Academic “ghost-writing”: the cheating scandal no one will discuss (2020)

https://logosnews.tech/-MJYdKMeuTakOZj7iq4d

by paulpauper • 5 years ago

201 209 5 years ago

logosnews.tech

k__3• 5 years ago

After I worked as a ghostwriter for a few years I saw the world–especially the online world–with other eyes.

jimhefferon• 5 years ago

Please, say more.

k__3• 5 years ago

There are many things you get for texts, not just degrees. Academic degrees are just the ones that are regulated, so it's against the law to get them with the help of a ghostwriter.

But you get prestige and awards on "the free market" for all kinds of publications.

drummer• 5 years ago

One more reason why credentials dont mean much. People have to be able to demonstrate their skills.

ALittleLight3• 5 years ago

I always cringe when I have to interview someone with a masters degree in computer science because in my interview I ask a FizzBuzz style question and CS masters people, for whatever reason, don't have a good record (for me) with questions like that. Plus, it's just more awkward watching someone flub the question and thinking about CS education (which I assume from my undergrad experience is much more math, algorithms, theory, and pseudocode) versus programming in practice which, in our case, is much more about "implement this straightforward logic".

albntomat02• 5 years ago

As someone with a masters in CS from a big name US school, the demographics of my cohort were super interesting. With the exception of a very small number of folks (<5% of total), everyone either had specific outside support (mainly government computer security scholarships of some kind) or was from outside the US.

I think this is because the cost of getting a masters doesnt make sense for someone with a CS undergrad who can easily apply to FAANG/etc.

nradov• 5 years ago

What point are you trying to make? Every hiring manager should know that a CS Master's degree focuses mainly on theory and doesn't necessarily teach much coding. If you just need programmers to do simple stuff then you'll obtain better results by hiring from trade schools, or finding candidates who are self taught.

SamvitJ2• 5 years ago

As a counter-point, here are three examples of highly successful individuals in the tech industry with an M.S. in computer science as their highest degree:

- Soumith Chintala (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumith): Co-inventor of PyTorch; Distinguished Engineer at Facebook AI

- Jacob Devlin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-devlin-135ab048): Inventor of BERT; SWE at Google AI

- Yuxin Wu (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ppwwyyxx): Lead developer on Detectron2; SWE at Facebook AI

If we include successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, the list becomes larger still.

Of course, these examples are cherry-picked, but I'd be careful with your assumptions.

Many people who pursue Master's degrees in the U.S. are international students who didn't have the luxury to do their undergrad in the U.S., a large number of whom have gone on to great success in the tech industry. At the high end, M.S. in computer science grads represent the best and brightest of three groups: international students, PhD dropouts, and those curious enough about CS to pursue it at the graduate level.

Nasrudith3• 5 years ago

FizzBuzz is used so much because the majority of interviewed people fail at it. Which implicitly includes experienced people too.

dfraser992• 5 years ago

Were they "real" M.Sc degrees or "conversion course" M.Sc degrees (the equivalent of an expensive boot camp with a official piece of paper at the end)? I'm part time staff at a UK university which offers a 'conversion course' degree. It is vaguely annoying (from my vantage point of 25 years in industry) that these students are getting M.Sc degrees - the good students learn the basics of programming, so I'm not throwing shade on them, but I would hire someone with a B.Sc over them if I had to choose. Those with a B.Sc are more knowledgeable due to having 3 years experience in IT stuff versus just one.

But they are getting M.Sc degrees because part of the course involves learning how to "do research", i.e. the process. That apparently is a general requirement for students getting an accredited M.Sc degree. But it doesn't have to be original research... or even good research. Honestly, the whole program is sort of a diploma mill and given that students typically go into the program in order to retool and get a job in IT, they would be better served learning more focused stuff like one does in a boot camp than "how to do research". Or maybe a not-MSc degree, but something that indicates they're good enough to be junior programmers but are not really MSc level. The uni is trying to play the "boot camp" game while adhering to "academic standards".

I OTOH went thru a "real" MSc program from a much better uni (Edinburgh) and you absolutely had to have the basics of IT under your belt before taking that program.

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

Only ½ joking:

Finding a good ghostwriter demonstrates a number of useful skills.

zdragnar3• 5 years ago

https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chi...

My favorite bit of the story is that he had been known as the best developer in house, and in a different article I can't find anymore there were more quotes from his coworkers about how it seemed like he could do anything, no matter the technology / programming language.

tyoma• 5 years ago

This is neither new nor related to high costs of college.

My parents told me of very similar setups when they were growing up in the 1960s USSR.

A roommate in the mid-2000s did similar work as a side hustle.

The actual practice is surely as old as university credentials.

finexplained• 5 years ago

The scale matters when classes are graded on a curve. If a few students cheat the score distribution doesn't change too much, if a significant fraction of students cheat it really hurts those who don't.

threatofrain• 5 years ago

I've seen a case where about half the class was cheating. People would pay those who took the test earlier to give the exam. Given this, it would be cruel to come down hard on any particular student for cheating.

anonporridge• 5 years ago

Just like a lot of things where the best thing to do for the individual only works out if only a tiny minority of parasites do it.

e.g. getting a vaccine. You're arguably best off if you're part of the 1% of the population who choose not to get one but still get protected by herd immunity. But if that 1% grows to 10/20/30%, suddenly, not only does the defection advantage disappear, but the whole herd starts to suffer. Tragedy of the commons.

We're all stuck between a rock and a hard place of simultaneously not wanting to restrict individual freedom, autonomy, and privacy, but also recognizing that when being a parasite is a disproportionately advantageous role for an individual to choose, it eventually kills the host.

murgindrag• 5 years ago

I had exactly one class in college where cheating was rampant. I don't know why, but most of that class cheated on exams; the prof reused exams, and frats had bibles. I didn't see much cheating in my other classes; it was exceptionally rare.

That class was graded on a curve.

I got a 'B', and I would say I was in the 90th percentile for understanding the material. It would have been neigh-impossible to get an 'A' without cheating.

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

If universities are not capable to prevent such cheating, perhaps they must stop grading on a curve, that's something they can do.

blowski• 5 years ago

The main character in the film Grease 2 (released in 1982) was paid by his fellow students to write their essays. I remember because he inspired me to set up a similar business in the 90s.

turbinerneiter• 5 years ago

I'd be interested to know if this happens more or less in different fields, and whether or not this has an impact on people's careers, again by field.

slyall• 5 years ago

That site was very hard to read on my browser. Every couple of seconds the author's byeline would flicker (too fast for me to see what it changed to) and the text would jump up and down.

sliken• 5 years ago

Same here, in chrome and firefox, and firefox reading mode wouldn't work.

bArray• 5 years ago

It's bad enough that I have to enable JS in a private tab, then the force-enabled JS makes it near unreadable.

I ended up using uBlock Origin to select the element and to block it, causing whatever crazy JS that is to die.

temp6672• 5 years ago

does anyone know how AMP seems to avoid this (despite the hate here). On AMP sites I rarely get the post paint jumping around insanity.

My own metric - non AMP site + clickbait headline = jank and constant jumps as dynamic stuff happens (be it ads changing or show off or attention grabbers or analytics maybe).

DiggyJohnson• 5 years ago

My own metric

This doesn't make any sense to me. Are you saying that you experience jumping content on many blogs.

The way any site avoids this is not being bad.

dang• 5 years ago

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't mean to pick on you personally—the problem is more that these things tend to get upvoted to the top of the thread, where they choke out on-topic conversation. This happens because the annoyances are real, not because they're unreal. At the same time this comes up so often that we have to try to avoid the repetition.

BeetleB• 5 years ago

I agree in general. In this particular case, though, it was jarring. Having the screen jump every few seconds without the user interacting at all is a bit extreme.

tzs• 5 years ago

In this particular case, the way the site semi-periodically twitches is kind of interesting itself. Way more than the common annoyances that you rightly chastise people for complaining about.

1. There are no apparent ads on the site. There are three things uBlock origin blocks, but they don't seem to be things doing anything visible (I'd guess trackers).

Usually it is sites infested with ads and a ton of trackers where you encounter visual glitches this jarring.

2. The interval between glitches varies, and sometimes it is a double glitch instead of a single glitch.

3. If I open the site in both Firefox and Chrome, their glitches are in sync. Same if I open it in more than one Firefox or Chrome window.

This suggests whatever it is doing is based on clock time, not on time since page load which is what I would have expected.

4. The glitches are much less frequent in Safari.

zepto5• 5 years ago

This just reveals that colleges simply aren’t doing anything that can be called tuition.

If the college did any amount of meaningful in-person teaching, it would be immediately obvious that a student had not written their own coursework.

TheOtherHobbes• 5 years ago

Colleges are simply doing something called collecting money so there's no incentive to fix this problem.

And it is a problem, because it means the output of colleges is increasingly just noise.

It will become even more of a problem in the future, because you can't run a civilisation packed full of 'qualified' people who can't do shit.

Except cheat.

jonnycomputer3• 5 years ago

You're sort of assuming people are paying for A+ quality work. But they're not stupid. For many, a B is quite fine.

zepto5• 5 years ago

It’s not obvious what grades have to do with anything. I’m referring to the idea that if you are teaching people you know enough about them to recognize what they’ve written.

paulpauper• 5 years ago

This what happens when professors are too busy to notice/care nd everything is outsourced to overworked assistants who are paid little

AcerbicZero• 5 years ago

There is a drastic difference between getting a college degree and getting a “good college education”

This article drops that ball right out of the gate, and doesn’t seem to notice.

CJefferson2• 5 years ago

Universities discuss this all the time. It's incredibly hard to prove.

This is one reason we keep exams -- while they have many problems (particularly in Computer Science), forcing someone to sit in a room and answer questions gives a way of checking the student really does understand the course.

albntomat02• 5 years ago

I also personally appreciated the time limits of exams as well. They seemed like a good balance to projects whose outcome was primarily decided by how much time one could spend (there's a clear balance in the real world utility of performing well under unstrained time, and time management, etc).

ghaff2• 5 years ago

Projects are great. But the best ones are time-consuming because, as you suggest, you can often iterate one more time. This is especially true if the problem space is at least somewhat unconstrained even if the result isn't. I probably got more out of project-oriented courses undergrad/masters (and my Masters thesis) but it doesn't scale to the whole curriculum.

thechao2• 5 years ago

While a grad student at TX A&M CS, I rolled out a grading rubric (for a couple of intro courses) which required the students to pass individually each of the homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course.

This nipped HW cheating in the bud by the 3rd semester, because the students knew that you couldn’t game the system by maximizing HW grades to bring up exam & quiz grades. Exams & quizzes were autogenerated from a set of parametric problems, and put in random order on the print out — made side-by-side and answer-sheet cheating basically impossible.

Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though.

tmpz22• 5 years ago

Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work?

I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and routinely expressed frustration when first year students could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of the class would have failed. And cynically that homework weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a problem with their course instruction and they covered up presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading...

The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown?

And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in y.

hiq• 5 years ago

required the students to pass individually each of the homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course

How was the final grade determined? min(HW, Quiz, exams)?

vasco• 5 years ago

Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though.

Maybe focus more on the teaching and less on the testing.

hn_asker2• 5 years ago

This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all.

CJefferson2• 5 years ago

I'm suprised people were so opposed to it, that kind of system is standard in all UK Universities I've taught in.

Teever4• 5 years ago

What's fascinating to me is about all of this is that techniques like the ones you implemented and others are all that is needed to eliminate cheating. It's the kind of stuff that is analogous to the protocols developed by the air industry in the mid 20th century that has almost eliminated entire classes of error that could result in loss of life from flying.

It is especially troubling because post-secondary education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the material that they need to be better at their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane crashing.

The silly part is that post-secondary education is something that is far older than the flight industry yet no such standardization of controls over testing / grading have been implemented.

It seems like it's almost a choice.

Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though.

Yeah. it's a choice.

zozbot234• 5 years ago

People love to complain about whiteboarding but it's extremely effective at assessing knowledge, far more than even most exams. Exams are used in an academic context b/c they're less resource intensive, though.

ska2• 5 years ago

This is sort of true.

White-boarding or "oral exams" are effective in proportion to the skill of the person giving them. Most people have little natural skill in this even (perhaps especially) if they are expert in the domain being examined.

TrackerFF3• 5 years ago

But it has its flaws - major flaws, some would say.

http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf

"To understand if coding interviews—as administered today—can induce stress that significantly hinders performance, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 48 Computer Science students,comparing them in private and public whiteboard settings.

We found that performance is reduced by more than half, by simply being watched by an interviewer. We also observed that stress and cognitive load were significantly higher in a traditional technical interview when compared with our private interview.

Consequently, interviewers may be filtering out qualified candidates by confounding assessment of problem-solving ability with unnecessary stress."

zdragnar3• 5 years ago

Reposting as a top level comment because it fits: https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chi...

Guy outsourced his entire programming job and got away with it for quite awhile. I guess the company didn't do much peer programming.

cbozeman2• 5 years ago

I think its fucking fabulous.

At a society level, companies and billionaires are outsourcing every goddamn thing they can to anywhere but America and Americans, and unfortunately that extends to other Western nations as well now.

They only got pissed off because for once, the little guy was winning here and outsmarted the greedy sons of bitches.

If you want a powerful Western society, you have to pay Western residents Western wages. Now China is on the rise and clearly the most dangerous threat not just to the United States, but the rest of the Western world, but no one sees it because they want their $999 iPhone that would be $1999 if it were actually assembled in California by people asking for a measly $15 an hour.

zdragnar3• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure they were pissed off because they are a "critical infrastructure" company whose employee exfiltrated their entire source code. Not to mention, if they were doing any government work, they may have inadvertently let in foreign actors- not great for "critical infrastructure" since management aren't likely to have been the worst hurt had anything gone more wrong.

Bear in mind he was getting a 6 figure salary- he was hardly the little guy making under $15 an hour.

xnyan2• 5 years ago

There’s no way that assembly in California or anywhere else in the US would even come close to doubling the price of an iPhone. Assembly cost is not that high[1].

[1]https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/06/09/159456/the-all-a...

colechristensen• 5 years ago

Most people don’t “need” a high level education nor do they actually want one, a degree is just another metric about a person and when you make something a metric you tend to ruin it.

Most people would benefit from a liberal education, that is the literal meaning of liberals to make one free, but most don’t actually get it at university because it’s hard to do and to measure (and not many actually care).

burnished• 5 years ago

Just wanted to nit pick >No doubt the rise of the Internet – and today’s “cut and paste” culture -- has cheapened the value of “original” work.

I think broad statements like these, that blame a shift in culture, do so out of a sense of nostalgia for an imaginary past. Isn't it more likely that the effect the author sees is simply part of the culture and that changing technology allowed for new expressions of it?

msla• 5 years ago

There's a trick to it:

Whenever an author says "No doubt" or similar, there are doubts the author can't answer. It's a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, something to get you looking over here while the hole in their logic slips quietly past over there. Do it deftly enough and you can get people to swallow camels in your article, even if they'd strain at gnats in an article written without such devices.

vvram• 5 years ago

What's not talked enough is how this is normalized in Saas digital marketing today.

cutemonster• 5 years ago

Ghost writing? Hiring people to write blog posts? (Or what did you have in mind)

Jan4542• 5 years ago

Maybe we just should not care? In the end, if someone claims sth., she always has to give proof. If da Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. super plus claims sth. without proof, and a pink hair colored teenager claims sth. with proof, everyone _should_ believe the teen (actually believing the proof, not the person). Sadly thats not the case, lots of people still believe "eminence based proof" instead of "evidence based proof".

Bootvis2• 5 years ago

That works nicely for maths but any subject that requires a non trivial amount of data gathering needs to be build on a certain amount of trust.

Jan4542• 5 years ago

which comes from peer-review and other scientists verifying it.

.. there are too many Prof. Dr. Dr. that did not "cheat" but still claim covid isn't real .. so the title really doesn't mean anything at all to me .. also having studied myself seeing what kind of idiots also got their exams .. it's maybe just a proof they can 'write' and 'read', but even believing this would proof 'understanding' is a big overestimation of the title itself ..

renewiltord• 5 years ago

The fact that we haven't seen some massively decline in productivity when there started to be rampant "ghost writing" means it's probably fairly meaningless.

It reminds me of the fact that when I was five to nine, my school assigned loads of academic busywork that was completely pointless.

My mum did it for me and let me go out and play. Our class ranks were based solely on exam performance, and I was top of every class.

University probably has loads of pointless busywork too. Though I recall my Masters degree in CS actually being a rather enjoyable experience all around with fun assignments.

For CS classes at least, it seems like you're missing out if you don't do the work because it's so much fun!

choeger2• 5 years ago

University is, at least in the classical form, a scientific institution. And science is communicated in writing. So at least in principle, exercising the writing of papers and essays under time pressure is completely natural.

In practice, though, the writing is often hardly instructive. There are very few people that take stuff like "The Elements of Style" seriously. And the subjects are usually quite trivial.

But calling writing per se is as much "busywork" as learning a programming language, CAD modeling, or working out mathematical proofs by induction.

chowells• 5 years ago

There are very few people that take stuff like "The Elements of Style" seriously.

That's because it's garbage. Learning to write is great. But that is best done by reading good writing and practicing. A list of rules that constantly violates its own advice because obeying it would make the text hard to read is not of any value.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid-grammar...

Aunche• 5 years ago

Technological productivity has been increasing, but social productivity seems to be declining. Compare the 2020 Presidential debates to JFK vs Nixon's debate, for instance. I don't think that ghostwriting is to blame though.

tppiotrowski• 5 years ago

This seems to indicate that some careers require a college degree without actually requiring the knowledge dispensed at the university.

If a job really required university knowledge you would be fired pretty quickly if you didn’t do the assignments but because people keep investing money in paying ghost writers it would indicate that it’s paying off.

I personally see this on CodeMentor: “I don’t care how it works, I don’t need to understand it, I just need it done in the next 60 minutes”.

casefields• 5 years ago

Enterprise Rent-a-car used to have commercials all the time about how they're one of the largest employers of college grads. Why on earth does someone at a counter handing out car rentals even need a college degree?

Nasrudith3• 5 years ago

Idiots armed with statistics perhaps showing college graduates were less likely to steal or take risks with a car while ignoring other variables like wealth and what is "worth committing crime for"? Auto insurance companies were known to charge those with college degrees less.

Bodell• 5 years ago

In my experience the system incentivizes this sort of behavior. I'll give my personal story as an example, singular though it my be. This is very long winded but I feel many here at HN may appreciate the details so I've included them.

I'm currently going back to school and my experience in doing so is quite troubling. Largely my issues reside in two classes, English and Ethics. While I have a B in both classes, I have not at any point learned anything in either class. By learned I mean learned in the traditional sense of doing class work, receiving feedback, revising, repeat. This process usually culminating in a full formal essay or test.

In English, my professor gives only a few sentences of rather generic feedback on each class item. We write many pieces of a total essay that we turn in to receive this feedback on before putting it all together into an major essay assignment. So for one of these pieces we were supposed to give a critical response to a couple of articles we read about the tech industry and its effects on human thinking. One argued that human beings were "evolving" into man/machine "centaurs" such as the super powers of "ESP" that are gained by using Twitter (not joking). The other was an article from The Atlantic titled "Is google making us stoopid?" (no, I did not misspell "stupid", that was the title). The assignment was to argue for which one was most persuasive.

I of course found neither very persuasive. I found some sentiments that I agreed with in the second one, such as people losing their ability to focus for long periods of time brought about by an industry of attention battling (too many distractions). But overall this was not a good case for human brains being made defective, which to its credit was said in the portion where the article's author talked to a neurologist.

In the first article I found an overwhelming misunderstanding of general and specific A.I. This position of my final essay had one note on it from my professor, it was a YouTube link to a dancing robot that I presume was supposed to be a snarky response displaying how intelligent robots actually are.

So I wrote my paper with the thesis that neither of the two were persuasive. I focused much of my paper on the fact that intelligence was poorly defined throughout despite it being the foundation of each argument. I spent a portion of the essay explaining that even though computers played chess (a main sticking point for article 1), this did not constitute anything near human intelligence and that is not exactly viewed as an overall positive thing from the chess community at large (I myself have played chess for many years, won a couple state championships as a child and currently after not playing for a long time have a rating of around 1600-1700).

I received little to no feedback on any of the smaller portions of this essay and got full marks for each. Yet, when it came time to put it all together, I received a C and was told my thesis "side-stepped the entire point of the exercise". I wrote my professor and said that I had already turned in drafts of my thesis twice and I was not told it would be outright rejected. The only real thing I had been told to change was my summaries of each article, as they were too thorough and I should cut it back to the "gist". My final essay was scored poorly on the summary section for "only capturing the gist". I also pointed out that in my last draft, I had specifically asked (parenthetically to my teacher and fellow students) if my thesis was okay or unclear in any way as I felt summarizing intelligence arguments in 5 pages or less was difficult to do effectively. This note was ignored and I was given no notes on it at all, only top marks.

He responded saying he graded it for overall effectiveness and that if I wanted to try again I was welcome to. I declined since I did not have time to redo it as by the time I received this, I was three weeks into our next essay. It's interesting to note that a week later I was told I had to scrap the work on this "formal research essay" as well because it contained "too much research" and was not "opinionated enough".

The point is, I was really trying to use my time at school to actually learn something. I know my writing can be better and I want to make it better, but this environment is not conducive to doing so. Admittedly, even this comment could use some work: better organization, less choppy thought structure, etc.

My ethics class is much the same way. We read portions of our two textbooks and take lock-down browser quizzes (on camera) as well as major tests. The quizzes are intended as practice and for understanding what you should study for the test. However, you are only allowed to see the numerical results of those tests and quizzes! You are NOT told which ones you missed or what you maybe did not understand. I fail to see how anyone can benefit from this approach to learning.

Which is an extremely long way of saying I understand completely why people would cheat and not try while in school. I myself am not one of those people but the design of the institution, at least the one I attend, seems to be begging people to game it and further circumvent actual practice and learning.

On top of all of that, when I asked an English professor about my issues leading up to that first essay, she informed me that my generic non-feedback sounded like the output of A.I. grading software. Something I had not before known existed and was mortified to be made aware of, as ironic as that is in light of the subject matter my class was concerned with.

Seems to me that the schools themselves are also outsourcing their jobs.

An example of this software: https://elearningindustry.com/artificial-intelligence-new-ro...

m4lvin• 5 years ago

Thank you for sharing! I enjoyed your writing and feel sorry for the mediocre feedback you get from your teachers.

lolc• 5 years ago

An older relative once gave me the hint to bury a question in my text to see whether the examiner would address it. I was actually surprised to get an answer when I tried that.

nitwit0052• 5 years ago

No one will discuss? I got a rambling story from a history professor about how he used to write papers for beer money. He claimed he stopped when one of his clients was caught.

The unfortunate lesson I got from university is that they were very aware of cheating, but not all that enthused about penalizing people for it. 11 people in one of my freshmen classes got copying an assignment to keep a journal over the semester. In theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing and just gave them a zero for the one assignment.

syops• 5 years ago

I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.

gwerbret• 5 years ago

I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.

...leaving the honest students as the only ones whose grades suffer from such a scheme, whether it is from their assignments seeming subjectively subpar as compared to their cheating colleagues, or when the class average (and grades) are disproportionately skewed. In the latter case, when grades are assigned based on a bell curve rather than by a fixed percentage mark, an honest A performance can easily turn into a B+ or lower.

acomjean• 5 years ago

My College roommate had a friend as his partner in his circuits design class. His partner did less and less work on the group projects as the semester went on. On the final project my roommate did the whole project (And elevator control circuit with a little spinning disk). He was exhausted. They had to demo to the professor, who asked who did what on the project. "Dave did most of the work." "What did you do?" the prof asked.. "Actually Dave did all the work."" The friendship was salvaged, but the freeloader had to take the class again.

topspin3• 5 years ago

It's getting difficult to identify the parts of our world that aren't corrupt.

anonytrary• 5 years ago

This is a sad thread. I guess institutionalized cheating is a very real and acceptable thing. I remember "cheating" once during a physics exam. It wasn't "cheating" really. He said we could use the internet, and it turns out a couple of the questions were on the internet. It's not ethical, and I shouldn't have done that, but technically it was allowed.

Thankfully I was never the type of person who had to cheat their way into prestige. I did that because I was an immature kid. What's worse is that I was smart enough to solve the problems anyway, but I was just lazy.

lumost2• 5 years ago

Is this really surprising? People who can pay for cheating schemes are so likely to be paying the university full price.

The university will only crack down when it affects their prestige.

godelski• 5 years ago

In theory it would. But either the schools are so good they can make cheaters good in the workplace or the workplace doesn't need the best and brightest (I guess cheating the the workplace could be a third answer).

Fomite2• 5 years ago

This. For something that "No one will discuss", this has been being discussed since I was in High School, and I'm now prepping my tenure packet.

angry-tempest• 5 years ago

In theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing and just gave them a zero for the one assignment.

It's likely that this decision was not up to the professor. Unless you have massive proof, deans (and the administration in general) hesitate against taking serious action. I'm talking from my own experiences.

nitwit0052• 5 years ago

The TAs caught it because the students copied the text exactly, so there was no issue of evidence. The administration didn't get a say because she never reported it to them.

In retrospect I could have made a stink and gone to the dean, but Freshmen me wasn't willing to do that sort of thing.

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

Too bad it seems impossible to contract to get good academic writing done. Otherwise more companies would publish.

hn_asker2• 5 years ago

Big Pharma uses this heavily to bias research in academia for their marketing purposes. It used to be that academic research was rigorous and objective. An academic title had prestige and respect. Now it's so watered down.

al2o3cr• 5 years ago

This goes out of its way to specifically hyperlink _one_ particular ghostwriting company twice: smells like thinly-disguised SEO spam.

galkk• 5 years ago

I think you're right. It's even has interesting formatting in one paragraphs, and description that sounds like the ad.

    One of the first and best known academic ghost-writing web sites is

    SITENAME.com based out of Montreal, Canada. It’s been in business for nearly 20 years, longer than most.

jboogie772• 5 years ago

It is and good pickup. That site has some really good pull and has managed to put itself in some really big name articles for pure seo purposes over the past couple years

nmca• 5 years ago

galaxy-brain: a great deal of resources are wasted in the university signalling game, by devaluing university these cheaters are contributing to societal progress in the long run.

nonpolitic• 5 years ago

It's going to be interesting when these people figure out GPT-3 exists. The days of the take-home essay as a useful grading tool are definitely numbered, at least in non-science disciplines.

spiritplumber3• 5 years ago

I'm looking forward to GPT-3 (or its successor) as something to do phrase-level autocomplete, rather than word-level as we have now. It will help as my finger joints get worse.

tomohawk• 5 years ago

There are a lot of courses that people are forced to take that have nothing to do with what they are trying to do in life. For example, nurses being forced to take an algebra (equivalent of HS algebra 1, algebra 2, trig, and and some analytic geometry). It is a big impediment for those students to pass that class and many cannot. So, nurses are selected on a skill they will never use or see again.

I can't blame students in that predicament for cheating on those kinds of courses.

They are merely jumping through the hoop. A hoop that serves no purpose, and is itself unethical.

I've seen many such students cheat on those courses so they can focus on their core learning and get on with their lives.

jonnycomputer3• 5 years ago

I once caught a fellow grad student out on hiring someone to do our assignment. I was looking for free-lance work and happened upon an ad, which contained a copy of the assignment instructions. I felt no compunction at all at reporting to the instructor. The assignment was a lot of work.

intended• 5 years ago

I’m willing to be persuaded differently, but any discussion on Academics and Academia is always a jobs/employment discussion with extra steps.

Nasrudith3• 5 years ago

There are also political ones both of the incredible petty internal politics and salt at them contradicting or not promoting their ideology sufficiently in their view. Although the first could be argued as jobs/employment on an internal level.

setgree• 5 years ago

Side note, why does this website jitter so much when I'm scrolling? Too much poorly-optimized JavaScript? (OS X Big Sur, Chrome (latest))

markrages• 5 years ago

Same with Firefox on Ubuntu 18.04. Completely different tech stack, same result. Must be standards-compliant jittering!

ashton314• 5 years ago

Same here on Firefox on iOS

fuzxi2• 5 years ago

It bounces up and down even when I'm not scrolling.

cycomanic3• 5 years ago

The previous university I worked at had a problem even one level more sophisticated. The school had a lot of international students, mainly from China and the Middle East. Mostly these were children of rich (but not obscenely rich) parents and often not particularly smart (the school was not super highly ranked).

Now the ghostwriting was also an issue, but that theoretically still can be caught (and it was from time to time). One way to do that was requiring in person exams and you always had to cary your uni I'd for the exams.

However, what the University administration realised is that there were some students essentially hired someone at the beginning of their studies to impersonate them at registration, where they got their photo taken. The "impersonator" would then complete the full studies for the student.

Now you need to id yourself at registration, however if the hired person looked somewhat similar it would just go through.

fma• 5 years ago

You'd think if someone scored low on TOEFL and SAT English, but their essays were a literature work of art..it would raise red flags.

nordsieck• 5 years ago

You'd think if someone scored low on TOEFL and SAT English, but their essays were a literature work of art..it would raise red flags.

Nah - university is full of people who desperately want standardized tests to be worthless.

AniseAbyss2• 5 years ago

In my country universities get money for foreign students. In fact more than they get for local students from the government. This is also the reason why universities switched to English in the 1990s.

Yes long term this can damage your reputation but in capitalism nobody cares.

RileyJames• 5 years ago

Often these platform ask what grade you’d like the work performed to. You can pay for Bs if you’re worried about being caught.

cycomanic3• 5 years ago

This was largely a technical university. I also doubt that the hired students were getting top scores. That often was not the goal, for those privaledged kids, getting a foreign degree almost certainly guaranteed a cushy job back home. The grades didn't matter too much.

Buldak• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if this is a serious comment, but I'd think professors generally aren't in a position to know their students' standardized test scores (never mind whether they'd care).

csomar• 5 years ago

Unless he finds someone who looks really similar, these international students should bring their passports/F1 visas? My guess is that the administration is turning a blind-eye because of the international $$.

the_svd_doctor• 5 years ago

Agreed. Seems like the admins would be onto it. The whole Sevis/F-1 should make this completely impossible.

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

Same sex siblings close in age have been doing this since forever.

One sibling takes the same class twice, once for themselves, one for the other.

TrackerFF3• 5 years ago

I heard rumors about similar stuff when I was a student - but not to that extent, that you had someone impersonate someone for the whole semester.

In majors with huge classes, no compulsory attendance, and schools where ID cards don't require a picture - this was apparently a thing. Some people would simply hire people to take the exam for them.

Obviously this wouldn't fly in a small class with 15-20 students or so, but very feasible in classes with 200-300 students, and where the exams are also open to previous year students.

u678u• 5 years ago

I had a small class in engineering and was surprised at the exam time to see a few faces I hadn't seen all year. I assumed it must be people coming back to sit a second time or something. I'm so Naive.

jakeinspace• 5 years ago

Plenty of students who don’t show up to a single lecture

spiritplumber3• 5 years ago

I was doing some genetic algorithm research at UO and I was approached by some kid who basically demanded that I do one of his electronics projects. I got some details, reported him to his academic advisor, and was then told that he was the son of one of the diplomats in town and that nothing could really be done.

So I agreed to help him do the project. He took that to mean that I would do it for him, he did no work and didn't show up on 2 of the 3 times that we had scheduled to work on it together.

And then he got mad at me when the project literally caught fire because of an absolutely obvious short that I put there on purpose to see if he'd catch it. I told him that if he couldn't be arsed to write the schematic he should at least have read it.

(This was between 10 and 15 years ago, and all this guy had to do was look at the breadboard for 2 minutes)

yellowcake0• 5 years ago

I'm not sure I understand, why did you agree to help him, did he have some sort of leverage over you?

rabbits77• 5 years ago

I saw somewhere that Paul Graham whole set of academic credentials are a farce. Through means similar to this story he basically paid others to do the majority of his work, all the way through grad school.

Partly explains why his language projects like Arc have been a hot mess.

peter303• 5 years ago

I wonder if an AI could fingerprint the writing style of a ghostwriter and identify them? The current anti-plagiarism tools are mostly algorithmic.

Then another AI could deep fake a students style based of their fingerprint. An ever-escalating battle between AIs.

_tom_2• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

7402• 5 years ago

I am baffled by the first paragraph, which begins "Getting a good college education turns out to be a lot easier than it used to be."

Can he possibly be saying that cheating in a class to get a high grade is "getting a good education"?

Or is this just an attempt at sarcasm?

Or was it simply a typo, and he meant to write something like "getting through college" instead?

In the current anti-intellectual period in my country (US), it can hard to figure out who is kidding and who isn't.

jboogie772• 5 years ago

It’s because it’s a poorly written article

OliverJones• 5 years ago

Wait a minute .... "getting a good education is easier than it used to be?" No, not that.

"Not getting a good education, but saying you did." is easier.

What is the point? Why not spend the best years of your life struggling to understand things? Why just bug out and waste your time?

It's not like rich kids hiring people to be drafted in their place, and sent to the Battle of Gettysburg to be praised by Abraham Lincoln in their graves.

Going to university is good. If it's isn't good, why do it?

Why fake it? So the patients you treat die because you're incompetent? "Anatomy? I hired somebody to take that exam for me. My bad."

sjy3• 5 years ago

Why don’t these cheating services ever get investigated by the police? They are obvious, organised, profitable frauds. How is this any different to selling fake IDs or stolen usernames and passwords?

etherealmachine• 5 years ago

It's not clear that it's illegal. The federal fraud statutes cover obtaining "money or property" through false statements. A prosecutor would have to convince a jury that the site is engaged in conspiracy to commit fraud and that a degree is property. If I were on that jury I'd convict, but it's a riskier bet than prosecutors usually like. I'd be interested in seeing a well crafted law here that makes it obviously a crime, although federal felony is a bit harsh but that's what let's you coordinate across state lines.

_tom_2• 5 years ago

Not a lawyer.

I was surprised that it was possible to prosecute faking admissions to colleges as a crime, but apparently you can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...

This would seem to be similar. Perhaps it can be prosecuted.

sjy3• 5 years ago

Thanks for prompting me to look a little further into this. Leaving aside the legal technicalities, I suppose there is a fundamental difficulty here in that academic cheating itself generally is not (and in my opinion shouldn’t be) dealt with as a legal issue. I think that it should be illegal to profit from it, but it does fundamentally differ from other kinds of fraud because the person who pays isn’t deceived, and the person who deceives isn’t paid.

The U.S. mail and wire fraud statutes are notoriously broad and on their face, seem to cover academic cheating services. Indeed, there is a precedent to this effect: United States v. International Term Papers, Inc., 477 F.2d 1277 (1973) [1]. However, I think it was overcome by the Supreme Court’s rejection of honest services fraud in 1987 [2]. While Congress reinstated the concept [3], the Supreme Court cut it down again in 2010, limiting it to bribery and kickbacks [4].

So that could explain why the newer online services haven’t been prosecuted federally. Several U.S. states have statutes explicitly dealing with this issue [5], but I suppose they are not being enforced for jurisdiction or resourcing reasons. Perhaps the newer legislation in Australia [6] and New Zealand [7] will be more effective.

[1] https://guides.law.fsu.edu/ld.php?content_id=4996427

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNally_v._United_States

[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skilling_v._United_States

[5] https://guides.law.fsu.edu/termpapermills/statutesandlegisla...

[6] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2020A00078

[7] https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1989/0080/latest/...

kjuulh• 5 years ago

I have a story about plagiarism.

It was during one of the first assignments of an infamous class I took during my bachelors. For context, the course was in Danish, but it was optional whether the hand-in, was in Danish Or English.

My group had written our assignment in English and had handed it in to the (public) repository.

The funny thing about this course was its structure, each group had to write a assignment, and then peer review two other assignments. This was done to take some load of the professors, as well as teach the students about collaborating on a long running project.

The first peer-review we had, was an exact copy of our own hand-in, though translated to Danish. it was quite unfortunate, I believe they got off with only a remark. But it was quite an experience to review your own work, plagiarized to that extend. Especially as it was in the beginning of the semester.

possiblelion• 5 years ago

Hey HN admins! This is actually an ad! The website "unemployedprofessors.com" has a really really strong guerilla marketing campaign going on all over the web. They've used a bunch of instagram meme accounts to do undisclosed promotions (such as @russiansinlondon) and spread these articles about the "problem" of ghostwriting while actually just promoting them.

The real article on HN should be about how this company is using all these crazy tricks to get them traffic.

mxd3• 5 years ago

Lol, they really laid it on thick. It was an fun read.

Academic “ghost-writing”: the cheating scandal no one will discuss (2020)

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