Confessions of a custom-essay writer (2010)

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

by redcap • 15 years ago

81 30 15 years ago

nhangen5• 15 years ago

During my life as a ghost writer for bloggers and authors, I had very similar interactions. It got to a point where I was writing comments/replies on behalf of some people because they didn't know how to defend work. Knowing what I know about online content, it gets me wondering how much of what we read is really written by the name attached to it.

As for the topic of schools, I'm not bothered by it. Part of the learning in college comes from learning how to meet deadlines and get results. It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user. That type of skill will serve people well later in life.

forkandwait• 15 years ago

>As for the topic of schools, I'm not bothered by it. Part of the learning in college comes from learning how to meet deadlines and get results.It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user. That type of skill will serve people well later in life.

I love when people are honest about their cynicism! Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think the other "part of the learning" is about learning skills and internalizing habits. On the one hand, becoming a good cheat may very well enrich you, but you won't actually learn how to write a freaking paragraph via that route.

Yet again, I am amazed by the decadence and worthlessness of so much of humanity... perhaps that is what happens when you turn 40 ....

EDIT: I don't find the poster I replied to worthless and decadent, just the customers of the ghost writer.

nhangen5• 15 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, I outsourced my java homework in college because I didn't think I'd need to learn programming.

Come to find out, I did need to learn it, but I also needed to learn how to manage freelancers, which I do now on a daily basis. So maybe cheating/taking shortcuts paid off a bit, just not how you would expect it to.

mquander3• 15 years ago

I hope it goes without saying that if a prospective student wants to learn how to "meet deadlines and get results", he should go get a job, not go to college. Going to college and cheating is both a destructive (it takes away time, resources, and credibility from the students who are actually there to learn the topic) and inefficient way to learn those skills.

nhangen5• 15 years ago

Sure, but they want the paper, so students figure out the most efficient way to get the paper. The fix isn't to catch cheaters, but to stop valuing the damn paper so much.

lhnz• 15 years ago

I don't think people cheat to learn skills. They cheat to get a credential that can be used to get them into a job. The credential differentiates them from the non-cheating or non-intelligent population. With it they can manipulate others into thinking they are worth more than they are.

Of course, at that point you might think they'd be out of their league but in many cases this won't be the case. There are a lot of jobs which require great degrees but only to get in...

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

> It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user.

You can't outsource everything. One day, you'll fail to deliver the end product precisely because you never learned how.

nhangen5• 15 years ago

I disagree completely. Businesses do this every day, and many hackers here, especially those learning to code, fake it until they make it, learning on the fly.

I'm not saying education is useless, but it's amazing how quickly you can learn when forced to.

corin_• 15 years ago

Previously submitted and discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901152

gmantastic• 15 years ago

This link's been plagiarised?

AlexBlom• 15 years ago

Should we be concerned that this is so pervasive, or that educators fail to realize deep essays written by one with a professed lack of domain knowledge?

klbarry• 15 years ago

There was excellent analysis of this article the last time it came up (someone's linked to it now). In other news, if anyone needs an blog/essay writer, I know a quite good one who's done some work for me.

Shenglong2• 15 years ago

Amazing read. It's kind of disturbing that the quoted text is almost identical to the writing of one friend. Here's a blurb for confirmation:

Actually i mnot to sure eiter iguess the very basic is someone smart funny and feedm food. haha like someonei canlearns uff from idk but wat i no is that he isnot y typ

One thing I can't make sense of, with the ESL students (and maybe someone will be kind enough to inform me): I understand that they may not be great in English, but they should at least know that ican (I can) is wrong right, especially when it's underlined in red, right?

thehigherlife• 15 years ago

I laughed at your last sentence which has a strange verve, and slightly ambiguous meaning. I cannot tell if you were being ironic, but it is definitely entertaining in the context of your post.

[quote]but they should at least know that ican (I can) is wrong right, especially when it's underlined in red, right? [/quote]

Shenglong2• 15 years ago

That wasn't intentional, but it definitely is entertaining. I'm actually multitasking, and I often end up alt tabbing a lot for every comment I make. Sometimes, unfortunately, this happens!

amalcon• 15 years ago

School ideally provides two things: domain expertise (by way of education) and the perception of domain expertise (by way of a credential). The problem is that these two functions are significantly disjoint. Studying for exams, doing research, and doing projects can provide education, but it is not necessarily so. Likewise, one can be educated effectively without actually completing such assignments.

As such, someone who is more interested in one half of the result can optimize to obtain that half with less effort than would be required for the whole. These are not likely to be brought into alignment any time soon. Session exams, if re-created from scratch and kept confidential, are difficult (though not impossible) to cheat. Unfortunately, they are typically possible to cram, still possible to cheat, and they reward test-taking skills as much if not more than subject mastery.

The practical exam is probably the most effective, where one purporting to have a skill is simply asked to demonstrate it on the spot. Unfortunately, not everything is amenable to this, and they are still possible to cheat, though there are really only two ways[1].

Practical exams are unfortunately not so good for research-heavy subjects (like, say, all of graduate studies). You can do it (research this topic, take all the notes you like, bring them into class, answer some questions (possibly in long-form), but it is a less effective exam than the normal research paper if the latter is done honestly. Still, I think they are the only way to go if you really want to put an end to cheating.

[1]-Impersonation and outright bribery. There was a big scandal about the former in one of my classes back at Uni, in which six students were expelled. I've never heard of the latter, but I find it implausible that it never occurs.

timwiseman• 15 years ago

You can do it (research this topic, take all the notes you like, bring them into class, answer some questions (possibly in long-form), ...

At least some university do exactly this for the Comprehensive Exam required as one part of a master's degree. My wife is preparing for something very much like you described for her master's in history right now.

ajray• 15 years ago

As someone who (sometime in the far future) aspires to be a professor, this is an important thing to hear. As a student I guess I was ignorant about how available services like this are, and as a professor I'll definitely be wary about it (and possibly design assignments around making this sort of thing difficult or less rewarding grade-wise)

MaxGabriel• 15 years ago

Just because it seems so difficult to circumvent, any strategies in mind to avoid this?

DanielStraight2• 15 years ago

I can propose a few:

Have a one-on-one conference with each student where you ask them about their paper without letting them look at it.

Skip papers altogether and simply do a one-on-one interview about the topic to evaluate their knowledge of it.

Make students write papers in class.

Don't assign homework. Grade entirely based on class participation.

Ronkdar• 15 years ago

Presentations are a fantastic way to make sure students know what's what. Shame is a great motivator. Put a student in front of his classmates and he'll put a lot more effort into actually mastering the subject matter.

In-class discussion is also powerful. You can see who understands the material and who doesn't. Having an active class also promotes questions during student presentations, which again helps motivate the presenter.

int3rnaut2• 15 years ago

I never had the money to invest in one of these writers. I don't know if I ever would but I knew as a University student they were around and that there were people in the classes I took that used them.

I find it incredibly interesting that this no-name writer basically did the same thing I did to courses I never attended (essentially his main demographic); Google books and Wikipedia were my bread and better and it always lit a huge smile on my face when I'd "beat the system" as it were and put a few hours into a paper and pass a course I knew nothing about just to get my degree.

I don't know what it says about the education system, but hacking it in this particular way did a lot for me in terms of personal growth. I probably learned less about the subject at hand then I could have, but at the same time I learned a lot of useful skills that are transferable to my future compared to something like Women's lit (not that there's anything bad with that--oh how I remember the cold stares).

I'm sure you could argue for or against these methods, I just wanted to put my personal perspective out there.

int3rnaut2• 15 years ago

hahahahahaha I just realized I wrote "bread and better"

Confessions of a custom-essay writer (2010)

Related Stories