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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.'"
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...
If you have enough money, you no longer have to try.
By the way, I see obvious homework projects on the freelancing sites all the time now (some with the actual homework document posted). Thankfully, myself and most of my colleagues avoid bidding on them.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Stroke your ego harder, why don't you.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
he could not find a better employer! :)
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Interesting the lack of scientific subjects amongst his claims. Yes, he mentions psychology but I'm talking about things like physics and mathematics which are not that easy to plagiarise or regurgitate from other sources without justification.
RTFA. He appreciates the irony.
I have to say I think this is a very large problem and part of the reason why a Bachelors degree doesn't mean as much as it did in the past.
While I didn't cheat (although I was tempted at times) I had numerous friends who did. They had more free time then I did, had more fun but also didn't really learn anything from the classes they had signed up for. I think in the long run this leads to longer education times as people are forced to go for a Masters (where cheating can still happen). At the same time colleges are becoming less about learning and more about taking a students money and giving them a degree so they can get the next cash cow in.
Just because he doesn't have any ethics doesn't mean he doesn't understand the concept. I studied engineering, so I've never had to write a paper on ethics. The fact you can write a paper on it gives me the feeling it more about working out how to screw somebody over while still being "ethical" in a business sense.
Notice there's no STEM items here (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Highlighting that all these "soft" type courses accept, potentially, a lot of BS. (I think philosophy classes are enormously important, the root of our culture, but still... I know it's BS'able in many cases.) No wonder some students find the actual hard sciences -- that have actual right and wrong answers and require justification -- overwhelmingly difficult in comparison.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Theology is a little disturbing too.
...it's Stephen Bloody Fry
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
Exactly, I could use a little freelance work myself, and I have a Liberal Arts degree - where do I sign up?
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
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.
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.
heh, that was the best part of the whole article. OTOH, it's not like academic dishonesty is explicitly forbidden in the bible, unlike homosexuality, so who cares, right?
weinersmith
Don't bother, it'll get shifted over to India and China soon enough.
Just the tone of the article is a giveaway. Another giveaway: google "widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define" which he says is one of his stock phrases. Surely someone would have posted at least one of the papers he claims to crank out. Aside from references to this one article, nothing comes up.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
i know i'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but dude, you're funny! this is a prime example of irony, if i ever did see one. (get it? he's criticizing the engineering-assholes for not being civilized, thus displaying his own lack of manners? funny, right?)
weinersmith
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 have a Liberal Arts degree - where do I sign up?
http://mcdonalds.com.au/careers/join-us
Sorry, someone had to say it. :P
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.
Theology is a little disturbing too.
Why? Regardless of ones particular viewpoint most theology is lies. The religious person only believes their own theology to be correct the rest are lies, the atheist believes all theology to be lies and the comparative theologian is often times just trying to compare the lies.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
This article gives me a very mixed feeling. On one hand, holy crap, that's one clever and dedicated guy. I'm not sure about how good is his output, but from the sounds of it, it could be pretty decent, and he takes the job very seriously. I think if he applied that towards some other endeavour he'd be worth his weight in gold. There's got to be a place somewhere that could use his skills for a better end.
What is really a pity is that what he uses the talent for is for unfairly advancing dribbling morons that shouldn't have passed high school.
You told us to write an ese, so we sent letters to our friends in Mejico
Some poor saps persist in believing otherwise(hence the usual 1-required-ethics-course-per-MBA-course-of-study...); but the study of ethical philosophy and behaving ethically really don't have much to do with one another.
There are, arguably, a few cases that are genuine conundrums, where "ethical common sense" doesn't tell you anything, and you have to call in the professionals; but the vast majority of the time the person in the situation isn't acting ethically because they know ethics, or unethically because they don't, they just either care or don't(sorry Plato).
In fact, it might actually be easier to study ethics, as a matter of philosophy, if you are an amoral sociopath yourself. For normal people, so many ethical conclusions are simply blindingly commonsensical. It takes an active effort of will to ignore that and focus on why 'ethical' is what it is. For an amoral sociopath, treating 'ethical' as a dispassionate exercise in descriptive taxonomy and constructing theoretical patterns and structures that govern it is much simpler, no emotionally salient ethical instincts to get in the way.
An analogous situation might be an atheist studying theology. An atheist doesn't believe in god, so their study of theology would have no operational relevance; but they will be fully capable of doing textual analysis of whatever 'sacred' text you plunk in front of them, in exactly the way an English major could analyze the character of 'Tom Sawyer' from the text, without believing in his existence.
of all of them pharmacology is the one that bothers me.. that is a subject that can get people killed.
the other? eh let the people who cheated pass and then fail in real life.. but i don't want their lack of understanding the subject to get others hurt.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
"thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now".
He helped Lolcats graduate. Now they can "haz cheezburger and duhploma."
Honestly, I would love to be able to afford to go back to school. I would absolutely bust my ass the entire way through, and do so proudly and without complaint. This is either sickening and disappointing or i am just old and cantankerous.
have you scored a -1 on Slashdot for someone else?
That isn't his specialty. I guarantee you could find a "him" for physical sciences. The trick would be finding a physical science course load that wasn't heavily lab focused (Note: I don't doubt you could find this, just saying it would be your first challenge).
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The ethics thesis he wrote really did it for me. I wonder if the people farming out their thesis-writing saw the irony of their position.
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Splines?
It's pretty funny that you wrote a report on this but can't remember the name for anything :p
That's proof that he hired someone to write the report ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
don't be so smug, engineering-assholes, a little humanities would go a long way toward civilizing you.
Yeah, then they would be ... like .. civil engineers :-)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
And that 10-pager I wrote on French opera in a two-year span of the 18th century, the only one in the class that got an A -- I'd like to see some shadow writer pull that out of thin air in 6 hours like I did.
....yeah, I'm just trying to make myself feel better after finally raking in the salary that my peers got right out of school.
P.S. Am I the only one who read every other paragraph in the article with the phrase "I am the goddamn Batman" at the end?
I do not mean to be insensitive, but I can't tell you how many times I've been paid to write about somebody helping a loved one battle cancer. I've written essays that could be adapted into Meryl Streep movies. I am the goddamn Batman.
On top of the ego rearing its head here and there, there is a sort of in-your-face shadowy narrator voice that you would expect to see usually in a film-noir like detective story or a grim-dark rendition of Yet Another Batman Comic.
FTA:
As long as it doesn't require me to do any math [...], I will write anything
There is cheating in college?! No way. A lot of the papers including research and also computer science classes are full of cheating. People would pay $100 a project that took you maybe 2 hours if you knew what you are doing and near$1,000 for research papers. Its become a pretty marketable business and there is a lot of sites that have always taken advantage of it. It will always win too since the work people are doing for paying "client" is submitted to the person and not posted online to get caught by plagiarism crawlers.
Bryan
That sounds like a piece of research that's just begging to be done.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Take away his TV, internet and phone and see how he likes civilization . . .
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
http://www.xkcd.com/451/
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I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. All while taking tech support calls for Dell
Now its believable.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
In my time at school some of our teachers gave us free hand - bring what you want and see if you succeed.
The best anecdote about this was a physics exam at CalTech where the teacher allowed students to "consult Feynman", which was the standard textbook.
One student grabbed the exam sheet and ran to professor Feynman's office. Feynman, practical joker that he was, was glad to do the whole exam for him.
but i don't want their lack of understanding the subject to get others hurt.
On the other hand, what's more worrying in pharmacology, people passing tests by cheating or tests designed so that cheaters can easily pass? Personally I'd find the latter at least as worrying, if it's an indication of testing methodology in actual pharmacological research.
There smart people who are not cut out for writing essays.
Not only that when you have filler courses like art history (A professor had this story) that in the class the student would turn in short papers saying art is great but for the final they turned in copied from on line a long paper about art theft and how it affected art prices in the year X.
Passing an ethics course was mandatory in my country (Canada) to be awarded an engineering degree. Ethics do not only apply to business. Cutting corners and bad decisions can lead to all sorts of catastrophes (See the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for a couple of examples)
He kinda wrote, that he would not do math papers
"As long as it doesn't require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything."
Ok, he did not kind of write it. He wrote it.
More accurately would be "All because someone paid me to"
I went to a college with a signed honor code that obligated you to turn in cheaters. I had a great deal of difficulty signing it because I was not sure I could turn in a friend. With perspective, I realize that turning in a cheater may turn their life around and future chances are better for that person. More extensive use of honor codes might help this situation.
"I've attended three dozen online universities."
I would be interested to know what percentage of his business comes from online university students and what percentage from traditional university students. I wonder if the dramatic increase in the growth of online universities has correlated to an increase in this business.
This is what you get when people are pushed to be in college when they are not cut out for it.
Also by making them get B.S, M.S and PHD just to get jobs does not help. In some jobs you don't need to write long papers and or it's not your job to do that much writing on the job.
I don't think lot's of people are using stuff like this to cheat (as in to pass without knowing anything about the class they are in) no they just are not good at witting long papers. They can do the short lab and or homework papers but not the big papers with not having to use people who are good at essays but don’t know that much about the topic.
.
You gotta admit, that's pretty funny.
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.
The depressing/frustrating thing here is I have actually been pondering going back to school to get a higher degree, but the process of convincing them to let me in is... well... a hurdle. This piece makes me wonder how many of the other applicants have had a bit of 'help' with things like entrance essays or even just getting their previous degree.
Yes, if you're awarded an honorary doctorate, you can use it, although in many (most? all?) disciplines it's considered poor manners to use any title you haven't earned. And why go to all the trouble and expense to get an honorary doctorate if you can't use it around the people whom you presumably got it to impress?
Semi-unrelatedly, at some colleges, the highest administrator (Chancellor, President, whatever) is referred to as "Doctor" regardless of his or her actual academic achievements (and permitted to wear doctoral academic regalia at suitable occasions). Once they quit/get fired, they go back to being whatever they were before.
I know someone who did similar work in the early/mid 1990s. He wasn't as good as the guy in the article purports to be; he seemed to mostly wind up doing glorified book reports for first-year English coeds.
He took his payment in phone sex, earning as much as a half-dozen sessions for one fairly short paper.
If about 15 years ago you entered a certain small, prestigious, east coast university where your first English comp paper was to be inspired by "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and you got some old guy off over the phone in exchange for the paper, then thanks for the memories and thanks for passing my email address around to your friends. :-)
My problem was always with groups of people working together on tasks that were expressly required to be individual efforts.
I have more respect for people who straight-up cheat than I do for that.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
...But did anyone notice how these are mostly BS degrees anyway? If you cheat your way to a degree in underwater basket weaving then, well, I guess my respect level for that degree was already in the right place. Now if this is going on for doctors and engineers then I see reason to worry.
Mobius Strip FTW!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
'nuff said.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
i'll agree both are worrying..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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.
Someone who makes his living helping others cheat is surprised at how rampant cheating is. Is a gas station owner also surprised that most everyone that comes to his store is looking for gas?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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. If he's written any papers on ethics, he'll probably know that most modern ethical theory is relativist: you may think he's wrong, but your opinion carries no more weight than his. It's been more than a hundred years since a good moral absolutist entered the scene.
That's pretty much why I stopped taking ethics classes.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Shrug. It's perfectly valid to end up an ethical relativist after taking an ethics class. Or a utilitarian. Neither one would see anything wrong with writing term papers for a living.
I've taken a ton of ethics classes; none of them have any component that deals with how you ought to live your life. They deal with various theories, what they say, and what their flaws are.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"..that is a subject that can get people killed."
Even the very best of them give sugar pills to half their test subjects.
The real test of a student isn't just their reporting on what's already known. The real test is their doing something new.
A better higher education paradigm would be spending a minority of time researching and reporting what's already known in a subject, for which no points are awarded. Then splitting the majority of the time between using that knowledge to produce something new, no matter how trivial - though requiring the base knowledge from purely historical knowledge - and the final task: educating others (teachers or classmates) in the new knowledge.
It's a lot harder to "just copy" the new knowledge, and even harder to fake teaching it to others. Such a system does require the teachers to know what's "new" and what's already known, but that kind of survey should be the work of the school itself, since it requires lots of low-skill "search the literature" work.
But this system would do a lot more than verify that students are educated. It would produce a lot more knowledge, and in the way that it's actually produced in "the real world".
Networks have revolutionized knowledge. They are therefore radically changing education. The momentum could be harnessed to power increased quality, rather than cheating.
--
make install -not war
I can't get over the fact that this "professional" writer insists on starting many of his sentences with And and But in TFA. I certainly wouldn't want him writing for me, much less pay him to do so.
Actually, one of the hardest things to shift is language-specific stuff. Pretty sure you're going to get caught when you turn in a paper in engrish.
Math and science on the other hand...
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You are one well rounded fellow. I wonder what your resume would look like applying for another position. Better, I wonder what the reaction of any recruiter would be upon seeing it.
The product returned to me was garbage, and, if I handed it in, would have resulted in a c grade at best. Whoever wrote clearly didn't carefully read the article, and instead focused on a few key sentences which he/she thought were important. The writing was verbose and not in the proper style for a philosophy paper; very disappointing.
But just what most users of the service would want, because it doesn't raise their head above the parapet.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
That may be fine if the topics are broad but if they are narrow it doesn't make much sense.
If I'm taking freshman Calculus and some of the problems are identical to the problems from the last month of my high-school Calculus class, well, the answers will be the same too.
On the other hand if college Freshman English class paper is "write about the influence of Mark Twain's peers on the book Huckleberry Finn" and you did a similar paper in high school, you shouldn't be allowed to "just turn it in." You should, however, be allowed to reference it as part of a new paper that incorporates new things you've learned in your current class or, if you didn't learn anything new, you should be encouraged to ask for a substitute assignment.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yeah, that's why this guy prefers his work be rewarded with MONEY, not credentials. Ironically, neither printing is necessarily worth more than the paper.
I listened to Spence on Growth the other night. He's the guy who came up with Signalling (economics) and won a Nobel prize for it, and then went off to do whacks of other high level stuff.
The premise of signalling theory is that the competence you gain from your education can be entirely ignored and the educational system would still have an economic function.
As for ethics, he's quite right his ethics are no worse than many of our leaders of the future. I have no doubt he does acceptable quality work. You can see that from the article. Students are pretty harried, so a lot of what even the good students produce is no great shakes. And he's a professional, with years of experience and crib sheets to draw upon.
My favorite part was that he "never edits" and gets thanked for the authentic mistakes. Just like slashdot, fire and forget.
The key assumption from Spence is that it costs less (by some metric) for a good student to earn the credential than the bad student. It's pretty clear at $2000 for a term paper, the bad student is taking it on the chin.
It's a basic problem in economics to determine who has the goods and who doesn't, without spending more on the discrimination than the discrimination is worth. University is the assembly line solution to this problem.
Shadow conformance is as inevitable as prostitution when society commoditizes human capital to the extent that global trade implies.
More of the problem explained here: Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms
(Had dim recall of the particulars of that link. Search google on "the world is thinking" to recover FORA.tv, hadn't the first clue about the guy's name so I searched FORA for the keyword "sir", and it came up first hit. That's funny. I could have found him the long way through TED.
WARNING: FORA practices bait and switch: you think you're watching the whole video, but clips are cut off abruptly as unpaid previews. The clip by the good Malcolm Gladwell on taxation would have been interesting to watch to conclusion. It's like his brain is loaned out from the Men in Black brain archive, and gets recalled from time to time, and to kill time without it, he writes another book.)
I started to do a series of "There, fixed that for you" replies based on the comments made. However, there were far too many spelling and gramatical errors for me to continue.
Certainly, from almost any self-consistent viewpoint one can take, one would conclude that much theology is unjustified either because it is built on false premises or because it is not justified by the premises on which it is notionally based, and possibly that some of the remainder reaches correct conclusions merely by coincidence, despite being based on false premises and/or faulty reasoning.
Characterizing it as "lies" is an assumption of ill motive, which is not necessary in most viewpoints (except, e.g., those that include as a premise "all false claims are deliberately false".)
Not at all true. Theologians -- even from religions that are, at the time, being used to justify wars against each other -- often accept ideas from theologians of different faiths and build upon them. As I recall, there was quite a significant exchange of ideas between medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theologians.
Certainly, theologians will think that some parts of the theology of different faiths (or even that of different theologians within their own faith tradition) is wrong, but that certainly does not mean that they will think that all theology but their own is lies.
I didnt go that far, but inevitably (in another post here I mentioned Im bad at math due to lack of practice) Id have a topic or two where I would almost always mix up something. Id have basic formulas and rules on the sheet, and maybe 2 or 3 example problems for material that I always screwed up.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
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.
Another article from a few years ago by a paper-mill writer pointed out an aspect of this I hadn't thought of before: people generally don't write good essays because they don't read essays on a regular basis. Most text that is read during the course of getting a degree isn't presented in 'essay' format. For an English degree you read a lot of novels but very few boring analytical essays. However, you're expected to write boring essays on a weekly basis.
Halfway through getting my English degree I realized that it wasn't a degree in 'writing' as I had assumed before - it's more of a degree in reading, because I did a hell of a lot more reading than writing. Close reading, analytical reading, boring reading, obscure reading, incomprehensible reading; a lot of goddamned reading. Writing was a necessary portion but not really the focus overall. At my school the difference between the general English degree I completed and a Creative Writing degree was two classes.
One thing that always baffled me working in the corporate world was the amount of customer-facing marketing and website material that was never proofread. That's how a company ends up with a full-page advertisement in the local paper proclaiming that they are The #1 Internet Proivder!
Overall, TFA makes me sad. I've written for money before but not for other people's schoolwork, and I don't know how I'd feel if I was offered a grand to crank out a thesis. It sounds like a tough way to make an easy living.
"This guy" is doing a job of writing papers.
I'm speaking of his customers, who value their degrees far more than the irrelevant courses they have to take to get a degree.
Such as an Art History major being required to take Calculus.
Didn't have to do it in the UK. However I do question the concept of teaching ethics to adults. How many people do you reckon sat up and thought "Holy shit, cutting corners to the detriment of safety is unethical"?
For the people who already have a built in sense of ethics (at the undergrad stage in life), it's a bit of a waste of time. For those who simply don't give a damn, they'll just blag their way through and pass unless they're very obviously sociopathic, or just plain stupid.
Take for instance the sign at my local petrol station: "It's a criminal offence to leave without paying for your fuel". It seriously concerns me that people have to be told this, however I do wonder how effective the sign is. How many people have been pulling away, read the sign and thought "Oh no, I'm destroying somebody's livelihood, I'll go back and pay". I suppose it may jog the memory of forgetful people, but on the whole it's preaching to the choir.
Now teaching ethics to those at a younger stage, that's a plan. Whilst not being religious, I do see the merit in a religious upbringing as it's a simple way of explaining why one shouldn't do "bad things". Not that a Baptist friend agrees that God should be used as a boogeyman for children.
Another article from a few years ago by a paper-mill writer pointed out an aspect of this I hadn't thought of before: people generally don't write good essays because they don't read essays on a regular basis.
That's because you are supposed to learn to write in grade school, aka 'grammar school,' and not in college. The school I went to recognized that most incoming freshmen don't know how to write and so required all students in all majors to take two semesters worth of writing seminars (100-level English courses). That's two semesters you probably should've spent learning actual material instead of re-treading over what your K-12 education failed to teach you.
i can has thezis?
On the one hand, it rather angers me that people out there are able to buy their way through undergrad (and grad school too) by buying papers. I wrote every single paper I turned in, and even if I had wanted to cheat, could not have afforded it.
On the other hand, I now work as an IT technical writer, and I'm surrounded by very smart people who are not very adept at writing things down. Since it's an area I excel at (from writing all my own papers and doing technical documentation for all the companies I've worked at even when it's not in my official job description), their lack of writing talent has ensured that I have a long, happy career ahead of me as a technical writer.
So march on, paper mills! Churn out more terrible writers from college so that I may continue to have easy work available!
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
My undergrad general chemistry class was somewhat like this. You could bring in notes, but only 3 index cards and it had to be hand written. Really it didn't matter that much since you largely didn't need notes for the test. Not sure why the limit, probably just to try and keep kids from bringing in entire copies of the textbook and wasting time going through it.
So we are getting ready for the first test and I see a girl in the row ahead of me get out a note card with the periodic table of the elements on it. Not a photocopy, hand drawn. Looked pretty detailed too, atomic number, symbol, weight, etc. Probably took her a long time to do all that.
Now I'll admit, a periodic table would be really useful on a chemistry test... Which is why the classroom featured two massive ones at the front. Each side had about a 20 foot display, that was clearly readable from the back, with all the information on it. These were permanent wall fixtures in that room, they were not brought in and out. They'd been there for years.
Somehow she had apparently missed that in class. Way to effectively spend your study time there :P.
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
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Was somewhat similar. First all the problems had sensible answers because the teacher didn't randomly make up polynomials or such, he started with the answers and constructed the polynomial form that. So the rules for the test were you could use anything you liked, notes, book, calculator, even go and ask him questions. He wouldn't give you the answer but would clear up misconceptions. When you answered a question, you chose how to do it. If you wanted, you would write the answer and circle it, nothing else. If you did that and the answer was correct, full credit. If you were incorrect, no credit.
You had the option of showing your work. If you showed your work, he'd trace through it and show you where you went wrong. The more of it you got right, the more points you'd get up to missing only a single point on the problem if all the work was right, save for some small error (like an arithmetic error or sign error or something). Also if you did something particularly clever in the solution, something he didn't think of, you could get extra credit. I remember noticing that two parts of an equation were the same thing despite begin stated differently and just canceled them, he hadn't noticed that and got some extra points.
That was an extremely effective class. I enjoyed it and learned a lot. That I did learn was confirmed when I went to university and absolutely aced the precalc test. His testing style was extremely effective at teaching, and didn't rely on stupid things like "You can't have notes or look at the book." It was about problem solving, not memorization.
Do they genuinely believe that scientific and technical fields require any less mental agility and analytic abilites?
It isn't a question of less or more, but simply different skills -- though there is definitely crossover (and probably more than either side would like to admit).
My first job was as a programmer and now I run a web design business where I still spend about 80% of my time writing code. Of course, I also took several semesters of CS in college, but then part of 'liberal arts' is that you're supposed to still have some science training as well ... something else that gets left out a lot, or else people take a survey course in geology and that somehow does it.
Following logic in written arguments or rhetoric is a different skill from following code or the logic behind a proof -- but if you're good at one, you probably have the capacity to be good at the other, if not necessarily the training.
My take on what liberal arts is supposed to be is that you should know a little bit about everything, at least such that you can hold an intelligent conversation with someone in any field and have a fundamental (if not very complex) grasp of what they do. To some people, this makes you a dilettante, but frankly I've found it pretty useful over the years -- and I've run a business, been a professional actor, written tons of code, written for the Onion, written marriage ceremonies, learned to fly an airplane, and been an amateur game designer. I've probably never been in the top ten percent of any one of those things, but I'm fine with that.
Why does this entire article smell of fakery to bolster ad revenue? I know people like this exist and while in school I had people offer me their services in this department on several occasions. But this whole article smells fishy. The numbers barely make sense and he seems way too altruistic. I also had a professor in college who claimed to have taken a writing class and there were people like this guy in there and apparently they all wrote garbage papers. Anybody else smell fakery in this article or am I just spitting conspiracy theories?
Somewhere a statue of Alexandre Dumas shed a tear that the name of his character who embodies revenge as an instrument of social justice and is a paragon of integrity is being used as the pseudonym for this person who helps people fake their way through life at the expense of others.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Or a journalist. Like the this shadow-writer. Especially if they are widely read. With web you can generate a fair number of believable references on any subject. Then stuff it with quality prose.
At this prodigious rate of 5,000 pages a year? I might re-visit a topic in my blogs or an online discussion group and possibly regurgitate sentences I wrote weeks before without knowing. I only have a limited degree of creativity.
I gave a co-worker a can of Mountin Dew to write this comment for me.
What a civil and polite post you've created.
I get how a person can write paper for high school kids or some of the easier beginning stuff for university, but he mentions a lot of things that would of been a lot harder.
So is this guys a super genius or are university papers actually very easy to write?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Come on now! They could totally make it as far Starbucks
does anyone care if students cheat on some paper? can't students already buy their way into higher tier colleges? writing a paper isn't proof of real knowledge anyway, but if some humanities professor thinks his material is relevant let him test on it. fucking waste of time most of these courses. here's a thought, let a student study what they want and achieve real success without piling on extra "well rounded student" courses. the fuck does some kid with asperger's care about art history? (unless of course, he REALLY cares about art history, but then he'd be an art history major) sincerely, some college kid with asperger's who doesn't give a fuck about art history.
I feel for the ESL students, good luck and keep plugging away, the other trash bags should just be hung and the corpses left in the town square. These people are criminals! Hang 'em all!
I prefer Classic Slashdot.
That's the entire point of going to University no matter what degree you take. Of course some people treat it like a trade school but it's not supposed to be that.
So you are telling me that when you go to work for a company built around cheating, you are liable to get cheated by your employers? Imagine my shock!
Why should absolute be required? If a man and wife are ok with an open marriage, why is it ok for someone that isn't to condemn them? How do you reconcile when entire cultures have conflict over what is or isn't ethical? The culture most like you gets to declare what's right for everyone (not that you'd personally say that, but that's how it works out in history)?
And relativism doesn't mean that his opinion is exactly equal to yours in that if the two of you have a disagreement you are required to concede to him. It means that there needs to be awareness of the environment when resolving the conflict. Manson wasn't ethical because he didn't think what he was doing was wrong. And no, his opinion doesn't share the same weight as mine (unless the number of mass murders outnumbered the number of non-mass murders, which isn't a self-sustaining culture).
I don't know about you, but the people I've met and talked with in-depth that had complaints like yours stopped taking ethics because they were nutjob-conservative who believed they had the right to personally assert what everyone else should do, and no one should tell them otherwise. But then maybe I've not taken the right ethics classes, as they haven't been ethics theory, but ethics for engineers or other such specific applied ethics classes. But they do touch on things that were ethical when done and wouldn't be now (many such examples in psychology) and since ethics, by nature, is dependent on the culture at that time and place, it is necessarily relativist.
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The problem with relativist ethics is that everything becomes relative. Murder? Relative. Theft? Relative. You need to be able to say, "In all cases, this thing is wrong" so when a Manson comes along, you can deal with him without going out and holding a vote.
The biggest problem with absolutist ethics is that people start trying to apply them to things like polyamory...Why is this a moral issue? Is anyone getting hurt? Being lied to? Being stolen from? No? Not a moral issue.
Whenever you start trying to lay down an absolute ethical theory, this exact objection comes up. Every society has something that they do, that other societies disapprove of, and so no one can agree on an absolute standard, so they fall back to cultural relativism, which is just as shitty as individual relativism.
Traditional religion (in its self-appointed role as "Arbiter of concrete moral standards") always screws this stuff up, so people become disenchanted with the idea of a bunch of stuck up assholes telling them that eating pork makes them sinners.
But the fact that religion doesn't do it right, doesn't mean it's the wrong answer. Relativism sucks, and it doesn't reflect anything meaningful in human interaction...There are no ethically relativistic societies out there.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The problem with relativist ethics is that everything becomes relative. Murder? Relative. Theft? Relative.
But, the fact of the matter is, it is. Duels used to be common. A sitting Vice President killed a man in a duel, and a man that would later go on to become president killed a man in a duel. Not that politicians are to be held in high regard, but if "murders" can take or continue to hold office, then it isn't as absolute as you imply.
There were tribes in the US where theft was considered a virtue. Being able to sneak into an enemy camp, take something of value, and escape was lauded, not condemned - even by those stolen from. So again, who are you to state that is wrong? For one, it was thought to reduce the tribal wars because they would have their Indian Ninja prove the prowess of the tribe over the other and they'd not have full-out battles.
But there's little that can be said today that would defend the practice of duels, but premeditated killing of humans is still accepted and done in the US on a regular basis. So taking of life is a relative thing. Many countries even refuse to extradite for certain crimes because of that practice.
The biggest problem with absolutist ethics is that people start trying to apply them to things like polyamory...Why is this a moral issue? Is anyone getting hurt? Being lied to? Being stolen from? No? Not a moral issue.
I think it is a moral issue, though we may be quibbling about the definition of morals. Morals as "proper behavior" would indicate that some people think that open relationships (or drug use, or tattoos, or anything else you can think of) isn't "proper behavior." So that would make it a moral issue. But, even if it is a moral issue and "wrong" couldn't it still be immoral to enforce one's views of morality on another?
Perhaps (some) moral relativists fall into the category of moral absolutists who believe that morals needn't be enforced for all cases. Just because it's immoral doesn't mean it should be wrong. For instance, lying is considered immoral (well short of the white lies, which are debatable), but as long as you don't materially harm the other person with a lie, they don't fall afoul of the law. Using the law as the definition of "wrong" (yeah, don't go there), something can be "wrong" and not immoral (speeding) or immoral without being "wrong" (lying without provable harm to someone).
There are no ethically relativistic societies out there.
But the fact that there are lots of them out there without matching ethics means they are, in practice, relativistic. Otherwise, there's be one set of ethics universally applied over the world.
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you are NOTHING