Right from the horses mouth. Someone who wants to be a writer so bad they will choose to write papers deceptively. But this person asks us to overlook this minor indiscretion in favor of the bigger picture. The bigger picture is WHY students request this service:
An education system that somehow failed?
A lazy student who couldn't be bothered to do any work?
Or rather a student who did more work prepping the cheater to be successful so they could be free of this hassle?
"It is my hope that this essay will initiate such a conversation. As for me, I'm planning to retire. I'm tired of helping you make your students look competent."
Thanks. Conversation initiated. I am glad you are retiring. I also hope your business has not been passed on.
I don't believe you were ever asked by teachers to make our students look competent. Rather we expected to our students to WANT to be competent. That want is motivation. But that alone is not enough. At some point you have to DO. You have to strive to achieve that which you are not capable of doing now, or capable of doing without help.
We
You gave them an alternative. An easier alternative albeit expensive. You enabled them to be lazy.
I have no qualms with pointing fingers at our education system. Part of it is institutional involving "teaching to the test". Part of it may be the teachers (some old that don't care, some young that don't know how, some that are not passionate, and some that have no choice but to be a glorified teen-sitter). part of it may be generational (tried and true teaching methods may no longer be working in the age of internet "knowledge" ... "I can just look that up why do I need to remember that fact").
Convenient that he can not remember the clients' name. Perhaps revealing who these people are might help the "conversation" you have started. It might help to explain why some of them are in leadership roles who can't lead, bosses who are idiots, or prevent real thinkers from advancing into roles where they can be most useful.
It only gets worse when you contribute to the problem and then leave it for someone else to clean up. Thanks for the legacy. Release the names of your clients. Post it on Google. Thesis titles too please. I know those are easy to look up.
The generational divide is causing more problems than I know how to fathom. The problems are non-linear and cumbersome and difficult to divide and conquer as is. Enabling is a symptom of this. Your lack of perspective and moral consequences will be remembered. Most importantly, don't be confused. You are no scholar. A scholar would be concerned with ethics because the process and the work are important.
If this guy is telling the truth (not exactly a given, given that he admittedly is a professional liar), it's yet another symptom of a deep problem in academics.
ReplyDeleteA meteorology professor I know (not at OU) insisted to me that this must be rare because neither he, nor his scientific and engineering colleagues, ever had caught anyone doing it, and also, because of the highly specialized nature of the classes. I beg to differ, based on the unrepresentativeness of our rather limited sampling volume within academia at large. Most meteorology classes, especially from upper-division levels onward, consist of math beyond this guy's means, nonstandard and almost cheat-proof structure with specialized material, and/or situationally dependent assignments. Yes, perhaps this guy couldn't BS his way through a wave-cyclone case that he hasn't seen yet. Those aren't how he's making a professor's shekels, however.
He is living off the assembly-line structure with overloaded instructors that characterizes the bulk of the educational system. Even that, which should be really simple for most students to vanquish with honesty, clearly isn't. This type of cheating hasn't been uncovered in any of the courses in which he has ghost-written a student's material. And therein lies the problem. More and more, especially in the humanities and liberal arts, but partly in some sciences that aren't too math-heavy (e.g., social science, paleontology or psychology), I'm convinced that this problem is irrevocably pervasive.
Straight plagiarism is another issue, as there are some increasingly sophisticated algorithms to detect it, for those instructors who are willing and able to use them. But skilled cheating via academic mercenary is, as the author notes, nearly foolproof. The only fortunate thing in all this, in a perverse way, is the utter lack of such highly-skilled and versatile writers in the population. Distill the top-caliber writers to the fraction who have warped-enough morals to do this sort of "work," and the number has to be exceedingly small. As he noted, the demand outpaces the supply!
Alas, when he retires, someone else will take his place. As long as there is money to be had for nefarious activity, some opportunistic sleaze will sell his soul for it.
Well put EGR.
ReplyDeleteClearly the assembly line is leading to unintended consequences. Unfortunately this will only continue to get worse as education standards get carried forward by the mass of students who are either lazy, uneducated, or simply unable to do their own work advance towards or enter college.
I certainly find it puzzling to discover cheating. The obvious loser is the student, not the university. I believe that parents also have to share some of the responsibility for this, because they think more about their embarrassment if their kids do poorly at school than they do about the kids. Parents need to reinforce the message from teachers about the meaning and importance of an education, not sue the school when their children don't get A's!
ReplyDeleteThe fact that some slimy weasel will nearly always arise to fill this perceived need isn't surprising - the customer drives the market.
Well said. Parental enabling is widespread, and even worse the many ways in which the customer demands enabling and gets it, because there is a market for it. This reveals a serious flaw in our selfish society ... selfish for too long and all kinds of things get integrated in our big web of issues.
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