The Shadow Scholar (The Guys who get paid to write papers)

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http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

Hypothetically speaking I have a friend who used to do this for money. (He likes money and has a real contempt for the "pomp and circumstance" that surround academia).

THe author is right on the mark about who the big cheaters are. Most of my friend's customers were Asians (which is deliciously ironic!)

Ah yes, cheaters.

A business professor recently caught 200 of his students cheating.

Make no mistake, as someone who has spent more time in academia than I care to mention, and has pulled so many all nighters that I have caused physical damage to my body; as a person who really pulled their own weight, I wouldn't oppose to policies which allow cheaters to be flogged.

However of the current state and culture of academia at the university level, as it relates to cheaters, I have this to say.

When cheating has become so endemic, universities really have to start considering that they are responsible for some of the blame, not for not taking measures to block or catch cheaters, but for creating environments which are not actually conductive to the process of learning, and in which it is actually impossible, or very difficult, for the average, or above average hard working person to succeed.

Universities often set unrealistic standards as far as work load goes, and this is very visible when no one cheats and grades aren't curved.

My school was on the quarter system. Minimum enrollment was 12 units. That amounted to 15 hours a week in class. On average, we covered 1.5 chapters a week. Each class usually had homework due every week, and each homework consisted of about 8 math intensive problems. Frequently these problems would have 3-5 parts and it would take 5-10 hours to do each homework.

So it was not unusual to spend 30 hours a week on homework.

We also had homework due during exam weeks and projects due finals week. Project frequently took 30-50 hours. I had one project which took over 100 hours because I did not have a partner.

If homework was a reading assignment, it was typically a 50 page reading assignment and a paper of 1-3 pages was usually due on it.

If one was taking a programming course, there were usually weekly projects and it was not unusual for those to take more than 30 hours a week.

Granted, I was in an information impacted major, however students frequently have to work and often took more than 12 units a quarter because the cost of college was so high they couldn't afford to stay as long as they should have.

In the case of Asians, they frequently have a lot of pressure from their family to do not well, but excellent, often times with complete disregard for the environment their children are working in.

I've had classmates who were absolute geniuses in a rather literal sense who have only managed straight B's some quarters because the workload was so unreasonable.

Saw this on PZ Myers' blog earlier.

Can't say I've had much of a problem with people cheating, although that said, I am only in high school. The system punishes cheaters very harshly (any assignment where some cheating has taken place will result in an instant failure, and doing this more then once can result in you failing the course, even voiding your Year 12 Certificate.)

Yes, it does. Schools will expel students for cheating. In the case of the business course, the instructor suspected his students had cheated because the average course grade came out a grade and a half higher than it had ever been in all of his years of teaching. Instructors keep statistical information on that and there are many statistics programs they can run grades through to find distributions that suggest students have been cheating.

However if a person actually writes an essay for someone else, it takes a keen instructor to spot this in a large class.

There is also the issue of a very blurred line between cheating and having a classmate or someone else help you, and this varies from class to class.

In many courses, students work together on homework, and this is acceptable as long as they don't make the same mistakes (implying one person just copied another).

I've had programming courses though where students were explicitly forbidden from working with fellow students, or seeking help from anyone other than the instructors and assistants.

But how does one define the line between cheating and helping when it pertains to writing essays?

Obviously if you pay someone else to write your essay, or you copy your essay from elsewhere, that's cheating. But there is a very big grey area.

I've tutored many non-native English speakers in essay writing and when they would ask me "What should I write?" I would tell them, "It's your essay, you decide." But If they said, I want to say (whatever) because I'm trying to express (whatever) and I'm not sure how to phrase it well in English, I would give them suggestions. So all of the concepts in their essays were their own, and the organization of the essays were their own. I don't consider that cheating in the least bit, but some instructors might.

True. What I meant in my original comment was that I had never heard of someone paying someone else to write their essay (or even for their parents to write it,) although, that said, it is still high school, and the stakes are quite low (at least compared to university.)


In the system here, "over-helping" someone is inherently discouraged as it is graded on a curve, so if you help someone too much, you run the risk of lowering your own grade. I don't like the competitive nature of the system, but I guess it does prevent altruistic smart people from doing work for the whole class.

AFAIK, most universities are run like this, although the culture with helping others may be different there. I don't know.

The effect of the curve curbing "overhelping" diminishes the more difficult the courses become, because everyone knows they are going to need help, and worry that if they don't help, they won't get help.

So homework scores tend to be rather uniform.

Not surprising, given that in high school, there are a lot of people who simply don't care (even in difficult courses like chemistry and physics,) always ensuring a kind of bell curve. Those at the top of the class are usually willing to help each other, for the reason you state.

Difficult courses tend to do a better job at separating people, anyway.