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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.'"
"I didn't much care for my classes, though. I slept late and spent the afternoons working on my own material. Then a funny thing happened. Here I was, begging anybody in authority to take my work seriously. But my classmates did. They saw my abilities and my abundance of free time. They saw a value that the university did not. It turned out that my lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates were thrilled to pay me to write their papers. And I was thrilled to take their money. Imagine you are crumbling under the weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt when a frat boy offers you cash to write about Plato. Doing that job was a no-brainer. Word of my services spread quickly, especially through the fraternities. Soon I was receiving calls from strangers who wanted to commission my work. I was a writer!"
And that's how capitalism works, friends. From the smallest college to the largest corporation, cheating is profitable.
Legal cheating the way of big business in the US and all over the world. Just look at how businesses avoid paying taxes with off-shore locations, lobby for de-regulation, hire illegals, and use corporate espionage to further their relentless pursuit of profits. So what makes this guy any worse than any business in how they bend and break the rules? He just learned how to work the system for his own profit, just like every other big business.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
You can not plagiarize or cheat from yourself.
Actually, you might be able to, but it is an unusual case. For some doctoral theses, you are required to sign a plagiarism notice stating that the work you are presenting as original has not been previously published elsewhere, even if it was credited to yourself. If you copy some of your previous published work, present it as original and don't cite it because you want it to appear as new work, then you may well be found guilty of plagiarism.