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...
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.
The source of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No engineering? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 engineering? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not what he implied, the article is about writing scientific papers and therefore I assume that the parent meant that all the scientific disciplines mentioned are not important. Not the subjects, that's a difference.
Now, I do agree that is a bit harsh but I have to agree that anyone dumb Joe can probably become good at any of the above mentioned subjects -- but you would need intelligence to excel in mathematics, physics, engineering and the like.
School to Corporate Prep (Score:4, Insightful)
Wonderful Article (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Yeah, but (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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: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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Many schools have a rule that you cannot use work you did for a prior class.
Then every paper will begin with an alphabet, rosetta stone, etc. If you know the material, it's immaterial where you learned 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:1, Insightful)
No, that is the difference between what an obsessive math freak thinks are subjective and objective metrics. There are very useful objective metrics in most humanities disciplines. They aren't as widely practiced as they should be, but they do exist. And as someone else put it above, it's just as easy to cheat on a math exam as it is to cheat on a paper.
Re:No engineering? (Score:1, Insightful)
why do you cower? what are you afraid of? you're completely pathetic.
ring ring ring ring ring ring ring banana phone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically everything is copying. It took years to get binary search correct on its own. Most students are just parroting out algorithms from memory that they got from a book which is more or less copying anyway. Programming is really about slapping together a bunch of algorithms/library calls into a coherent program...
Also even an open book take home test is not so easy to cheat on. If you say define term x, define term y, then the answers are in the book/google/bing/etc.. If instead you come up with some problem that uses the stuff but is not so obvious, then only people who really studied will get it. Often the cheaters all get it wrong, and it becomes obvious they cheated because they all get the same exact wrong answer....
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:Students will only punish themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Can we begin with "loose" vs "lose"?
Re:The source of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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:No engineering? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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: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: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: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.
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:3, Insightful)
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 appreciation type courses. Because I'm NOT going to be the one to write the next great novel - I'm more likely to be trying to write regulations, personal evaluations*, reports, documentation.
*One line bullet statements; it's not real english.
Re:No engineering? (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect other engineering tasks are similar. When someone is building a building, is it forbidden for the other engineers to work together?
Even when it comes to writing reports, having someone else do it for you is considered outsourcing and the ability to manage outsourced work is highly sought after.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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 governmental interference in these segments has been meant to address problems of income shortfalls in the working class, but instead, inflated those prices; made the degree into some sort of "magical piece of paper" - required to gain entrance into the magical land of >$40k salaries and bennies. (which, used to cut it back in the 1980's, doesn't cut it anymore. now it's more like >$100k, or >$150k for that standard of living). Unfortunately - the associated skills learned are not even roughly equivalent to 5 years professional experience in the field.
Why does the government need to interfere in these segments of the economy by subsidizing? Because of our ideology. So we can pretend to be a free-capitalist market, while, in actuality, being a heavily corporatist/socialist economic system. Because our government lacks the very fundamental power to create its own currency. (and therefore, is not a real government.) Because of this: these subsidies are "for show" subsidies - and only act to distort the market. They help no-one, and long-term, to more harm than good. Due to the geometric progression of interest owed on borrowed money, eventually, we (the "responsible parties" of the government debt) are going to be completely screwed.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
And since when is essay writing all that valuable in say the techie world?
It's not valuable at all if you're content to be the low-level code monkey who just does what he's told. The instant you need to communicate proposals, specs or requirements to other people, it will serve you well to not come across as borderline illiterate. I've actually heard the ol' "you know what I meant" defense from people that would never say that to a compiler. (Well, they probably say it same as I do, but they wouldn't expect the compiler to take them seriously.)
Hope you like working for The Man(tm). If you want to strike out on your own, it's been my experience that potential clients or VCs often hesitate to give money to folks that can barely string two words together in a proposal or business plan.
Essay writing is valuable, as are other less technical subjects. Despite whatever we might have thought in college, we don't spend our entire day feeding instructions to a machine.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No engineering? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 modality, and everything is equally valid.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:No science? (Score:2, Insightful)
You've probably never graded any assignments. For something as simple as 1+1=2, what you've stated is true. For complex math, science and engineering equations that require multiple steps, there are enough variations in arriving at a correct answer that you can easily spot the lazy cheaters. People indent differently. People start different parts of the problem first. In a class of 30, I easily spotted the obvious duplicates, even when I saw the 2nd student's paper hours later. Except for the obvious duplicate, no two papers in that class of 30 had the same organizational structure to arriving at the final correct answer. There were a few that had similar structures, but still varied enough to be different. Of course a single duplicate isn't necessarily a sign of cheating, but if you notice someone duplicating several problems and several assignments, it's obvious they're just copying. The answers may be absolute truths, but the process at arriving at the answers differs quite a bit from person to person.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just to say that while degree itself may not be all that important, having had to actually work to get it helps a lot, and so most people with degrees are better in their profession as a result. I certainly knew how to program well before college. But I also learnt a lot in college, and it would have taken much longer to get equivalent of theoretical knowledge. I was motivated to study of course, so just copying papers or code would have been of very little value.
Re:No engineering? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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 believe that, then our ideas of education differ greatly.
While education can and does increase the material well being of society, this cannot be its only purpose. If I were Socrates, I would probably be able to ask you a series of questions that would lead you to realize that the assumption that education is only for material gain leads to logically fatal self-contradictions. But I am not Socrates. So I am left to give some quotations from Greek philosophers:
"The purpose of education is to teach us to love beauty." Plato
"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead." Aristotle
"The un-considered life is not worth living." Socrates
The above quotations point to a type of education which I believe is increasingly foreign to contemporary students. You see glimpses of it, in passionate scientists like Carl Sagan, or Richard Feynman. However, I believe that most students today receive an education that seems intended to make them into drones, drifting through life with no other purpose than to fulfill a role in a huge bureaucratic machine.
The fact that in the public sphere we have largely ceded education to the purpose of wealth creation is disturbing to me. By your comment I can tell that you didn't have a conception of what I meant from my original comment. Many of my educational ideals are gained by reading the writings of the ancient Greeks.
I believe that it is very important for more of us to begin reading the Greek Philosophers again. Their ideas, their ideals were what lifted civilization out of the Dark Ages. Greek philosophy is what sparked the modern scientific revolution. The Greeks gave us our ideals of law and justice. They were the first moneyed society, and many of their tragic plays can be seen as warnings about the perils of money. The Greeks created the first recognizable universities, and our modern educational system is largely modelled after Greek institutions.
So if you really want to understand my ideas of education, read some Greek literature. Read Plato's "The Apology". Read some tragedies by Sophocles. Read the Iliad. Twice. Read some Aristotle. Study some philosophy. Read Kant. Read Locke. Then come back and tell me that we should educate the vast majority of citizens to be corporate drones.
Re:No engineering? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 to explain what we're doing. Some are quite good at setting out context, and how particular details of technology and procedure fit into that context; others, when questioned, just explain technical details, neglecting context; and a few, when questioned, will just jump into fixing a problem, making no effort to explain what they are doing or why. The training documentation consists largely of lists of URLs for Web frontends to tools and archives of documentation, without a word of explanation what the tools are for or which of the thousands of linked documents are important to read. Many of those links are dead; most of the linked documents are just as poorly written.
In general, I've seen that an enormous amount of time is wasted by poor communication, in particular by the neglect of context. Data is a necessary condition for knowledge, but not a sufficient condition.
The liberal arts, for all the bad reputation they've gotten, are necessary and sorely under-appreciated by the tech community, because the liberal arts are supposed to teach the art of communication. In saying that, I must admit that there's good reason for the bad reputation of the liberal arts and the social sciences, as there certainly are a lot of students who coast through their coursework, on their way to careers as pointy-haired bosses. Part of the trouble there is the inflation in credentials; another part is the bizarre world of managerial culture. But in general, I think we'd be better off if more people took the liberal arts more seriously, and if more science and engineering students took more humanities courses, even if we had fewer liberal arts majors and more science and engineering courses for liberal arts majors.