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.'"
I had professors who simply gave every student the chance to bring a note sheet to the exam.
One 8-12x11" sheet of paper. Both sides. Put whatever you want on it. The kids who printed it up with every possible item in 3-point font failed, those who put down the relevant concepts and formulae in a quick and easy-access format succeeded, because the test was actually structured to test whether you had learned the concepts and how to apply them.
Of course, this requires that the professor isn't a lazy asshole who's been using the same, unchanged scantron-based multiple guess test for the past 20 years.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, why are we prepared to take it on trust that this man who claims to make his life from cheeters isn't himself cheating the system by exaggerating the extent of his abilities and achievements?
If it is easy to write an undergraduate nonscientific essay, it is even easier to fake correspondence.
My wife ran into that and caused hell for an instructor.
She turned in 10 years ago a paper on a subject.
last semester she use the same topic and paper as a basis for her new class, updated it with new info.
You can not plagiarize or cheat from yourself. But it was marked as copied from another student. So she challenged the school and won.
Software makes the teacher lazy. Get off your ass and READ, you can tell if johnny pot-head wrote the paper or if he copied a lot of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And as such exams are time limited no dead tree or electronic material can really help you solve the task in time if you have no clue. These were exams I actually enjoyed as I could pass (albeit not w/o difficulties) and majority of my colleagues (the cheaters and those that learned by the letter) needed few more attempts usually.
Actually, It could make a rather interesting thesis: pay someone to write a paper on ethics for you, use the paper as part of your thesis showing how easy it is to have someone else do the work for you and use the paper written for you, your correspondence, et cetera to question the morality of having someone else do the work for you. I am sure i could explain it better but i would rather pay someone else to explain it better in my words.
I've seen instructors fail students after using Turnitin.com's service. What was "non original"? The bibliography page... but on a 2 page paper, the bibliography is 30% or so, and the instructors never looked to see what wasn't original, just how much wasn't original.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Sure you can.
Have a seminar and make the student present the paper to peers. That is what good universities in Europe do and they have had to deal with the shadow scholar industry for many centuries. If the class is too big split the class and have the grad students run the seminars helping them out on a round-robin basis. They need to learn the trade too.
In fact in most cases the other students _WILL_ catch them for you. There is nothing as merciless as an audience of your peers especially if they are getting a grade percentage or grade bonus for successful critique. Especially in humanities.
Divide, conquer, rule.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
A variant of that idea I rather liked. I had a professor who liked to give 'tests of 2'... i.e. every answer on the test was '2'.... but better show your work.
I had a friend whose professor allowed this too. He said pretty much what yours did, that "You can put whatever you want on it, front or back." My friend was in an advanced logic class so he brought an empty 8-12x11" sheet of paper and a postgrad philosophy major who stood on the piece of paper and gave my friend all the answers. Because it was a logic class the professor allowed it. A professor who can admit that he's been outsmarted by a student is a pretty good teacher if you ask me.
On the night before his assignment was due in he came and asked me for some help. I proceeded to waffle on about the book based on the leading question he had been given regarding it. He sat there with his pad and took notes as I pointed out the sections of the book that were relevant to the question and gave some examples of the how the technological change (nanotechnology) in the book had changed the separate societies that are mentioned. It probably also helped that I was studying Physics so had some idea of nanotechnology.
After an hour or so he took his 1 or 2 sides of A4 notes and went upstairs to churn out an essay based on my ideas. He gained a first for that paper, and permanently changed my opinion of humanities subjects: Most of them are so easy to pass they should not even be taught in the same college as the sciences of engineering subjects, they are certainly not the same academic level and do not require the same amount of study. All they require is the ability to structure your ideas (or someone else's) into a well formed English essay.
I have a humanities degree and an engineering degree. Neither was easier than the other to pass, they just required very different skills. I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay". Don't you wish more engineers had that ability? And why do you assume he only used your ideas? To get a first he would have had to have shown how it linked in to the rest of the course, something he would have had to do himself when he got back upstairs.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
That is incidental. The source of the problem is the basic failure of the relationship between business and citizens. Most citizens want good paying jobs. Business wants labor to be trained before they are hired. But, high schools don't successfully prepare students for work or college. Therefore, business demands college education. Now the colleges see that they can make a buck by enrolling all these new students and lowering their standards. However, the institution designed for cultivating the best and brightest has been effectively reduced to a diploma mill. Hence, all the cheating.
Who can blame the students? They are not the best and the brightest. They want a job. The piece of paper stands between them and gainful employment. Therefore, they will do whatever it takes to get it. Business doesn't demand that people actually know anything. They demand a piece of paper.
What we need is more trade schools. Business needs to get together with the people (and the government) to design schools that will fill the needs of the job market. Business needs to bite the bullet, and help pay for said schools. Graduates would be trained, with experience, so that they can step into their new job. This would satisfy the needs of business, and the needs of the student who doesn't care about Pavlov's dog, or the integral of e^-x. Then college enrollment would go down, and they could get back to the business of educating people who actually want to be there.
I'm going to university now. Im an older student, at 27 years old, and started in a community college wit the intent to transfer out. At the CC I had to take intro trig and college algebra.
I hadn't had a math class in a decade.
Turned out....the math professor at this little dinky community college was an *excellent* teacher. Very thorough, very knowledgeable, very very good at teaching the material. The guy had a Ph D from a state university (maybe in physics? I dont recall) so everything he had to teach here was stuff he knew inside and out.
He allowed notes for the tests "write whatever you want on it. formulas, sample problems, fill it up, I dont care. If you dont know the material you will fail"
He wasnt kidding. He even gave out last years tests (he always rewrote them) as study guides for the next test. If you didnt really know what you were doing, you were going to fail.
Wish I had more teachers like him. He was thorough, interesting, and an excellent communicator of the material (this is a huge issue with a lot of instructors)
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin