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Some YouTube Stars Are Being Paid To Sell Academic Cheating (bbc.com)
A BBC investigation has found that more than 250 YouTube channels are being paid to sell academic cheating. Specifically, they are promoting EduBirdie, which allows students to buy essays, rather than doing the work themselves. From the report: The BBC Trending investigation uncovered more than 1,400 videos with a total of more than 700 million views containing EduBirdie adverts selling cheating to students and school pupils. EduBirdie is based in Ukraine, but aims its services at pupils and students across the globe. Essay writing services are not illegal, but if students submit work they have paid for someone else to do the penalties can be severe. The company is not just aiming to capture the attention of university students with its advertising. Popular YouTubers, some as young as 12, are being paid to personally endorse the service. In some of the videos YouTubers say if you cannot be bothered to do the work, EduBirdie has a "super smart nerd" who will do it for you. The adverts appear in videos on YouTube channels covering a range of subjects, including pranks, dating, gaming, music and fashion. Following the BBC's investigation, both have now removed videos with EduBirdie adverts from YouTube. A YouTube spokesman told the BBC: "YouTube creators may include paid endorsements as part of their content only if the product or service they are endorsing complies with our advertising policies. We will be working with creators going forward so they better understand that in video promotions must not promote dishonest activity."
As an engineer, I will never be in a position of being "exposed" for being unable to write a good essay about Shakespeare's "Midsummer night's dream". Real life is not like college.
You are also presuming that people cheat because they can't do the work. I think I actually could write a good essay about MSND if I cared to. I just preferred to devote time to things that actually mattered, like my engineering courses.
And you are presuming that people only cheat on exams that don't matter to their main field of study.
"I just preferred to devote time to things that actually mattered, like my engineering courses."
A Midsummer Night's Dream was written over four hundred years ago. Care to tell us what you're working on now that people in 2418 will talk about?
Still think what you're doing matters?
This contemptuous and dismissive arrogance from engineers whose only contributions are to next year's e-waste is tiresome.
And I work in engineering.
Mostly random stuff.
You are also presuming that people cheat because they can't do the work. I think I actually could write a good essay about MSND if I cared to. I just preferred to devote time to things that actually mattered, like my engineering courses.
One of the time-honored excuses of cheaters. Turns out, they usually are quite wrong with their self-evaluation. Arrogance and stupidity have synergistic effects.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...when I read that advertisers "...must not promote dishonest activity." What do they think advertisers do?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
so why should they force me to write essays on "Shakespeare and the Semicolon"
Because we're only a step or two away from a plains ape and have trouble forming personal connections with more than about 200-300 people. We've some biological wiring that gets worked up about 'other' and 'outsider'. Shared culture helps. It teaches or reminds us of the values that we share. It means that if I meet someone from someplace I've never been, that I can make some assumptions about how they will act and behave based on shared values. It's not perfect, but it's what we've got.
You don't have to look at the elements that are important in building or defining that culture. You can pick most of it up second hand, so to speak, but living in and among people who have been shaped by exposure to those elements, but when the aim of education in more than just learning a skill, but is also about producing members of society who are well educated, then taking at least a minor look at some of the more influential elements and how they have come to be that way is useful.
Your essay on Shakespeare isn't the equivalent of a differential equation. It's closer to multiplication. It's basic, high school stuff.
Shakespeare would be completely unknown today without Gutenberg's engineering genius.