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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...
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.
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?
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
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.
You told us to write an ese, so we sent letters to our friends in Mejico
No the source of the problem is the value of the degree exceeds the value of the courses.
The piece of paper at the end is the important part, the classes leading to that piece of paper are failing to provide sufficient benefit to the students.
Many schools have a rule that you cannot use work you did for a prior class.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
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.
When was the last time a person with an English Degree really had value in society?
Many people with English degrees become teachers. I've had several such teachers, some quite talented. Are you saying teachers aren't valuable?
And since when is essay writing all that valuable in say the techie world?
When you work for a small company that can't afford a technical writer. Holy fuck is it annoying to completely rewrite document after document produced by a bunch of slackers who think because they know how to ping something that means they can be practically nonfunctional at everything else including such basic things as language.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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
"The Ethics of Cheating on my Ethics Thesis: Did I Cheat? Can You Tell? Does It Matter Anyway?"
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/
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.
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/
The piece of paper at the end is the important part, the classes leading to that piece of paper are failing to provide sufficient benefit to the students.
College: You're doing it wrong.
I believe one of the reasons why students cheat on the Humanities is because we don't value the humanities and we force students to take course that they simply aren't interested in.
Cognitive psychology, accounting and pharmacology (three subjects from the list in the summary) are not "humanities". And you can bet the only reason that person wasn't doing maths or computing coursework was that he wasn't up to standard in those subjects. People cheat because they want the results without doing the work.
What I believe these services do is allow students the opportunity to get through work they simply will never have any interest in--or they BELIEVE they won't be interested in. When was the last time a person with an English Degree really had value in society?
If they don't think they will be interested, why do they choose that subject?
And since when is essay writing all that valuable in say the techie world?
The "techie world" isn't a world, and the techies that can write good proposals and reports and can communicate effectively with customers or with other departments in the company are likely to do better than those who can't.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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.
And since when is essay writing all that valuable in say the techie world?
A software developer who can't communicate is worthless.
On the other screen of my computer right now is a design proposal that is every bit as linguistically complex and eloquent as any essay or term paper I wrote in school. It is a deliverable requirement for a major software project and is, in fact, more highly valued than the source code that will eventually back it up.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.