nearby university library. Quite possibly, he did a liberal arts or social science degree, which gave him the necessary practice; but found the job market unexciting with those credentials. Those things would equip him to produce adequate material in a wide variety of writing-heavy areas. If his skill is in writing, and he gets enough business, why would he turn away paying customers in order to brush up on his math, which, unless he has a genuinely unusual talent in the area, could take a couple of years? Presumably(and, taking a quick look at rentacoder, certainly), there are equivalent people who specialize in math, CS, and science. If his area of comparative advantage is writing, why go up against people who have a comparative advantage in other areas?
It doesn't take students in higher education long to see cheating and lying are the norm, even required. It prepares them for what they are about to have to do for the Corporations.
I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst.
These are the people that will be future teachers that are too inept to do their own course work that will eventually fail their own students who will in turn purchase academic papers from a professional writer. The vicious cycle continues.
This appears to be a business that will continue to boom for a long time especially considering how everyone is pushed toward college these days.
have you scored a -1 on Slashdot for someone else?
The writer of TFA clearly specializes in writing. He/she probably has a good academic prose style, and good research skills, along with a jstor subscription or nearby university library. Quite possibly, he did a liberal arts or social science degree, which gave him the necessary practice; but found the job market unexciting with those credentials.
Go back and read TFA. I'm saying this not to be an asshole but because it's genuinely fascinating.
The author states that:
* He went to college to be a writer and found out that there's more than one way to get paid for what you write.
* He uses mainly Wikipedia (for background), Amazon for the free pages, and Google Academics for the abstracts. Everything else he spins from educated guesswork and outright bullshit with lots and lots of filler.
* He doesn't edit his work at all, this helps him work faster and heads off requests for him to "dumb it down".
* His clients often thank him for making typos (presumably because it looks more authentic that way).
He's not producing high quality work for top honors, he's producing "good enough" work for the sake of graduating at all. It may pay to get A's but C's get degrees, etc.
I've said for years that not everybody needs a college degree. I would guess (I would hope) that this guy is helping along the raft of mediocre graduates who won't ever really use their degree except as resume fodder. Unfortunately this just devalues college degrees even more so that employers keep on requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need special training.
He's right about one thing, blame the colleges that are more interested in collecting tuition fees than in producing actual, competent scholars.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
...what happens once the cheaters get high-ranking positions in the business or political world. That's when the entire economic system turns to shit.
Read any newspapers lately? Heard of Enron, Tyco, Ireland, Greece, Fannie and Freddie?
Is their any way keeping track of the cheaters and blacklisting them from ever managing any sizable projects or organizations?
You could start with the Fortune 500 and extrapolate to any organization with similar accounting and management methods. Um, yes, that's basically just regular accepted business method - lies and obfuscation.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I certainly hope most of the students who use these services are going into management, where they'll never be required to use any skills.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Are you kidding? It's especially valuable in the techie world -- a world that incessantly suffers from misunderstanding by the general public. Ask yourself how popular Linux would be today, if Linus had published a well-written series of introductory articles about it in the popular press, 20 years ago. Ask any small company: The technical writer is key to the success of the organization, because he/she introduces the product to the customer -- either directly, in the company documentation, or indirectly, by ghostwriting articles in the trade and popular press.
If you don't believe me, try the following. Take a collection of your peers. Ask them each to write a four-page article for the trade press presenting and explaining Moore's Law. Now compare their papers with Gordon Moore's original. Which one is easier to understand, and more persuasive? Which one do you think would still be remembered 45 years later?
Words matter.
I was a liberal arts major at an Ivy League school and graduated with a BA in English. I later lived for a year or so with a fellow graduate who had taken a job for one of these paper mills for the money. I saw the kind of people who ran the place as well as the kind of people who needed work done.
All the points about how this is easier with a humanities degree because you're not being tested in class are correct, but they're not a complete picture. Liberal arts degrees are indeed much easier to get than a science degree for the simple reason that you can't BS your way through math and physics (at least nowhere near as much as you can through the humanities). But a humanities education isn't meant to train you as a scientist or for a specific career, or a group or specific careers. It's meant to give you the intellectual tools to analyze anything. It's meant to make you intellectually agile, so that you can learn new (and possibly completely unrelated) fields very quickly. It's meant to give you a sense of what it means to be a damn human being and to give you the chops to appreciate arguments and ideas that might be contrary to your own, and to get to the bottom of why that is.
My experience was that, if you did the work and applied yourself, you got exactly that. But the nature of the work is such that there are not as many external factors forcing you to do the kinds of things you have to do in organic chem. It used to be that this kind of intellectual laziness would mean you washed out, but these days, even at an Ivy, you have to be pretty terrible for that to happen. I've seen resumes and letters from some of my fellow graduates with English degrees -- people who, presumably, ought to be expert writers -- and they aren't. Sometimes it's just because they're lazy, and sometimes it's because they got all their credits studying ultra-specific intellectual theory, whether it's queer theory, post-modernist theory, feminist theory, or anything else that makes for interesting graduate work but shouldn't be forming the entire basis of your undergraduate curriculum. But the grad students are pretty much forced into claiming an intellectual niche and working it to death, and that is reflected in the classes they teach. All of this in the name of a 'broad' intellectual base!
My recollection is that my friend was not writing papers for top tier schools most of the time, but it did happen. I remember that a lot of her clients were in one- or two- year master's programs (and sometimes MBAs) and almost always had the attitude that they just couldn't be bothered to do it themselves. Even if it started out as a single occasion where some kid just couldn't finish one paper on time, it became like a gateway drug.
And the people who ran the paper mill were absolute scumbags. This one was in NYC. They would withhold payment from their writers, promise things like health insurance and not deliver, and otherwise screw the people doing the work as much as possible so that their margins would be as high as possible. But they always had work.
Shrug. I think it'd be more work to fake your way through a liberal arts class than a big math/science class. I took classes that had more than 1000 students in the section, where the exams were given by TA's who'd probably never seen you before.
For the price of a fake student ID, you could have someone take the exams FOR you. Easy. I once took a geology class where I only came to class for the exams, and aced the whole course. I did roughly the same for physics (I went to the practicums religiously, but never to class). I never saw my TA at the exams, and, indeed, I took the exams at the wrong location every time, due to a scheduling conflict. My professor might have been there, but I don't know because I didn't know what he looked like.
In short, just because this guy specializes in liberal arts, doesn't mean there aren't people out there who can churn out easy science classes. And saying that, "Well you couldn't do hard science classes" misses the point: the people who do this stuff are doing it to knock off course requirements. It'd be equally hard to bluff your way through higher level liberal arts classes, with maybe 10 other students, and a heavy dependence on class participation.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You've probably never graded any assignments. For something as simple as 1+1=2, what you've stated is true. For complex math, science and engineering equations that require multiple steps, there are enough variations in arriving at a correct answer that you can easily spot the lazy cheaters. People indent differently. People start different parts of the problem first. In a class of 30, I easily spotted the obvious duplicates, even when I saw the 2nd student's paper hours later. Except for the obvious duplicate, no two papers in that class of 30 had the same organizational structure to arriving at the final correct answer. There were a few that had similar structures, but still varied enough to be different. Of course a single duplicate isn't necessarily a sign of cheating, but if you notice someone duplicating several problems and several assignments, it's obvious they're just copying. The answers may be absolute truths, but the process at arriving at the answers differs quite a bit from person to person.