Shadow Scholar Details Student Cheating 542
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.'"
No engineering? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:No engineering? (Score:4, Funny)
Note that animal husbandry is okay, as long as it's not video documented.
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Engineering students just copy from each other. The penalties are harsh though, I had some friends that were caught doing it for one of the easiest possible classes and they were all instantly failed from the course. I've never personally cheated during my coursework, but from my own anecdotes I would say about 30-40% of my classmates were cheating. Either by copying homework solutions directly from solutions manuals, from previous years papers, or by copying the work from someone else.
People would also a
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Consult Feynman? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my time at school some of our teachers gave us free hand - bring what you want and see if you succeed. The problem was that these were the most difficult exams of them all as they required:
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.
They're also the most representative of what most people need to do in the real world. Solve problems in real-time with access to reference material if they need it.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hardly ever used my "cheat sheets". By the time I was done studying and had created my sheet I knew the material well.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Boom. This right here.
I had them. Occasionally they were helpful to reference complex formulae or names/dates I never cared to memorize. But the activity of summarizing concepts and creating the cheat sheet was all the review I needed to handle the exam.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Similarly, I had a Calc professor who gave all the answers on the test, but you had to show all the work on how to get there.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'll reply to you of a few possible posts.
I begin to think that meta-organization is becoming more important now. The guy with "bring in the grad student" did it right. It's how business really works. Courses reward the Specialist, but business rewards the Jack-of-all-trades if he can make himself CEO and is really savvy with hiring.
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Yea. If you can derive a contradiction from the negation of the corresponding conditional [wikipedia.org] you know that the argument is logically valid. Or, in english, if you can prove that the negation of a proposition leads to a logical contradiction, then the original statement is true.
You can also use it to prove points that are irrelevant to your givens. Since (in deduction) your premises are all assumed to be true, if you can use them to form a logical contradiction, then you've basically divided by zero in that mod
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I was guessing that the point of the exercise was that there was some flaw with the givens -- a reductio ad absurdum.
Re:No engineering? (Score:4, Funny)
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I have run into the, "single page of notes," option many times. I have to say that it is extremely helpful to me as I have a poor memory of things like formulas and names. This is due to a named and diagnosable cognitive issue. Being in my final semester of an MBA program (with no cheating, mind you), I make up for it in other ways.
I remember one instructors comment on the idea of books during exams and tests. It was during my undergrad yeas sin on of my engineering classes. His comment was, "no one is ever
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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I suspect other engineering tasks are similar. When someone is building a building, is it forbidden for the other engineers to work to
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A paper? He'd probably do fine. An exam however? He'd flunk it quite badly.
This is the difference between subjective and objective metrics.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hah! I'd love to see how this guy would do a physics or calculus paper...
When I studied Physics we had hardly any coursework. There was some but I don't remember it as I never did any. 80% of the course was based on reeling off mathematical proofs in exams.
In this type of course it would be just too easy to cheat so they force you to reel the proofs off under closed conditions with a limited supply of reference material (if any) provided.
I do remember when I was studying Physics though one of my house mates who was studying Sociology and Cultural Studies had to write an essay on Neil Stephenson and his book The Diamond Age. He had about as much interest in Science Fiction a I do in Sociology but he chose that book as he knew I had a copy. He also knew I liked the author.
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.
Incidentally the guy who wrote that essay passed sociology and now works as a building site labourer. I failed physics and work as a lead software developer for a fairly small but very friendly company. I guess the employment market does not really value his sociology degree either.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'm an engineer (well, comp sci, so sort of) and I can write A+ English papers all day. I just fucking hate doing it.
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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".
I certainly do.
I've recently started an entry-level job in IT, in a network operations center. The computer networks we monitor are quite different from each other, with a mix of Linux, Unix, and Windows servers; the networks of corporations and teams are even more complicated. I've found my co-workers to be generally knowledgeable about the technologies involved, though each of us has a particular forte, of course.
What has really stuck out is that there's a much wider divergence in my co-worker's abilities
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code to draw and scale using the squiggly lines.
Splines?
It's pretty funny that you wrote a report on this but can't remember the name for anything :p
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Could be Bezier splines [wikipedia.org]. I worked with my dad on a CAD plugin he wrote that converted geometry into splines for a machine that cut ceramics/textiles. I'd forgotten the "Bezier" name too to be honest.
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You're probably thinking of Bézier curves [wikipedia.org].
Ha! Obviously he hired someone to write it! (Score:3, Funny)
code to draw and scale using the squiggly lines.
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 ;-)
Re:No engineering? (Score:4, Funny)
That's flamebait if every I've seen it.
In what world do you live in that accounting, sustainability, maritime security and ethics do not matter?
Would you really like to live in a world where your employer had no money to pay you, farmers had no crops left to feed you, and pirates and foreign armies were free to invade via sea to rape your wife and daughters while everyone else either watched idly, or cheered them on?
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It's the American dream (Score:2)
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.
Re:It's the American dream (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
No science? (Score:2)
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Science & Engineering papers usually depend on new work or research, whereas a lot of the subjects he mentioned just want you to repeat whatever the current received wisdom is with your own little bit on why you agree with it
Re:No science? (Score:4, Insightful)
science and physics course work you can copy much easier by yourself as it's "absolute truth" from the course material(that's been running in any given university for couple of decades with the same problems and assigments). it's much harder to prove that you copied 1+1=2 than to prove that you copied sentences directly from someone else.
here's a nice plagiarism tip: use a source that's in another language than the one you're submitting in, then just translate. it's a method many many many songwriters, book authors, reporters, national heros etc have used with great success. the less has been translated to any given language the easier it is.
Re:No science? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:No science? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And there's also an *awful* lot of waffle in these types of things, too.
When I was a first year student, one thing I had to do on my degree course was Industrial Socieology. A group of us were sitting around in one of the computer rooms one evening, having been given an assignment for this course, and we were having a bit of a group-moan about the awful paper we had been forced to read first. The first paragraph of this tortured and abused the English language as far as it would go: a single run-on sentence
No STEM (Score:2)
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.
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The big difference is the amount of coursework. My degree only had a couple of modules that were more than 20% coursework, while people in humanities courses had a lot that were completely assessed by long essays. Paying someone to do all of the coursework on my degree would, even if they got 100%, only just be enough to move you up one grade boundary. The coursework was mainly there so you knew before the exam whether you really understood the subject.
To cheat, you'd need to pay someone to sit the ex
Re:No STEM (Score:4, Insightful)
Shrug. I think it'd be more work to fake your way through a liberal arts class than a big math/science class. I took classes that had more than 1000 students in the section, where the exams were given by TA's who'd probably never seen you before.
For the price of a fake student ID, you could have someone take the exams FOR you. Easy. I once took a geology class where I only came to class for the exams, and aced the whole course. I did roughly the same for physics (I went to the practicums religiously, but never to class). I never saw my TA at the exams, and, indeed, I took the exams at the wrong location every time, due to a scheduling conflict. My professor might have been there, but I don't know because I didn't know what he looked like.
In short, just because this guy specializes in liberal arts, doesn't mean there aren't people out there who can churn out easy science classes. And saying that, "Well you couldn't do hard science classes" misses the point: the people who do this stuff are doing it to knock off course requirements. It'd be equally hard to bluff your way through higher level liberal arts classes, with maybe 10 other students, and a heavy dependence on class participation.
Students will only punish themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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As someone who has worked at a university I have to let you know that after the grade/degree is final it is final. There are no consequences of finding out afterwards, and the potential for blackmail here is minimal.
Sorry, but that's not true. I knew somebody whose PhD was rescinded due to plagiarism. The guy basically chucked away ten years of his life, because he can't do anything related to the field he studied - nobody will write recommendations for him.
also he may be a liar (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Which, of course, won't be plagiarised...
Except he can't release evidence because that would get the non-authors in trouble.
So we can't reasonably falsify his statement, as he is aware.
I get the feeling this man is a scientist and a troll, and he intentionally indicated that he was not writing science/mathematics/engineering papers to mock the other disciplines as bullshit.
8/10 very good effort.
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Except that his story isn't that hard to believe. I can remember busting out 20-page papers overnight when I was in college and I'm not a particularly fast writer. It's easy to imagine that someone with enough practice and motivation could churn out papers like this for a living.
Today I code web applications and I recognize the process he describes. He has essentially built a research paper "framework" that lets him quickly build products that fit a baseline set of requirements. In fact it sounds like he ra
Total bullshit (Score:2)
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.
School to Corporate Prep (Score:4, Insightful)
Obligatory South Park ref (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory South Park ref (Score:4, Funny)
The one nice thing about a music degree... (Score:3, Funny)
And that 10-pager I wrote on French opera in a two-year span of the 18th century [wikipedia.org], 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.
Future managers of America (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
English & Liberal arts not for the weak-minded (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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The source of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Many schools have a rule that you cannot use work you did for a prior class.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
And I've seen an instructor pass students after they turn in ~10 pages of nearly identical answers. Years ago when I was marking CS Masters degree coursework, I noticed that two papers were almost identical. The only thing changed was the spelling had been corrected in one version. I took it to the course organiser, who said he agreed that it was certainly copied, but we should drop it because a) it just wasn't worth the hassle and b) these were foreign students (Taiwanese) who were paying a lot to be at the university, and it may be a cultural thing that they don't see copying as a bad/prohibited thing, and it just wasn't worth the hassle of following the official plagiarism process.
Another anecdote: several hours before a big programming deadline, I am sitting in the lab, and one of the guys from my course comes in. He's one of the guys who isn't so knowledgeable about computers - computer science students tended towards being geeky and into programming, math, electronics, physics etc. but there were always a few who were just there for the qualification so they can get the money whilst learning as little as possible (to be honest, these were the ones who were usually doing joint degrees in business or management)... with about 4 hours to go, this person asks his friend to send him a copy of his work, and promises to change all the variable names and add a few dummy declarations, so they won't get caught. It was blatant copying, he didn't have any idea how the program worked, and he didn't care how it worked.
Another interesting anecdote I have comes from an EE friend of mine. He got so fed up of people stealing his work that he stopped using the lab printers during normal hours. He was known as one of the more knowledgeable people on his degree course, and it was just completely normal that, coming up to a deadline, he would print his circuits and associated text ready for handing in, and it would get stolen by someone while it was sitting next to the printer.
So, whilst I agree that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether or not cheating has really taken place, there is no doubt that people do cheat. I think we should actually use more automated systems to detect possible cheating, pay people to find out whether it is cheating, and have strict processes and penalties in place to remove habitual cheats. Doing otherwise just devalues the whole academic institution.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
The "source" of the problem, in my opinion, is the shifting of education from being something of value in and of itself, to it becoming something of value largely based on the future financial gain to the student. This corrupts the purpose of education, making it a selfish pursuit instead of a noble search for truth. When education becomes a selfish pursuit, it subconsciously licences the student to use whatever means are necessary to receive the credential. Do you think Einstein sought his theory for mo
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Fully/well lived? By now or by then? Or is this a continued project?
Consider someone who does nothing.. maybe plays Go, works, comes home and meditates a lot. A person who sits around calming themselves, focusing introspectively, and considering everything around them, thinking about things, trying to understand things. Seems like a waste of time, right?
Many people I know actively reject knowledge. They "don't want to know, don't want to learn" anything new. When I try to explain simple things tha
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I think you and I have rather different conceptions of education.
Einstein and the others had completed their education, and were driving forward the boundaries of knowledge. Aka scientists.
I think the above statement indicates your conception of the purpose of education. You imply that the purpose of a scientific education is to "drive forward the boundaries of knowledge". At first this sounds very much like what I think. However, I believe there is an implicit assumption that the sole purpose of "driving forward the boundaries of knowledge" is to increase the material well being of society; aka to make money. If you do be
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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 b
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Your statement is true; and suggests an economic inbalance; an unnatural inflation in wages in the US job market. . . which, in my observation, is true: to match, certain other (heavily subsidized and/or legislatively monopolized) segments of the economy whose costs have spiraled out of control: entertainment, medicine/healthcare, law, banking/finance (especially including housing and automotive).
The "matriculated class" deals with these highly-inflated segments. The "uneducated" do not; usually. The gove
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:The source of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I did a little teaching at a local college, it was just Second year VB6. I told students its much easier to google up an algorithm, than to try and rewrite it every time.. The real test is how you use them.. Students that called sub routines often (re-use code) rather then past the same logic over and over again.. those are the ones I knew had a knack for code.. The marks I gave out were mostly on interaction... The ones that asked questions, and specifically, the ones the re-asked the question when it seemed contradictory to any prior advice I had given them... The ones that stay quiet in the back, or dont show up for class... then suddenly turn in a perfect project, would get my attention... then I would set out to decide if they were savants, or just cheaters... I was happy to find out most were savants, as they had been tinkering with programming concepts at home and at previous schools..
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I was thinking 'in the commercial world' - English majors are mostly an 'internal product' of the teaching world. You generally don't become an english major if you're looking for work outside the teaching environment. Which would make for some distortions, since most works in english aren't written by, or even reviewed by, english majors.
That's not to say that I don't value their education and teachings, but that I honestly see more personal value in a technical writing course than I do most literary app
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Can we begin with "loose" vs "lose"?
Re:The source of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The source of the problem (Score:4, Funny)
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You know what's ironic? (And I'm surprised nobody's called me out on it yet...) I realize after review that I put a sentence in that post without a verb.
That just might have something to do with the fact that not all verbless sentences are wrong, or inappropriate. They're just bad style from time to time.
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This is just to say that while degree itself may not
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Which code would you rather maintain?
Preferably one in which the meaning of the latter would be readable in the body of the function without resorting to describing the algorithm in English.
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I can argue by anecdote too!
All my schooling prior to college was in a public school system. While they didn't pay their teachers at great rates, they were better than most of the surrounding area, which definitely helped. I had a mix, but most were either competent or better than competent. My second grade teacher in particular did some really innovative math teaching, and my fifth grade teacher taught me a great deal about writing well rather than just writing correctly.
But none of that really counts as e
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(And before any criticism is leveled at my punctuation, I take the British approach to quotes as it is more logical.)
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Essay writing in the techie world (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [intel.com]. Which one is easier to understand, and more persuasive? Which one do you think would still be remembered 45 years later?
Words matter.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
God, I wish I had mod points.
In the world of enterprise software, you must have well-written requirements. And specs. Everything needs to be written down so five years down the road you aren't left wondering why you did something a certain way. Or, God forbid, you get hit by a bus and some other poor sucker has to figure out what you did and why. I've seen programmers whose written English is so poor as to border on illiteracy. They write specs that are complete nonsense. It doesn't matter how good a programmer you are if you can't put what you code into plain English so others can understand it.
On the subject of cheating, I recently had a candidate who was given a coding assignment so I could gauge their programming abilities. Nothing too serious, I just wanted to make sure this person could actually code, right? They submitted something blatantly copied from a website. Very little Google searching turned up the original source. I don't know what's worse: that they didn't think they'd get caught; that they thought I was too stupid to figure out what they did; or that they simply didn't care enough to do the assignment on their own. I mean, if you'd cheat in the process of applying for a job, why the hell would I want you to work for me?
Re:The source of the problem (Score:4, Funny)
Or, God forbid, you get hit by a bus and some other poor sucker has to figure out what you did and why.
Why are hypothetical programmers always being hit by hypothetical buses? Also, why is it always suggested that they are poor at documenting their hypothetical code?
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For "bus" you may substitute some other sudden or not-so-sudden tragedy. The point is, the people who work here today may not be here tomorrow, and the software must still be maintained in any case.
It's not just documenting code that matters, it's having documented specifications. The specs say how the system should work. The code says how it does work. These things are not always the same and it's worthwhile to know where you have discrepancies.
Programmers often seem to think of documentation and other pap
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I would assume that someone in a graduate program might actually be interested in the topic...
I make fun of my friend for being in an EE master's program where something like %40 of his coursework is non-EE. He likes the material, but he's also in it 'cause the job market is so lousy that a masters is becoming somewhat standard.I also know plenty of guys in the masters program 'cause they want to become management. Then there fields like education or psych where a masters is required for most positions. Basically it may be that money, not interest, is the motivator for being in a masters program.
Re:It's the modern way (Score:5, Funny)
I have a Liberal Arts degree - where do I sign up?
http://mcdonalds.com.au/careers/join-us [mcdonalds.com.au]
Sorry, someone had to say it. :P
Re:anonymous coward (Score:5, Funny)
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 :-)
Re:Ethics (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ethics (Score:5, Funny)
"The Ethics of Cheating on my Ethics Thesis: Did I Cheat? Can You Tell? Does It Matter Anyway?"