IMHO, unfuck an inequitable educational system that does not provide an education to all due to gatekeeping obstacles such as meritocracy, immigration, or economic hardship and without an effort to evenly distribute value across the entire system (elite colleges vs understaffed/under-maintained) from the get-go.
If education was seen as an inalienable right instead of a transaction, maybe we wouldn’t run into issues like this.
Even in our (US) courts of law, the concept of extenuating circumstances exists, and I think there should be consideration that Mary is someone who demonstrates an actual thirst for knowledge over simple profit, and expresses that if not for the power imbalance, would likely be happy to not have to do it in the first place.
On a macro-level, white supremacy both assisted in the creation of the educational system we have and colonisation and capitalist exploitation of black bodies by the British have left Swahili culture at the low end of the power imbalance. Equitable solutions should be sought for the disenfranchised, and barriers lowered.
ETA: It should be noted that one of my brothers is a department chair at a large state university. He knows how I feel about our academic system (most US/first world systems, actually) and we’re still cool.
I am somewhat put out by the slant of the NYT article and some of the attitudes expressed here. Ms Mary is merely a journeyman academic writer. She is not a purveyor of crack cocaine. There seems an insinuation that “what kind of people are these that can do that?” a shifting of the blame for the problem onto the true authors of the essays - when all the time it is a question of supply and demand and the demand comes before the supply. She writes according to her skill and the assignment she is given. Is she a plagiarist @Lexicat ? The hell she is. How can the original author of a document be accused of plagiarism? She does not sit an exam in another persons name. She does not write a document in another persons name. Typically the authors of these essays (unless its a one-on-one contract a la fiverr) do not even know the name of the person they are writing for. It is those lazy, talentless, sack-of-shit- cretins who puts their own names on documents they have not authored that are the plagiarists. The end user is not forced to employ the work of others - it is simply an expedient - like jumping cues, parking in the disabled zone etc. Now, is this in fact about essays for US students, or is it about essays for students in the US? Because in my experience the majority of Chinese students that apply for study in the US are manifestly ill-equipped to handle the language - and I am not even talking about academic language. They may be able to speak passable English but their writing and grammar frequently just doesn’t cut it. So having gotten a placement - what are they going to do? Two choices - go hammer and tongs at getting their language up to speed - or have someone else do the majority of their written work. I presume other foreign students have similar difficulties. That leaves the homegrown, domestic dipshits. Some of you still want to vilify the essayist? OK forging recommendation letters is tacky. Years ago I was offered this kind of work in China. I refused. “Why?. You could make a lot of money”. Because I believed that foreign university applicants should get placement based on talent and ability - not because daddy is loaded and an ivy league certificate will insure a happy life. And I would feel the same way about local students - only more so!
I can see how freshmen could get away with using this kind of service, but the essays I was asked to write in upper level classes required an intimate knowledge of both the reading and what was discussed in class, or hours and hours spent perusing primary and secondary sources. Then again, I wasn’t trying to squeak by with a C.
Pretty much all of the assignments in the classes I taught were of the form “here’s some raw data and a pre-written method section; now write the abstract/introduction/results/conclusion as if you were submitting a research article to a peer-reviewed journal”.
Very few people are unaware that society’s rules are made by people. Therefore, observing that “we” “chose” them in some contexts–like discussions of impoverished people in Central Africa–can sound like blaming the victim.
It’s also worth, in the context of constructing “systems we hate,” what sort of “we” can contain people on this board and that woman. Opportunities and agency are very different in each case.
This is too naive.
Even if the original authors don’t break the rules directly, their intent is to do it.
Ignoring something like that justifies all kind of wrongdoing by clever people who found a loophole in the rules.
On the other hand, I also don’t feel like a ban would have the desired effects as at most it would just drive them to the shadows, since you cannot punish them if you don’t know who they are.
What is the difference between someone writing the whole thing or pointing how to fix the mistakes?
The result will be the same composition, but in the latter case it was the student who “wrote” it.
Your university would go broke in 2 years. Your board and trustees would have you fired for just mentioning such a thing. American universities these days are first and foremost businesses.
And that is a major part of the problem. Full stop. Much like health care and housing, if you treat education like a business, you’re going to get issues like this cropping up, because the value is no longer intrinsic to itself, it has to justify itself as a business, so out goes all the things that make getting an education worth while - focusing on deep learning, on deeper understanding, on exploring ideas or concepts that might be foreign to you, on understanding in a more meaningful way how science works, or how a poem or a story work. Out goes all the things that don’t “make you money.” And that takes all of the joy out of education, it dehumanizes the people doing the educating, and it makes people who are getting an education frustrated and resentful.
At the heart of all these problems lies the corporatization of the academy. Not that it was some utopia before, but while that has helped to expand access to a higher education, it has also cheapened it to a mere commodity, instead of a means of both giving yourself a better quality of life and greater options within the job market.
Hmm…if there is anyone with the intent of breaking rules it is the student who hands in the work of others. Would you object if, not having the wit to lay out an essay himself, a student resorted to such a service and then paraphrased the document, so as to employ it as a useful template, adding or deleting information along the way? That would at least be a learning experience and give the student some authority over the work. But more likely they just hand it in unaltered. I’m thinking branding the original essay author as a plagiarist goes too far. Fraud perhaps? Not knowing with certainty that the student will submit the document unaltered may make that a difficult charge to lay. Ultimately it is the student who commits such a fraud. A supervised essay will bring these students undone. Even an interview will make a person wonder why a student who writes so eloquently does not have the same oral expression. Perhaps it is also the teacher, who knows damn well that this cannot be the work of this student, who is also a party to fraud (by a neglect to expose the perpetrator)? You decide.
More than two persons can have the intent to break the rules.
Labeling the original author as a plagiarist, or whatever other label that suits it better, doesn’t exclude the blaming of the student who commissioned the word.
I would object in most cases.
I think it would be acceptable only if the modified document didn’t looked like the template, which make the template mostly useless.
I think it is easier to picture the problem with this if the work of another student was used.
If the modifications are enough to distinguish both works, it is probably easier to go for the original sources.
Would it be enough to submit an unfinished work?
For example if the arguments were laid out, but not structured into a text.
If the answer is no, then the original author knows that it will be used as submitted.
This article said it was a Chinese student applying to an American university, so the supervised essay is not so easily arranged.
I’m not sure if the writing and oral abilities are very strongly correlated.
Apart from the cases were the difference between them is too high, it is not obvious that they are not the work of the same person.
I also don’t think a supervised essay would show the same quality as an unsupervised one for most students.
ps.: Can you separate you next replies into different paragraphs, it is hard to read and reply to it without a clear marking where a new idea starts.
Quite right they are not and that is my point. Usually (at least in the Chinese case) their spoken English is far superior to their written English. I will not dwell on the why.
For International student enrollments I don’t think it is simply a case of hand in the application, the supporting essays and a cheque. I have to presume that the documents will get you an interview with the enrollment officer. That the decision to enrol is based solely on documentation seems absurd. No checks and balances. In any case the supervised essays I referred to would come after enrollment - that is when a student becomes undone.
I assure you that it is often glaringly obvious. When you see sentences that have been produced by anyone who has a facility for grammar, spelling and ordered thought and compare it to the word salad that the applicant regularly produces you cannot for a minute believe they are from the pen of the same person. Supervised essays prevent students from gaming the system and sort the functionally literate from the barely literate.
Wrote someone parading their ignorance of what plagiarism is and who does not work under ethical directives about plagiarism in the day to day.
Plagiarism ≠ copyright infringement. Plagiarism is not about who owns a text or cultural artifact.
Plagiarism is about honest attribution as to the author(s) of a text or cultural artifact, including whether such a text or artifact is being reproduced in whole, in part, paraphrased or adapated, or is being used in full synthesis.
Mary is plagiarizing because she is hiding the true author and origin of a text.
This is not even a borderline case of plagiarism, it is plagiarism front and center, full stop.
I don’t know how that would stand up in court. Mary is not concealing who the author is. It is the student who uses her work that is concealing who the true author is. In any case, it is of no issue until the essay is submitted and Mary does not do that - not in her own name or in anyone else’s. Regarding, faking recommendation letters - you can call it plagiarism if you like. I call it fraud. Forgive me for relying on the dictionary definition of plagiarism - it seems to stand up to my interpretation.https://www.dictionary.com/browse/plagiarism?s=t
Tenured university professor with over a decade of experience checking students’ work and occasionally proceeding against them for plagiarism here. And, incidentally, courts are not where plagiarism is resolved within US universities. That would be with professors, and with deans of student affairs or similar.
Mary is 100% complicit with the students who hire her in committing plagiarism, albeit in different roles.
