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.'"
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.
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.
Re:also he may be a liar (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
leik omg! lol! (Score:2, Interesting)
"thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now".
He helped Lolcats graduate. Now they can "haz cheezburger and duhploma."
Honestly, I would love to be able to afford to go back to school. I would absolutely bust my ass the entire way through, and do so proudly and without complaint. This is either sickening and disappointing or i am just old and cantankerous.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:1, Interesting)
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. Sure, I suppose there are those who could use these services to go through their whole education and use this as a crutch--I bet there are those that get in over their heads, but I don't see this as the trend, because eventually you have to be able to hold an intelligent conversation with people. 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? And since when is essay writing all that valuable in say the techie world? Heck, this guy that's writing all these papers, probably is the most entrepreneurial English major around.
Sure professors can do more to breathe life into their subjects. Sure they can test harder and stop giving the same tests to students and using the same identical curriculum year after year (which is where most cheating in college occurs, btw... just ask the foreign grad students who have whole batteries of "study aids" that they pass around in secret). Sure they could even find new ways to teach the humanities, or they could even get rid of the requirements for those who don't value the arts of taking them... but ultimately I think mostly we just need to take a step back and start acknowledging that these classes are worth doing a good job at--even if they won't be the primary source of income for students.
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.
Re:No science? (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting the lack of scientific subjects amongst his claims. Yes, he mentions psychology but I'm talking about things like physics and mathematics which are not that easy to plagiarise or regurgitate from other sources without justification.
It's not that much more difficult. A friend's father wrote some twelve PhD dissertations for other people for a living, in mathematics and economics, at the Sorbonne no less (not exactly a degree mill). All the while he never completed his own, for personal reasons. Basically it's all about having at least some grasp of the ideas behind it, and about being express yourself in the language and jargon of the subject.
If you know the methodology and the style of the typical paper or dissertation well enough, I don't think there is a fundamental difference between subjects. I have degrees in Oriental philology and CS, and I don't think it would have been that much easier to write a paper in the former just because it's not considered a "scientific subject". After all, knowing a language or two (to the extent that you can do critical editions of ancient texts in it) doesn't come cheaper than calculus or compiler construction. One shouldn't be too smug as an engineer - other people do hard work, too.
Re:No engineering? (Score:1, Interesting)
What kind of university did you go to? When I did my bachelors and masters, I would say that probably a handful of students (of ~60) *perhaps* cheated during the first year but then they fell out. *No one* in my class of ~30 Master students cheated. Really. Except exchange students though, they cheated all the time (this is also reflected in the nationality of the students ending up before the disciplinary board -- Indian and Pakistani students numbered *vastly* more than anyone else).
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: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: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.
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No engineering? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:also he may be a liar (Score:3, Interesting)
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 rarely even has to come up with a true finished product, essentially building one proof-of-concept after another. It's amazing how fast you can work when you honestly don't care about the details.
How many code geeks will spends hours and days and weeks over meaningless bullshit projects just because they can? This guy does the same thing with words and he found a way to get paid for it.
Re:No engineering? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 science? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 full of long obscure words and we decided the authors of these ghastly things did it just to sound "academic" and "learned" when in fact the whole damned thing was completely devoid of actual content.
So what we did is found some English "obfuscation" program on the net (I don't remember what it was called, this was a while ago, but think of one of those "Jivespeak" things except it turns what you wrote into "academicspeak") and turned our essays, by means of this program (and a little, but not a lot, of correction of the obvious grammatical problems the program introduced), to convert all our essays into "Sociologyspeak".
A+ grades all round. What we handed in looked pretty unintelligible.
Some years later I got around to reading "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". I was most amused to see that Richard Feynman had made exactly the same observation as we had (he explained he read this mountain of impenetrable prose which basically translated to "People listen to the radio. People read books", and that was about it). I felt vindicated :-)
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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 brightest has been effectively reduced to a diploma mill. Hence, all the cheating.
Who can blame the students? They are not the best and the brightest. They want a job. The piece of paper stands between them and gainful employment. Therefore, they will do whatever it takes to get it. Business doesn't demand that people actually know anything. They demand a piece of paper.
What we need is more trade schools. Business needs to get together with the people (and the government) to design schools that will fill the needs of the job market. Business needs to bite the bullet, and help pay for said schools. Graduates would be trained, with experience, so that they can step into their new job. This would satisfy the needs of business, and the needs of the student who doesn't care about Pavlov's dog, or the integral of e^-x. Then college enrollment would go down, and they could get back to the business of educating people who actually want to be there.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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)
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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 that are new, I often get cut-off by anyone over 30 who figures they learned enough in college and now should be able to put up a brick wall to all new knowledge and just watch TV and work. (By the way, parenting problems much? You're watching TV, who is watching the kids....)
I have difficulty respecting this. Zero-feedback self enrichment I can respect. You're useless to me but you have a job, you get paid to work, I can't demand more of you. What I can't deal with is people around me that want to just stop, as if they're now working so they're now entitled to close off the entire world and live in their little life like they're finished ... well ...living. These are the people that get laid off when the company moves on, or that get lost in the growth of technology or the market, and complain it's not fair they no longer have a job. These people are cogs in machines, easily replaced and overall worthless... necessary, but worthless.
Why would you actively avoid any form of self-enrichment, any and all forms of mental exploration, any new knowledge? Why recoil from the thought of putting anything new and technical in your brain? Why throw a tantrum like a child if something suggests you might need to think for fifteen seconds to figure something out? I don't get it.
Re:The source of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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 evidence. What might count is that my public high school had higher average SAT and AP scores (among those who chose to take those exams) than either the Catholic high school or the private rich-kids high school in the same area.