Back in the early nineteen eighties, my then girlfriend was a professional dissertation writer. That was back when America made things.
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That was the point. Delegating is not the same as making someone else do your work.
This is troubling:
“This is cheating, but do you have a choice? We have to make money," she says. "We have to make a living.”
My perception is that an American making this statement would be reviled and pilloried.
Yeah, I know I'm polluting, but I got to make a living don't I?
If a thing is wrong, it’s wrong.
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There is no way in hell I can compete with $320 a month. Plus, I agree with the smart ones who already spoke up, let the students suffer through the assignments, for crying out loud, so that they learn something more valuable than, “I can buy my education.”
But every cheater is a cheater. There’s no need for air quotes here.
I’m somewhat inclined to accept that freshpersons will make stupid mistakes, but hiring someone else to write your essays and pass them on as your own isn’t one.
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I think you are tackling the wrong end of the bull. It is not what the writer is doing that is wrong. It is what the end user of the document is doing that is wrong. It is that person who is passing the document off as his/her work.
I just sold you the petrol. It is you who stole the car!
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Yes, that’s how capitalism works. We technically don’t have to have it, but it’s the systems we’ve chosen.
Technically you don’t have to pay rent. Technically you don’t have to eat.
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Your recognition here of differing teaching situations means my response to your first post can be more brief. But, in case someone else who’s reading: You sound like me when I was in my 20s teaching at an R1.
Do not make assumptions about the pedagogy of faculty complaining about plagiarism and paper mills. Instead take a look at where they’re teaching, what they’re required to teach, and the demographics of their student body.
I’m too tired of talking to idealist young teachers about how even the “best practices” composition pedagogy can be inadequate in some circumstances. So I’ll leave it at the above.
Correct, rent is not something we have to do as a society.
You do have to eat to survive, and I’m including all liquid diets as eating. But you don’t have to use currency or the production of your own labor in order to do so.
That’s a really interesting use of the word “chosen.” Or maybe it’s “we” that’s problematic there.
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Ah, yes indeed. I remember my college years in the 70s, when I drank lots of alcohol & did drugs (pot, hash & psychedelics.)
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“I’m too tired of talking to idealist young teachers about how even the “best practices” composition pedagogy can be inadequate in some circumstances. So I’ll leave it at the above.”
Feel free to conserve your energy then.
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this is absolutely not true, modern unis heavily brief students (especially international students) about the norms of the institution.
what they really mean is they were aware it was a rule, but weren’t aware it was a rule they could break.
Where is the gofundme page?
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And of course, people who cheat their way through undergrad this way to get credentialed are cheating themselves: they’re spending more money to get less value out of an already expensive experience. It’s like going to Disneyland and then spending the whole time sitting on a bench watching PPV smartphone videos of other people on the rides (after which they get drunk and pass out on Tom Sawyer Island).
And then a group of these same chronic cheaters go on to get MBAs and proceed to destroy businesses, industries, and entire economies because of their lazy, corner-cutting, self-destructive habits.
I will quote a former YouTube “celebrity” whose parents spent an extra $250k in bribes in order to get her into one of the country’s priciest universities:
“I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend, but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone and hope that I can try and balance it all. I do want the experience of like game days, partying. I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
If the college admissions scandal hadn’t broken, I’m sure she would have been a regular patron of the essay mills. Everyone’s impressed with Rick Singer’s criminal entrepreneurship, but a true evil business genius would have a least set up an “aftercare” co-marketing deal with a plagiarism sweatshop to show that not only would he get these dimwits in but also that he’d get them though.
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My pre-med major prof purposely turned a blind eye to cheaters, saying they were only cheating themselves. Could be he just didn’t give a rat’s ass, but it’s true they didn’t learn anything.
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If they get into positions of responsibility thanks other people with the same attitude as that prof, they inevitably end up cheating others, sometimes with life-or-death consequences.
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Agree on this as a general principle, but there are a host of other incentives at play here. Grades in classes outside of students’ general interest areas still affect their overall GPAs, which in turn affects their post-graduation prospects. Assuming that there’s a low likelihood of getting caught, cheating on an essay in that situation is still, obviously, immoral–but it’s also potentially rational. Telling students to get what they can out of classes is all well and good, but unless you’re at a gradeless institution and/or are willing to hand out mere-participation A’s, it’s likely going to fall on deaf ears.
I work in the legal profession, where (insanely) firms and judges make major, career-trajectory-altering hiring decisions based on one year’s grades in law school. Mess up one class during that first year of law school–especially if your school is not among the T14–and your prospects of ever landing a top clerkship or top-end firm job may essentially vanish. I don’t think it’s quite come to that in undergrad institutions yet, but those undergrad grades do still have a significant effect on students’ abilities to get into top post-graduate schools, where the name of the institution can counterbalance a slightly lower GPA.
Credentials, for better or worse, matter.
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I am from Italy, and a typical class exam and a mandatory exam to get th high school degree is to write a “tema”, that is an essay one has to write in a fixed time and supervised an essay chosen from three or four, normally without any notes or books. Foreign languages have a lot of supervised essays to write, you can have a dictionary and a thesaurus, the architecture and engineering PE/CE exam have one of the exasms that is to write an essay on an enginnering or architectural argument, one has six hours, a series of books and a calculator. It’s hard.
In thecnical engineering high schools there were essays to do at home but were tied with lab experiments and projects.
Unfortunately this was the situation in yhe last century and also in Italy started the idea to do multiple choice exams.
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