The fact that an American student has to pay someone in Keyna to write an opinion essay on whether humans should colonize outer space is a sad commentary on the quality of American college students.
9
Chegg is a US business that earns hundreds of millions of yearly revenue directly from cheating. It says that it’s business is primarily about textbook rental but the majority of its revenue/profit comes from its cheating business — it supplies answers to nearly all college textbooks as a subscription. Recently it has been buying edtech companies focused at the high school market to “hook” students earlier. It is a much bigger problem than these essay writers.
10
This is so very typical of what America has become. It is immoral, decadent, anti-intellectual and corrupt. How much longer can American imperialism continue when the centre of the empire is rotten?
25
do schools have the honor system anymore? do the schools and profs take time and effort to enforce same? where i went to law school, the students made it clear to other students that they must follow the honor code(not try to cheat themselves and must turn in cheaters to the dean if they saw cheating by others). failure of a student to turn in a cheater could cause a student to be expelled as if he cheated himself.
do the colleges care if pupils cheat or are they only interested in getting your money? how many students are kicked out of colleges each year for cheating? what do profs do to stop the cheating? can't they tell if a student is cheating by one on one discussions? do the colleges care?
6
It's not limited to essay writing. While sitting for a math test, in just a few minutes you can take a photo of a problem, upload it to a professional "tutor," and get the solution.
9
How pathetic! It appears that immigrants really do do all the hard work. It also calls into question the use of the internet in online courses in general. Learning to write essays is a challenging and essential skill for most future professions. Colleges should consider if the amount of reading and writing assigned is actually feasible with the course loads students carry. And they should also consider having some timed tests on word processors with access to spell check and class notes, but not to the internet. If you can't write a coherent, well reasoned essay citing at least two relevant sources in two hours (and have no identified learning disability) then you are not ready for college level work and need remedial courses regardless of cheating. For all the money colleges charge if they can't produce students who can write their own essays, then the colleges are cheaters too.
10
Accredited American Universities are ‘diploma mills.’ It’s the individual students we are counting on to make their time and money useful. ‘Teach your children well’
5
“Desperate” students? How about “lazy, entitled, and ignorant” students.
16
What is heartbreaking to me is Ms. Mbugua--who is clearly smarter than all those college students that used her services--has to sell kitchen utensils to make ends meet.
19
With regard to the epidemic of cheating on college campuses, I would say that we reap what we sow. So, what is happening at American universities that is leading students to outsource their writing...to “cheat”? Thirty years in higher education has taught me that our educational system is not structured to foster the spirit of inquiry, nor the love of learning that Ms. Mbugua came to realize as she wrote papers for others. The goal for many students has become the reward - a good grade. Our educational system uses these extrinsic forms of motivation to force students to learn, but also have the consequent effect of divorcing instructors of the responsibility of creating an engaging learning environment. If what an18 year old student is learning is not at all personally meaningful, then perhaps it is rational to take the shortest route possible to the real goal...a good grade. Think of the revolution in teaching approaches that would emerge on college campuses if faculty no longer could rely on the grade crutch to motivate learning. How many students would plagiarize their work if the goal was no longer just to get a good grade?
3
As universities create increased numbers of online courses to chase student dollars, the problem only intensifies. One poster said that students would later face consequences because the employers would realize that the students did not have the requisite knowledge to do the job for which they were hired.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Business, health care, and many other fields don't care one whit what the new hire knows - they want to train the employee their way, even if it contradicts more current knowledge. Then the former students assume that their college education was a waste because they had to learn on the job. The ones who rise to the top are often the most mediocre because they do not question the information they got from their employers since they never learned the more current information in the first place.
As a result. college education has become a hoop to jump through any way you can for the sole purpose of making money.
At work one day, I walked into a meeting of nurses getting their DNPs who were explaining to their essay writer what they needed in an assignment. They did not care about what they were supposed to learn since their organization wanted them to think and act differently from the information in the course. New ideas were not allowed.
Cheating is not just a moral issue - it literally could mean life or death and many other harms to those who place their trust in the cheater. Think about that.
6
Back when Nixon was president and I was in college, I was friends with someone in a sorority, not exactly the glory days of the Greek system. When I asked her why it was worth it, she said, while it was mostly her parents' idea, she has access to all the tests and papers ever to pass through the house, and that alone made it worth it.
I am truly disturbed by the notion expressed in so many of these comments that writing is merely a low-level task, and kudos to those who delegate. Good writers are the expert marksmen of the birds of thought, I've heard it said. Whatever your line of work, you will be better at it if you know how to distill ideas and communicate them in writing.
9
Treating the symptom is not a cure. When education is looked at as a magic bullet for the ills of humanity it throws up a whole range of new issues.
In places like India, "finish school, to go to college, get a degree..." this is the mantra, a routine. But once out of university, these graduates find out the hard way, there are no jobs for them. Uber, food deliver and contract cheating are some ways out.
On the other side, in the developed world, education itself has lost its value, becoming instead another way for the rich to enjoy their early years.
Is it time to stop treating formal education as a magic bullet and encourage other forms of learning like apprenticeships and informal learning.
2
Our system has become less competitive as reading and writing skills have been de-emphasized in the wake of reliance on adjunct teaching and emphasis on credentials. It’s not surprising that Kenyan graduates can write acceptable essays for Americans.
These competitive advantages are inherent in the differing educational systems and motivations for getting a university degree. After teaching in an American state college for four years I became a lecturer at Nairobi University, and one year taught several students on exchange from the UC system. All our classes and exams required essays. Only one of the UC students was academically stronger than my better Kenyan students. My son, who attended a private, predominantly Kenyan school through 8th grade, had never taken a short answer test until he entered school in the US. All of his primary school exams and assignments required extensive writing. During our absence overseas writing requirements here had been de-emphasized, as I found when I enrolled in a professional Masters program at the university where I had earned my PhD.
With the globalization of skills and knowledge US graduates should not be surprised to find their jobs being outsourced to individuals like Ms. Mbugua.
3
Writing papers for others has probably been around forever. But the shift in state and federal higher education from public financing and providing grants to those needing help with college costs to offering them loans has exacerbated the situation. After all, if students are going leave college saddled with burdensome debt repayments, some of them are going to pay a bit extra to someone who will help with their assignments. It is the logic of the cash nexus that is at play here.
1
In the 80’s I worked as a word processor, as the electronic typewriter had just become available. One of the customers I dealt with was a student seeking a doctorate at a nearby university. His writing skills were abominable: sentence formation, spelling, jumbled ideas etc. Clearly not worthy of a graduate student. For $2 a page I edited that mess and presented him with a paper worthy of submission. I often wondered how he fared and thought perhaps that I should be the one getting the graduate degree.
6
It is not hard to see what is happening here - the jading of American minds.
People are jaded for a number of reasons, some of which are: legal bribery in American politics, so-called religious leaders openly supporting corrupt people and politicians, government actively working to take away health care from working people, government constantly giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy, and corporations and their CEO's raking in billions of dollars while paying their employees a starving wage.
Young people rationalize that if decency, morals and ethics no longer seem to matter, then why shouldn't they also take shortcuts to get ahead.
2
I have worked in universities teaching writing for years, and students are not the only ones who cheat. Universities, particularly private universities with big endowments, cheat students and parents by hiring over half of their faculty as adjuncts, who are paid so poorly and inconsistently that they qualify for government assistance. It is amazing adjuncts care as much as they do, considering that they get no job security, health insurance, or any other benefits.
Public universities have been cheated by state legislatures and governors who consistently cut their funding.
And our some of our political and corporate leaders cheat in pursuit of money and power--just examine the money trail and the failure to pass any requirements for gun safety as an example--and we are the poorer in character and integrity for it.
9
I, too, was a community college English professor for more years than I like to remember. My favorite story is about the young man who turned in a completely plagiarized paper - never having realized that he cribbed it from a textbook I had written several years prior. He cribbed ME to ME.
13
I do wonder what will happen--which it will--when hackers drill into the databases holding all these essays and publish them online, complete with clients' names and universities. Will their schools retroactively pull their fraudulent diplomas, or will we just have to settle for knowing they will never get the jobs they had counted on to pay off their student loans? I'm already enjoying considerable schadenfreude just thinking about it.
7
This is the updated version of old news. In an earlier era, a college instructor who was an exception, insisted that his exams essays be handwritten(!) in class under his watchful supervision. A policy he adopted after he heard from the hosts of a foreign student living off-campus who discovered a box of ready-made papers addressed to the student.
4
I was a doctoral student at an elite university in the early ‘80s.
Somehow, a foreign student from a less challenging university contacted me, and asked me to “help” him with his term paper. He was willing to pay very handsomely, about $250 for a relatively short paper. This was 1983!
I told him that I would indeed HELP him, but not “help” him.
He had to write the drafts, do the research, and then meet me to discuss, review, and improve. This way, he ended up with a much better paper, and I actually felt good about what I was doing. Not just “not guilty” but good.
My logic? His professor was clearly not able or willing to invest time in coaching. I was. And, yes, i was very happy to be paid for this. Of course, the paper was in my field, so he was actually getting some real learning out of this.
It worked well enough that I did a couple more, for his friends. Then stopped as the time commitment was getting too much, and I had my own dissertation to write...
4
It's distressing that there is little to no focus here on the immorality of passing someone else's 'work' off as one's own. We constantly focus attention on the prevarications of the current White House occupant, but do not examine the deeper implications of lying and cheating in general. Having someone else write essays is not a new phenomenon; what is new is the notion for far too many is that it's ok. Why? Because "everyone's" doing it...just look at that article in the NYT that identifies it as a global industry.
We are witnessing the erosion of the underpinnings of civilization, let alone our educational, political, economic, and social institutions. And all we get is a report on how widespread college cheating is? We read that one young Kenyan woman felt guilty at first about cheating for some rich American student but demurred in order to eat. So the rich corrupt the poor, and that's ok? Pretty soon, if not already, we'll have no basis to believe anything...the world will be all smoke and mirrors.
6
Now, let me understand this.
A rich student has parents who can buy his way into an elite college. He has the money to pay someone to write his papers. He has the connections and can afford to get an unpaid internship. Finally, he has the network to get a well-paying job.
And, poor students with none of these advantages are supposed to "pull themselves up by their socks."
11
There is also something wrong with the assignments if they are so easily done by people who aren't in the class and haven't done the reading. The fault lies with "courses" that do not teach anything. If an acceptable paper must discuss something taught in that course, or expounded in its reading, no distant ghostwriter can write it.
We had a President whose career was based on the ghostwritten "Profiles in Courage". The problem extends beyond coursework.
8
Assigning written papers to my college students has been nothing but a stress-fest. Either there’s nothing worth giving any grade to or it’s a plagiarized cut-and-paste. The only solution I’ve come up with is to assign the task, given time to gather data, then have the actual writing done in class.
A time waster,shorter papers but at least it has to be their words. And the results are equally sad. We’re in the iphone text era: inability to spell is a given, no capitals, run on sentences, no paragraphs, shorthand (.....as u cn c.....). FYI- I’m training students who want to be in a medical field. I’m valiantly trying to stay healthy.
11
A wild and well reported story. This is probably a consequence of the Humanities being devalued in many institutions of higher education. Im a senior at Carnegie Mellon, and A LOT of students at CMU don't think it's important to know how to write.
7
I’ve been a college professor for many years now and have witnessed the unrelenting slide to mediocrity or below. Learning is still verbally applauded with its comcomitant indicators of student success (retention, graduation rates, GPAs). But with the acceptance for the vaidity of student evaluations of faculty performance, ‘rate my professor’ websites, along with some colleges using these evaluations as determinants for tenure or promotion, the less-than-surprising acceleration of grade inflation and diminishing standards has ensued.
The whole scenario used to cause me great pain. But I now see this trend of diminishment of knowledge and skill as the planet’s salvation. If we keep going in the present direction, the ability of future generations to effectively communicate, think original thoughts, invent or fix much of anything decelerate giving the planet time to restore itself.
16
Though it makes me angry that students game the system (and obviously at $15 or more per page, not the poor students), it is ultimately themselves that they cheat. The point of college is to get an education, not to party or sleep or to get a 'little piece of paper,' but to actually know more. Yes, I suppose one can focus on one's major's courses and farm out the rest. Sadly, that is not getting an education - only getting training.
One solution might be for professors to randomly quiz students on the content of the papers they turn in. A student who has done the work ought to be able to have a discussion about the topic, be familiar with the sources sited, and defend any position taken. A student who simply paid for the work will know it very little, if at all.
24
The circle of plagiarism can be broken by a few well-placed obstacles. My favorite: an oral report based on an annotated bibliography. Students sometimes elide this one by being absent or late. But they usually come around to writing the research paper themselves. I should acknowledge that my class size is small, so I get to know each student and his writing.
16
Late? A paper has a due date. There is no late. if that seems unbearably cruel, each day a paper is late, it drops a full grade. my students didn't love me but those interested in learning the subject often told me my upper division seminar was the best they'd ever taken.
5
This us another consequence of turning "public" universities into privately funded schools. The commercialization of what used to be public education is not good for America. As an employer, I sometimes hire people and then wonder how they got a college degree when they can't write a complete sentence. I guess as long as you can pay someone $4 a page, you don't need to learn to write a sentence. Perhaps I should hire Kenyans, who apparently can write better in English than Americans who are rich enough to attend college. Time to being back the in-class essay assignment.
26
@anita Understand them, we are just trying to help and survive.
1
Sadly, after 12 years of coddling, "beat the odds" multiple-choice test coaching, and parent-negotiated grade inflation, our little darlings can't write much more than hashtags and photo captions.
I really hope to see a prestigious US university offer Mary Mbugua a full scholarship. I hear there's room at USC now that Olivia Jade has left school in order to "rebuild her brand."
31
In the 1990s, I was teaching at a state university and a junior college. at both levels, most of the students were astonished when I explained there would be no multiple choice tests or use of Scantrons. my tests would require thinking and writing. at university, the Department chair took me to lunch and explained how the department was competing for space and needed students. tough grading drove students away. at JC, the Division chair suggested that I change my grading because my average daily attendance was too low. in both instances, I resigned. taking tuition while giving students the illusion of an education is also cheating.
23
Every student should be required to do on the spot writing in front of the teacher at some point, especially if there are doubts they are doing the work themselves.
22
Yes, there has always been cheating. Of course, the internet makes it easier for this type of cheating to happen, so it makes things worse. But no one seems to mention the neoliberal order as an accelerator of this phenomenon. The bankrupt neoliberal order has no other alternative for individual economic stability, much less mobility, than to say, go to college. When education becomes so utilitarian, the joy of learning is stripped away. College becomes a rubber-stamped rite of passage because professors in elite universities cannot grade the scions of the powerful honestly if they hope to remain employed, and professors in public colleges and universities do not want to be the ones to squash the dreams of struggling working class students. They let the work world take care of that. When education is everything, it becomes nothing.
14
That's rather hitting the nail on the head. I'd just add that for most, attending university has become so grotesquely expensive, that attendance must be a passport to a well paying job. getting an education to learn how to think and make decisions is a luxury most simply cannot afford. More than 25 years ago, college and university became glorified job training. It's hardly a surprise that so many Americans today can't think logically, conjugate verbs and or write coherent sentences, identify the seven continents on an unlabeled map, or identify the century of the American Revolution.
10
Some very good students abroad who help some very mediocre students at home. Remedy: become a better student.
2
When students are more in tune to texting with their thumbs most of their life, expectations by an older generation of writing a term paper without emojis may just be asking a bit too much from students.
8
This is sad, but not that surprising. When I was in high school back in the day, we learned to diagram sentences correctly, we studied hundreds of vocabulary words each year, and many of us took advanced composition classes. These days, kids mostly learn how to write through texting, social media, etc. It's not working out too well. U no wat i meen?
24
Some linguists applaud the new digital lingo believe it or not. those of us who use periods and commas while texting don't know how to write properly in the digital world.
7
@Sophie Diagramming sentences has also been shown to be quite unhelpful in actually learning the nuances of sentence structure. I diagrammed sentences too when I was young. You never see it now in schools.
@Sophie As Roger has said - language on the Internet is its own thing, separate from regular writing conventions. It is a pertinent and valuable skill to be able to write in various ways using different conventions. u feel me?
2
This is sad, but not that surprising. When I was in high school back in the day, we learned to diagram sentences correctly, we studied hundreds of vocabulary words each year, and many of us took advanced composition classes. These days, kids mostly learn how to write through texting, social media, etc. It's not working out too well. U no wat i meen?
2
In reference to Australia, those students buying essay papers are Chinese nationals.
10
One of our current presidential candidates was known for plagiarizing. The NYTimes itself had an article on this subject:
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/18/us/biden-admits-plagiarism-in-school-but-says-it-was-not-malevolent.html
9
As a professor, I see this as the result of the cesspool of mediocrity that higher ed has become. As long as grades are used as the primary metric to determine who gets into college, who graduates, who gets a scholarship, who gets into graduate school and who gets a good job, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The question is whether college administrators and corporate recruiters ever find the guts to eliminate grades as a means of evaluating student intelligence and potential. But I will say, as a professor awarding grades is easy. Evaluating students individually on what they have learned as well as providing constructive feedback is time consuming and hard. I’ll keep making the easy money for now. I’ll be happy to quit sleep walking at work as soon as administrators quit thinking grades mean anything.
10
Wonder - if students failed the course after using one of these masterpieces could they claim they were exploited due to their financial naïveté and intellectual handicap? Did they fully get what their payments entitled them to? Would a new Student Consumer Protection Board be set up by Ms Warren? Would Congress pass laws forgiving their cheating bills? Would they ever regain their safe spaces from which to placidly enjoy passing off other people's intellectual drivel?
Most importantly, in view of what the EU is doing to US internet giants operating there, would the US be entitled to tax the earnings of these paper producers which earn their keep in the US?
A related issue...group projects...where one or two students do all the work. The others better hope daddy or uncle have a good job for them. Kenyan ghost writers can't do your job for you.
13
Some people only need a Sharpie to cheat.
28
And that's why barely anyone can pass the writing tests at job interviews these days.
6
This is nothing new, the internet makes it only easier. When I graduated from college in the 70's I couldn't get a job. So I posted flyers on the 4 neighboring colleges bulletin boards. You ripped off the coupons to get connected with a person who would help you "academically". I got paid very little for all the leg work. So one day I mailed in one of those coupons to see what they actually sold. They'd write your term paper! I quit. To me that was unethical.
I have a friend who's a professor. Not only does he run his student's papers through one of those plagerism programs but he has his students, at the very beginning of the semester write a short paper for him in class - by hand. That way he has a sample of their writing style. If he thinks one of his student's paper's is a bit beyond what that person is capable of or if it uses high level vocabulary he checks against the sample. Labor intensive yes, but just the fact that he warns them about this deters many from going the buy my essay route!
19
I know highly paid executives that couldn't write an essay; never mind without a spell checker. The US college admissions are a joke, a joke on the taxpayer and the honest people who still believe that meritocracy is a real thing in the USA. It's not what you know, it's whom you know.
13
Who do you think wrote Donald’s papers? Clearly it wasn’t he.
9
What has happened to our country?
2
Does no one enjoy learning any more?
8
We wonder why we have huge ethics lapses such as McKinsey consultancy advising J&J as to how to sell more opioids? Having parents paying bribes to get their kids into college and a bankrupt President, US 2019
14
Just think about all the Ivy League grads of questionable ethics and competence who have served or are currently serving in the highest realms of the Executive and Judicial branches of our government, and who reportedly spent half their time in college drinking and boofing. Talk about diploma/gin mills.
9
Some non-Ivy Leaguers are even in K-12 classrooms. And leading schools as administrators.
Sadly, access can be purchased.
1
Disgusting and disheartening.
3
Anyone heard of Cliff’s Notes? This is nothing new.
2
As a retired professional writer, I have to say, I'm appalled by the pay rates that paper writing brings. The Internet had eviscerated the writing profession. Academic cheating has always existed. I recall being offered a couple hundred dollars to write a paper for a classmate back in the early 1990s. I refused to cheat, even though I could use the money. That was the going rate. Even then, there were plenty of people who couldn't write an English sentence, even at top 25 private universities.
These days, "thanks" to the Internet, such a paper can be farmed out to a Third World country for $4/page or to a desperate US writer for $30/page. The per hour wage of such a thing is piddling! VASTLY lower than it was 30 years ago! Yet the costs of everything we have, everything we need are much higher.
A house costs 3-5x as much. Gas costs 3x as much. Food costs 3x as much. A university education costs 3-5x as much and you borrow FIVE times as much. There are far fewer jobs that pay well. Good luck finding health care or a pension.
It used to be that I didn't get out of bed for less than $0.50 per word. Now MOST of the people I knew with comfortable freelance careers have day jobs, and are living desperately, hand to mouth. Rates have not risen since the 1960s... in fact they have fallen.
Exactly WHAT did the Internet bring us?
13
Well said, Dejah. I'm one of those professional writers hustling to keep writing every day. Regardless.
Crass students are even advertising on craigslist for paid research papers! All in an oh-so-professional and entitled way. This lack of ethics sickens me.
Writing - and objective news reporting - is still a valuable skill. Professional writers and reporters must be paid fairly and equitably. Writing is REAL work.
3
To paraphrase Robert Plant: "And she's buying her way out of an education."
This is how great civilizations end. Through lazy amorality.
13
The real problem is the time wasted on a lot of the papers. It isn't the research that is the problem, but the amount of time needed to write it, edit and present an error-free paper.
I had a professor in college who assigned bibliographies. At first, I thought how stupid that sounded. Then I went to the library to make a bibliography for a non-existent essay. I spent a lot of time reading chapters from books that I might have used and some time on books that weren't suitable. I had time to learn much more than if I had to produce an essay for some grad student to read. A lot of essays are the replacement for the busy work of producing a project in grade school. Generally, an exercise in wasting construction paper and poster boards.
3
I’m a professional writer and editor. I reject clients who seek my services for academic work and have toyed with calling their colleges to report them. While I always tell them my rejection is due to the ethical issues of plagiarism, I’ve only received one or two angry responses. Sadly, the majority of these rejected clients are merely confused, not angry. “Why is this unethical?” they always ask.
10
I did call one masters's program at a seminary to report the chaplain who refused to pay me the balance on his bill four years ago. The editing job took longer than anticipated because he is such a poor writer.
I supplied the school with his original document and the one I edited. I couldn't sue him because the military wouldn't get involved.
4
Win for the international essay writers financially and intellectually.
Win for the cheaters confirming their world view that money can buy you anything including happiness.
2
Cheating and Outsourcing are real world skills that will get these kids ahead in today’s America. Actually writing a term paper? Pffft, old people please spare us the romantic indignation.
It is of course wrong to cheat, as well as it is self defeating. But a part of me is glad that Ms Mbugua is prospering. It’s people like her who deserve a break.
9
Absolutely. I hope she finds a decent job in the field she studied for, but in the meantime, I'm glad she's making a living writing papers for lazy and incompetent students.
4
The fish rots from the head. In this case the Orange Head with the fake hair.
Come on, how can our universities demand honesty when they have entire Offices of Externally Funded Research that offer courses to their own junior faculty on "grantsmanship." I kid you not. I guarantee you all these professors proudly telling us how they assign in-class essays are not the ones being invited by the provost to wine and dine with the trustees. Instead, they are headed for the smaller office, off the end of the hallway.
Corruption is rampant in every walk of life in America. It is all vita enhancement, all the time.
8
My ex-wife is Turkish..she graduated from a university here in California. This is exactly how she did her homework and assignments, most students did it. However, that was done mostly at the time by Asian guys, and they were here in the US. Now this is being farmed at an industrial scale.
3
I wonder if this is kind of like how the decline and fall of the Roman empire began--the mainstreaming of corruption from the very top on down.
9
A fascinating essay topic...
2
If a student at an American university can successfully pass a semester-long face-to-face course by submitting a paper cranked out in a matter of hours in Kenya or Ukraine by someone who’d never set foot in the said course... then I have more questions for professors and universities than for students who collectively don’t feel that it’s worth their time writing these ‘millions’ of papers’.
17
Cheating is almost foundational to the maintenance of the rich and powerful and their offspring throughout history especially in this country whether by legacy or active plagiarism. What percentage of the freshman classes of Ivy League schools are legacy admissions. Why be surprised that it has reached an industrial level. It is part of the historical ethos of this country whether one admits it or not. Win at all costs is quite an acceptable philosophy many Americans teach their children. Make as much as you can for the least work. Everyone wants “a dollar and a dream”. Of course some may think it is not whether you win or loose but how you play the game that is important. Unfortunately this country does not reward losers in any foundational or rewarding way.
7
At least in a writing class, an attentive teacher might notice papers not written by a native speaker. Though English is spoken in other countries, it is rarely spoken in quite the same way. Similarly, if the student does not buy every essay from the same person, an attentive teacher might notice a sudden shift in style. I used to tell my own students that a person's style is rather like a fingerprint. If students write a paragraph in class every day, you will get acquainted with their style. Such writing need not be strictly graded. Supposedly, it is useless to teach grammar, but students under such a regime can learn to avoid a few of their commonest errors.
4
I've been teaching at a college or university for more than a decade. I have a strong suspicion that many--if not the vast majority--of the students that pay for papers are international ESL (English as a second language) students.
In a day and age where state and provincial (I teach in Canada) funding is decreasing (see Alaska and Ontario) international students are admitted enmass and their tuition dollars essentially shore up university's bottom lines.
To compound the problem, since budgets are tight, there is virtually zero support system put in place to help these students succeed. As the result, they often have no where to turn but paper mills to get assignments done.
It is an absolutely crying shame that there is now a global plagiarism market that provides a solution to a truly global phenomena. The solution, of course, is to properly fund our institutions of higher education and do right by the students admitted.
I won't hold my breath.
9
I wrote a handful of papers for others while I was in college. Two of them were for other students in the same classes I was taking. I charged anywhere from $100 - $500 for a paper, depending on the length. The $500 one was a 30 page paper for a senior level class in Sociology that was a required class to complete for graduation. The student had some research done but nothing written. It was due in three days. He got a B for the class and graduated. I didn't feel great about it but I did it. All of the students I wrote for had work issues and couldn't find the time to do the class work.
3
Considering the rampant outsourcing, casualization and detenuring of undergraduate teaching - a lot of markers and lecturers and grad students and adjuncts aren’t being paid or acknowledged sufficiently to care, much less to run undergrad essays through software checks or attend appeal meetings with deans, student fee paying customer/client/consumers and, in cases, their legal reps or parents. The whole system of higher ed risks turning into a look the other way business transaction in the credentialling of human capital. Rich folks buying their kids places, foreign student fee gouging to subsidise domestic cutbacks, research philanthropy by weirdos and money launderers, sports programs with harassers and concussions and bigger budgets than liberal arts faculties. Time to put the pieces of this puzzle picture together. Yes, back to number 5 pencils and exam rooms, face to face lectures and hand written notes, enough of this online, don’t front up, fees for degrees universe.
3
There was a girl in my masters cohort who cheated.
We'd occasionally do assignments in class and then swap with a partner for review. There wasn't a grammatically correct, or honestly corherent, sentence in anything I reviewed of hers.
But she graduated a 2 year program in 6 months with a thesis on a niche topic that was not at all in her wheelhouse. (she traveled the world and did volun-tourism then wrote a thesis on gamification despite bragging that she had never actually played a video game)
The whole department knew. But she had "connections". I suspect a lot of what determines if somebody gets punished for it is if the student is paying full sticker price or not. Follow the money.
9
One way to catch the cheaters would be through a “sting” operation where the professor (or a paid service the professor subscribes to) covertly signs up as an essay writer on the essay-buying websites and bids to write essays for cheating students at their university, then exposes them when they do. The proceeds for the purchased essay will be reimbursed to the student (but they will be disciplined by the institution for cheating) or donated to charity. Students will be warned in advance that they will be busted in this way, so will not be able to complain about unfair entrapment.
1
A superpower country like the USA has better things to do other than monitor what school-going adults are doing to get their school work done.
I must not be rich enough, because when I got to University, studying a topic I had chosen, I could not stop reading about it. I read every book and paper I was assigned and then more. I was consumed with it.
14
I didn’t see the number of essays the subject of the article wrote or the grades that the essays obtained, but her educational background and creativity surely has earned her a chance at a job in this country.
2
Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. However, his six volume history of the Second World War was largely a team effort, with Churchill acting as the chef in charge of the sous-chefs and kitchen helpers that handled the research and rough drafts. The final words are his own, and he was open about his process. We should acknowledge that delegation in writing can be the mark of high intellect and great purpose.
The problem with the world of Ms. Mbugua does not lie with the writers-for-hire. In fact, it would be useful course for some students to learn the arts of delegation and coordination of effort. The problem lies with the lack of attribution and general opacity of the process.
Beyond this, however, is a much more serious problem: the willingness of universities and their professors to hand out credentials to students who have not earned them. It takes no great mind to grasp that if credentials have value, a certain number of people will try to steal them. However, the credentials only have value because the granting institutions warrant their authenticity, and therefore bear the responsibility for verifying that the student’s certified abilities correspond to actual abilities that have been demonstrated and tested. To go by this article, this is a responsibility that many institutions of higher learning have remarkably failed to meet.
6
It's not just the students who are cheating - I identified blatantly plagiarized material in a grant purportedly written by a senior faculty member in the university with which I'm affiliated.
No exotic software needed beyond good ole google - I put quotes around a couple of sentences that didn't pass the smell test while I was reviewing the grant, and sure enough, up popped the original source.
When confronted, the look on the offender's face was priceless.. He got off without formal charges of academic misconduct being filed, but I'll bet he won't cut corners like that again!
3
Don't worry. In a year or three, AI will do all the writing, eliminating at least some of the moral dilemma.
5
I don't understand why some commenters are praising people like Ms. Mbugua and suggesting they should be brought to the US, where they would appreciate and perform well in US universities.
Passing off someone else's essay as your own is unethical. But so is writing an essay for someone else to pass of as their own. Even Ms. Mbugua realizes that; that's why she says she has "a guilty conscience." It doesn't matter which side of the unethical practice you are on, it's all unethical. I'm not really interested in cultivating any of them.
8
The ability to write well stems from the ability to read critically. Better readers means honing in on early access to high quality, holistic education that allows young children to use multiple modalities to build literacy skills. This wave of college students were raised in the NCLB era and high stakes testing, which had the perverse effects of lowering overall academic outcomes. (Look at the PISA scores compared to countries that focus less on testing and more on supporting researched based measures to help students succeed.)
4
We underestimate the creativity and needs of some living outside the US.
A writing professional overseas explained how he and a group of other professionals split up teleworker assignments for a vendor to Google. The pay rate was low enough that most Americans would not do the work. So one person took the work assignment -- and split the work among themselves. The US vendor never knew.
1
As an English professor for the past 45 years, I'm always depressed when I read about paper-writing businesses. Of course I know they exist,but reminders such as these always dent my idealism somewhat. I'm not sure how I've maintained it,but I have. I haven't met w. a lot of plagiarism, & for what it's worth,I'll say how I attempt to prevent it.
1) I learn every student's name (my classes close @35 or 20,depending on the level);
2) I mix lecture& discussion;I require 2 individ conferences,1 @the beginning of the semester so I can get to know each student & 1 before the final paper is due, to discuss in detail paper topic/outline/questions/anxieties/required secondary sources; I'll have read 2 in-class midterm exams and 2 short papers by each student, so I'll already have some idea of each student's abilities;the short papers are based very specif. on class discussions & ergo can't be outsourced;
3) the topics I offer are Very Specific, e.g.discuss the idea of the contested domestic site in poems by X & Y; the poems will have been published w/in the last year, so there will be nothing already written on them;
4) when I discuss the assignment w. the class,I give a talk about the high (moral) & low (practical) reasons not to plagiarize & I assure the students I will not lower grades on late papers.
Such techniques can be adapted to other subjects & other courses. You have to be careful & imaginative.
9
This is not at all correct. College admissions shouldn’t be based purely on essays. A competitive exam should be held for admission into the college provided the Bachelor degree is worth doing. If not college admission can be given on the basis of academic merit and extracurricular activities that include inter school debates, quiz competitions, social service and sports.
This is not about admissions. It's about paying people to do their homework.
3
@JerseyGirl : Thanks for correcting me. If college assignments can be got done in this fashion, then even college admission essays, which play such a huge role in admission can also be got written in this fashion. It’s a highly condemnable act.
In what way the present cheating mentioned in the article and the influence exerted by rich parents while getting college seats for their children in IVY colleges help them. Further such cheating deprives the genuine students from what they richly deserve.
Those essay assignments serve a very distinct educational purpose: they allow you to wrestle with your thoughts, get clarity about what you think, and then organize them so that someone can understand your thoughts through written expression. I hated writing essays in college (and I was an English Lit major), but they taught me how to think through a problem and present a compelling, logical argument. Students who take the easy way out are robbing not only themselves but also the companies they hope to work for.
6
Sometimes students are left desperate for such help from these websites. International students who struggle with English language are more likely to seek for such help from websites like www.doctorateessays.com since their professors always want flawless papers. In other cases, if a student has to go to work during the day and attend classes, how does the professor expect them to handle all the pressure? Nobody wants to fail and clearly it's not easy dealing with work related deadlines and assignments. While I agree it not the best way to handle the pressure, I think it's the professors or rather the universities that should come up with ways of making sure students do not cheat.
Why bother paying $50,000 a year for an education if you are hiring someone else to do your work? I am a college professor. I have come across one students that I know of who clearly had someone else write his paper. Because so many of the points we discussed were part of the paper, I realized he must have tape recorded our conversation. I did speak to him and warned him of my suspicions. His second paper was much weaker, but it was clear he wrote it on his own. Most universities, mine included, are having a difficult time with grade inflation. Hiring outside "help" goes well beyond mere grade inflation, and seems quaint by comparison. I do hope that turnitin and other services will offer ways to catch students red handed. Students found purchasing their papers should be expelled from college, without exception. Regarding my students, even though we have a writing center, many students do not avail themselves of these services. So I help them with writing. My feeling is that if I can give them the tools and they are willing to work hard, they can become good writers. It is most definitely a skill that is learned and enhanced with practice. I start my students at the level in which they are functioning, usually below a college level. But they do improve.
20
I never even considered cheating either as an undergraduate or as a grad student. But one time in between for some kind of credential I needed to have completed some sort of introductory business class (this was not actually of any particular relevance to the credential) that I took online and my husband completed a lot of the assignments for me. I could have easily done the work myself but he was faster at it because he didn't take it very seriously. I was strapped for time and nursing a newborn. I did have to take the final exam myself and passed with no problems.
3
With the bulk of teaching jobs held by poorly paid and overworked adjuncts, many of whom would struggle to find the time to assess papers broken down into multiple step processes, it seems like this kind of paper is exactly what many of today’s universities are looking for: “check the box, ok, you’re done.”
In addition many high schools don’t assign papers to students. Are these overburdened adjuncts supposed to remedy this? How?
Universities are the winners here, for sure. It would cost them a lot of money to provide enough professors to REALLY TEACH their students. Until that day comes, we just have a machine—one step up from a diploma mill.
13
I appreciate your sympathy for adjuncts but object to the claim that only full time faculty really teach. That is simply false and perhaps insulting to adjuncts.
5
Most students aren’t ready to go to college until their mid to late 20’s. Most students never sincerely desire liberal education. College is now required to be in the middle class, but only a small proportion of Americans are skilled enough and have enough desire to go.
Mandatory work experience or military service before college enrollment; trade schools; and regulations on companies demanding higher education for applicants - these are starting points for raising the standards of education in the United States.
11
I don't see how it's possible to enforce this without undercover agents.
At a major American University that I attended a sunny boy architecture student consistently had architects in his dads office prepare his design projects , The profs must have seen through this, but never challenged him. He did not have many friends among his colleagues.
10
My freshman class English professor found an easy solution to prevent plagiarism. Every Friday, she had us write an impromptu essay in class. We knew would write, but she wouldntl't give us the topic until we got to class.
19
When I was an adjunct at a community college, my class and I got into a discussion about books. The majority of students in the class, about 20 of them, were never required to read a book in high school. I asked them what they read in school. One or two page handouts from the teacher.
How in the world do we expect them to write a research paper when they haven't been required to read in high school?
46
@Linda
Now students don't even read in college. Most students, when presented by an assignment involving reading a book, go straight to the internet and look up summaries or reviews - they spend more time trying to find the "cliff notes" version, than it would have taken them to actually read the book.
5
@Linda - :)) Recently there was an article in this paper about homework and the comments lit up. There should be no homework because it gets in the way of family time (watching Love Island or something) and that college was for research papers and writing assignments, not grade/high school. :))
2
This makes me think of the movie “Working Girl”, where Sigourney Weaver’s character steals Melanie Griffith’s characters ideas. Only when (SW) was grilled at a board meeting as to how she came up with the idea did her plan fold.
5
A wonderful movie Dori, and one of my favorite New York City films, with the great moral that hard work, long and careful study, and analytical thinking earn both career advancement and Harrison Ford. The only thing that saddens me is the film footage at the end showing the Twin Towers standing out against the skyline of Lower Manhattan.
4
In the near or already present future, there will be no way to effectively test for plagiarism. Back to oral exams?
3
Now we know how several recent presidents made it through university.
16
Here's one way to stop this kind of cheating. Bring back REAL number 2 pencils and the old "blue books" of REAL paper and make the students write compositions in the classroom right in front of the profs.
324
That’s fine for tests, but research papers are more involved than that. At least, when students aren’t lazy, they’re more involved.
39
In the high school where I work some lab reports and papers are written in class or during exam time. It’s possible.
9
@mary This is not a practical solution for essays. A good research essay should take about an hour a page to write. My upper-level classes have a 15 page research paper requirement. *I* don't want to sit there with them while they write it.
One solution for profs though is to make the requirements of the paper incredibly idiosyncratic to YOU. My gen-ed students (the most likely to buy a paper) have to use sources specifically from PubMed and Jstor. They are barred from using mainstream media sources like NYT or internet news sources. Papers must be written in third person; slang is barred... And they have to submit 5 specific assignments prior to the final paper that are used to demonstrate thought and progress on their paper (including an annotated bibliography that I later match with their finished research paper). It's more work for me, but worth it. I guess I could try not to care, but I do care. I just do.
76
Maybe we should go back to the days of oral exams?
13
I paid $10 for this comment.
223
@Padfoot
Really, that much? I only paid $8 for this reply.
18
Hilarious... however, you were fleeced as that comment took a mere four to five seconds, if even that long. 😬
8
I wrote the comment and only got 50 cents the other $9.50 went to the broker I got the assignment from.
25
The decline of the empire is in full swing! No wonder I struggle to find co workers who can write their way out of a paper bag. Too much time spent getting drunk and partying at college. And now, heck, don’t even need to show up for class.
25
I'm surprised that the foreign writers haven't take the next lucrative step - blackmail.
Write 1,000 essays over a couple of years, and then threaten students with revealing their names to their universities. Many would be willing to pay a couple of thousand dollars or more to avoid possible expulsion or even just losing the class credits.
Any American students who is using such a service is putting themselves at potentially substantial risk.
35
@John
Now there's a thought. Why didn't I think of it?
12
@John
It's happening now. In at least one instance that I'm aware of the student was blackmailed for more money. When the student didn't pay the blackmailer sent out "explicit" images under the student's name to everyone on campus.
4
@John Blackmail is there only when a client; the student, fails to pay.
1
The problem is too many classes requiring essays and not enough requiring math and engineering exams.
3
Right.
What a foolish response. Every paper in every peer reviewed journal covering every topic is, essentially, a research paper or essay.
2
Well, I guess it’s better than using the old frat bros' papers. Besides, in most subjects the content has moved on as well as the style of writing, sources of material, etc.
Then, there is the Example-in-Charge who's running the country who could use someone to write his lines.
6
as someone who grew up in Asia, these practices are well known among the elite communities. quite frankly the wealthy are willing to pay ridiculous amounts to ensure their kids get into top notch colleges, and do well while they get in. in addition to this, many of these companies also write college papers for students for their college application. some Asian countries surpass their American counterparts in easing pathways to elite colleges for their kids.
16
The solution is simple. Stop asking students to submit essays, projects or anything else that can be done by someone other than the student. Come up with better ways to teach and assess your students. Innovate or perish.
18
Working with children K-12 for almost 25 years, it has become a depressing endeavor: Critical thinking has become almost nonexistent. Grammar, spelling, punctuation is optional. Why bother when one's take-home Chromebook loaded with programs can do it for you? Summarizing? What does that mean? Explain?
Generations of students are adept at picking out words; circling words rather than explaining and understanding text. Wikipedia is the go-to source. Footnotes? What prey-tell are those? "In your own words." What? An entire paper with each sentence beginning with "And then..."
I thought it was just my neck-of-the-woods, until I spoke with a friend who taught in various states as a military spouse. The same lament teaching in New Jersey, Virginia and now Arizona.
A few years ago I agreed to "proof read" a paper for a friend pursuing a Master's Degree and had to edit virtually every sentence. Structurally and grammatically, the work was the equivalent of a high school student's first term paper. I do not know the solution to higher-education-ignorance, but something needs adjusting.
26
I come from a creative arts background and wrote my university essays in a very conversational style. One of my girlfriends found this horrible and not academic enough.
While we were dating, she grilled me into editing everything into a more formal writing style. I spent hours on it.
We broke up and I went back to my original style. My marks stayed the same, so why all the fuss?
Meanwhile, my sister- the English grad - commented on how much she liked my writing, because it had its own voice.
Which worked out great when I became a weekly columnist.
3
A very revealing comment and should have been awarded an editorial pick.
3
Disgusting. But solvable. Oral exams are the single best mechanisms to probe what a student truly, deeply knows. In Europe, and as well, this is a tried and true practice. Never understood why undergraduate programs don't leverage this. Probably because it's more labor intensive.
I wonder how widespread this. Meaning, is it going on at top schools? I say this not so much because I think those students are more ethical but because it seems highly unlikely that someone off shore could write a strong paper without access to the course, the intellectual horsepower etc.
In some ways this article just reminds us that for many who do not attend selective colleges, college has become a rubber stamp to put on their resume. Glorified high school. They go to party and drink and enhance the resume. It ain't Swarthmore.
3
I am a senior now and seeking to enhance my education and knowledge by taking free online uni courses. A rare privilege that I could not afford when younger. It is a real high to do the assignments and increase my understanding of world history and how we got to where we are. Question: Should I hire out my essays so I can play more solitare or hearts?
4
@Jo-Anne - I have gone to college three times in life although life has interfered with getting a degree. First time, I studied film making. Second time, I studied chemistry and spent a year working in the chemistry lab. Third time, I studied recording engineering.
I only studied things that I am passionate about and that I read about and study on my own. I would much rather watch a lecture on chemistry-anything than play hearts or solitaire. Hopefully, students are in college studying things that they find equally enjoyable. Why go into debt to play solitaire? :)
@Jo-Anne
FYI as a senior in Ontario, you can take college or university courses for free as a non-degree student. You don't have to do online courses if you don't want to.
@Jo-Anne Can I give you my email? I am in this and so willing to help?
1
As a youth, I transferred from a large state university to a city college where classes were smaller. Hand - written essays could not be plagiarized easily. The professor knew his students and worked with them on their papers. Essays written by the students themselves required an integration of the material and that integration held value. I entered college with a set of ethics gleaned from a disadvantaged background – orphanage, foster homes -- which would never have permitted hiring another person to write a paper for you. There is nothing special about such a set of ethics. They should be a default setting for all students. I want to say that a moral code which permits cheating can get you only so far before the sand beneath your feet dissolves. You wonder what harm is done by, in plagiarizing, students fail to reflect on the work at hand. For whatever reason, the temptation to “just get thru the course” makes the practice described in the column almost a reflex devoid of the ethical reflection we hope college helps to nurture. Refusing the temptation to cross the line for the sake of a class essay can be the start of an ethical professional and personal life. Equally, succumbing to that temptation can be the start of a less ethical one.
12
I know students who bought papers to pass classes. But a few of those cheaters got hired in jobs where they were required to write, which they did poorly, so the bosses ordered them to go take writing classes at the local community colleges.
To prevent cheating on research papers, some instructors require their students to submit a working bibliography, outline, notes, and rough drafts before accepting final drafts, step by step.
157
@Hector “...some instructors require their students to submit a working bibliography, outline, notes, and rough drafts...”
See also the comments by Anonymous (also Times Pick) and headnotinthesand and the various replies.
Requiring outlines and drafts makes it harder for students to cheat, but I see that as a secondary benefit.
The real advantage of requiring drafts is that it leads the student through the process of criticism and revision that is central to serious analysis and argumentation: Comments on a draft that the student needs to revise are much more useful than comments on the finished paper.
The only argument against students submitting drafts is that the comments take time for the teacher, but that is just a matter of balancing the course design: A five-page essay with feedback on one or two drafts may be more useful than a 15-page essay with no feedback.
Guy Carden
Pullman, WA
20
The service will just provide drafts, a bibliography and rough drafts. Ultimately schools have to trust students on some level who by cheating are just depriving themselves of the educational experience for which their parents and themselves are spending thousands
10
As a former college teacher, I will propose that there is one (almost) fail-safe way to guard against plagiarized papers:
Have the students submit a short, in-class essay the first week of class.
In my experience, the vast majority of college students, especially at non-elite schools, have poor writing skills: They write in simple sentences, with grade-school vocabulary, and often in a conversational style. They seldom use punctuation such as semicolons properly, or won't even try, and will make common errors with apostrophes. These issue will generally not change from the first essay. When I received a really well-written paper, especially from a student with writing skills markedly different from that first essay, it's a red flag. At my first teaching job, I busted half a dozen cheaters in one class alone, and that was in 2000.
The problems of plagiarizing, whether copying from the internet (very common) or buying a paper, are not that difficult to solve. However, it does require a little effort on the part of the professor and school.
37
Assuming the student doesn’t learn to write better over the course of the semester, which is probably the case but which goes against the fairytales we tell ourselves.
A more serious problem with your proposal is this: you might have a very strong suspicion that a student cheated, and having them write short in-class essays in the first week of class may make your suspicion stronger, but, absent a confession, it’s nearly impossible to prove that a student bought an essay.
I think the solution is exams, including oral exams. You really can’t fake your way through an oral exam.
8
@Scott Cole
Having witnessed college students writing in my classes, I can say that another dead giveaway is _penmanship._
Not only are the essays poorly constructed in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation, the handwriting is malformed at best & nearly illegible at worst. I have even seen a sophomore holding a pencil clenched in his fist, writing with the pencil perpendicular to the page. The last time I saw someone holding a pencil and trying to write that way was in kindergarten. Kindergarten! When LBJ was president!
Two of the worst remarks in my teaching evaluations were: "I can't understand the lectures without looking up half the words in a dictionary" and "For the first time in my life, I have had to read a newspaper every day."
4
Poverty or harsh economic conditions are not an excuse for contributing to worldwide unethical behavior.
The other blatant iissue in this piece is that when a growing number of students in US colleges hire ghost writers, we further witness the collapse of American education.
7
The biggest unethical activity is the poverty itself.
5
@Hope
I agree, but this is a different matter altogether.
If you concur that poverty should allow for ethical "flexibility", where does it stop then? Stealing, murder?
1
It is a fine exscuse. Who are you to judge some one who can make money off the unethical, but not illegal (I doubt the state laws that forbid it would pass constitutional muster if they are ever challenged), behavior of people better off than them. Perhaps these paper writers should get a scholarship to these universities in place of the students they are writing for.
While I was worked my own way through night law school, I taught first year courses at USC. Fraternities kept "libraries" of essays for their members to draw upon. Some "students" could pay other who'd taken the course in the past to tweak papers for cash. Twice exams were stolen from my tiny office just before the test time, and I had to scramble to write an entirely new test on short notice. Another favorite ploy; setting off a fire alarm after a test began, causing building evacuation and invariably some exams "lost" in the confusion. Money and privilege always lead some to cheat. A sense of superiority is the problem, in academia, business and government. At all levels, there are some who think they are smart to cheat, instead of corrupt.
23
Until I read this article, I had completely forgotten that I had written papers for a couple of friends while I was in college. I did not, however, get any money from them. These were not people who had no interest in doing the work nor in learning. It was just a favor I did a few times to help them with issues that were a bit beyond their writing capabilities. They often sat with me while I did the work. I am not implying that any of this made it right or fair but simply remembering a time when youth blurred our vision about such things.
Schools could catch this sort of thing by having a 1-hour class in which students were asked to rewrite the papers from memory. Obviously students would strain to remember their details like dates and quotes, but any student who did the work could write the Wikipedia précis of his or her own paper.
I had a professor who sat down with each student to have us tell her what we learned in writing our papers. It was more of a two-way conversation that didn’t insult students with the accusation of being distrusted. This professor did catch a few cheaters but she did not punish them. She made them write new papers but had them come to her twice a week with their own research. By doing this she taught students more than how to write articulate thoughts. The professor taught them the value of earning trust and doing things correctly while stress that, in life, they would probably never get such a reprieve.
10
@David Marcum Unfortunately, a huge percentage of teaching at universities today is done by low-paid contracted itinerant adjunct assistant professors or instructors who don't have much time to meet with students, let alone mentor them like the prof you cite.
11
That professor taught his students that if you plagiarize and are discovered having cheated there will be no consequences and you get to do the assignment again for a grade. That in my humble opinion is insane and teaches one lesson: don’t get caught.
1
Since I funded a large share of my education and was passionate about my studies I actually did all my readings and wrote my own papers. I remember when I graduated and started my first job I met a business administration student who regularly paid people to write his papers.
Quite frankly, if you spoke to him on issues which he should have known about this guy was shockingly ignorant. The question is does it really matter?
Well right now I would not be surprised if there is a President in office who did not write all of his papers himself. Someone with an economics degree but who shows a poor grasp of some of the most basic economic concepts.
I had an economics professor who once said "crime is simply profit discounted by risk." If the risk of getting caught is high enough and the penalty sever enough it dissuades perpetrators and vice versa.
If professors caught even a small number of people per year and suspended or expelled the students it would make people think twice before engaging essay mills to complete their work.
8
These things have been around for decades. I taught for 30 years at a mid-level university, retiring in 2007.
They are very easy to beat. One makes the assignment such that only a student in your class could complete it. And you give exams that have an essay or two.
An A+ paper, not really meeting the assignment, for a student who ordinarily gets a C on his/her essay is a dead giveaway. Just invite the student in for a "chat" and ask them a few questions about their paper. They know they are busted.
And then off to student court they go!!! And if you think faculty are tough on students, wait until you see a group of students dealing with cheaters!
15
Ghost writing also exists in the medical literature- drug companies pay ghost writers to write the research paper up and the physicians put their names on it. The NYT has exposed several of these stories over the years.
6
The central idea of this article that the ghostwriting of academic papers is a foreign phenomenon is beyond absurd. Perhaps your writers should have secretly hired someone with direct knowledge of the numerous (and legal) American term paper mills to help them with their research. Having written academic papers for several years to augment my economic survival as a musician, I can direct them to a number of domestic companies that openly engage in this business. Such journalistic incompetence gets them - and the NY Times - an F.
8
I'll bet Donald Trump wishes he'd had one of those contract cheating services available when he was at Wharton.
2
This essay is so unfair! Our President was able to purchase a degree from the Wharton School. Why should every student have the same chance to reduce every encounter, educational or otherwise, into a transaction.
As Zippy the Pinhead used to say, "Find a need and fool it!"
6
Who needs essays if you can be president with 120 characters (plus spaces)?
6
Slightly off topic, but there's a big industry of Excel experts out there (namely in India) where you can share your challenges with a creating a formula in Excel (VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, IFERRORS, et.al.) and the solution is given to you. You share the spreadsheet through Skype (or another application), explain your issues, and VOILA, your work is completed.
I'm morally challenged. I spent $25 for about 30 minutes of Prabakhar's time (name changed to protect the innocent in Bangalore), and passed along my work as my own. It was a formula string about a mile long, but it saved the day.
You’re morally challenged? That sounds like you’re not sure whether you did the right thing or not. You didn’t. You cheated.
1
That would be perfectly fine if you did not pass it off as your own work. It's called cunsulting.
@Andrew
I know, i hate myself.
1
Colleges are already diploma mills, and they provide useless but very expensive pieces of paper upon graduation. How about we talk about that for a while, huh? If colleges didn't want student to cheat, make it worth it. Stop making kids take pointless classes just to get more money out of them. Stop making them buy super expensive books that are worthless after a year. Stop leeching off these kids who just want a brighter future. Colleges don't care about their students. They care about making money. So why would a student care for the college? Be real, around 70% of what you can learn in college and pay a huge price for, you can learn for free online and learn better.
I'm appalled at colleges, not the kids trying to get these useless classes out of the way so they can just get it done and be over with it.
NYT, you appall me too. You say these people who came to you to tell you their story didn't want to be identified, and yet you identified them. For shame. Your publication is a sham.
7
Fake scholars are the most dangerous people in any society. They live in constant fear of being exposed and will go to extremes to conceal their ignorance. A well qualified Buffoon can lead us to Doom!
3
@TheHowWhy Read Jane Mayer's "Dark Money" to find a long list of "Foundation" and "Society" "think tanks" filled to the rafters with such fake scholars. Some are even located within the ivy covered walls of the most elite universities.
4
Why should anyone play by the rules or tell the truth when our President and his enablers show everyday that doing so is only for losers?
5
Maybe we should give these Kenyan graduates green cards and bring them here to teach our students how to write.
We could go back to classes of a dozen rather than hundreds.
The only condition I would impose is that they join a union and don't bring down the salaries for Americans.
10
@Norman If you could switch places with Trump. This would be welcome.
2
There's only one way to nip this in the bud--start cracking down on cheating. Back in my days as a student at Carolina, cheating carried a MINIMUM one-semester suspension. Make cheating less attractive, and this black market will evaporate in a hurry.
2
Can we do a cultural exchange? Bring these talented foreign writers into the US as college students and send our lazy American-born students to tough it out in Kenya? It would be good for our country (not so good for Kenya.)
12
@Terry G. This is hilarious but sadly I wish I could an opportunity to be in the US. And if you are part of the seek discomfort gang on youtube, I know you wouldn't mind hosting a foreigner. (You can look up Yes theory to understand seek discomfort part).
1
It would be good for Kenya as there would be an influx of capital from the student parents to pay for their liveing expenses.
1
Can we trade? Maybe the smart, hardworking Kenyan essay writers with advanced degrees could come work in the US, and the useless, semi-literate, deadweight cheaters could leave the US and get jobs selling knives door-to-door in Nyeri.
8
@Glen Nyeri County where I'm from originally is a hilly, verdant and occasionally cold part of Kenya, where you'd have to go downhill to draw water from the river, and split firewood to cook dinner, then wake up at 4 am to milk the cows before taking the milk to the creamery by 7 am the same morning on foot every day. They wouldn't last a week.
3
@Glen We would love that.
1
Honestly, if native English speaking students use one of these ghost writing services then they are fools. It’s usually very apparent if the writer does not have native fluency.
2
@Nick One of the requirements is to have a native-like mastery of English. Fluency problem solved.
1
@Cohen having a native-like mastery of English is not the same as having an actual native-born mastery of American English. There are very subtle nuances that are easily sussed out.
2
Keep going on this topic, NYT -- you're just scratching the surface with this article. It's not just the cheating/ethical breach aspect that disturbs me. It sheds light on an even more alarming reality: that the perceived importance around the need to shape one's OWN point of view -- and then share those authentic thoughts effectively in writing -- is withering away. Not just across high school or college campuses. Speling...who cares? Punctuation...hey its no big deal all good. Well-constructed thoughts? Well, just check out you-know-who's Twitter feed.
9
Discerning which papers are written by foreigners and which are written by American students who are actually enrolled in U.S. colleges shouldn't be too difficult. The papers with grammatically incorrect sentences are those written by graduates of U.S. high schools. The papers that display a writer's knowledge of grammar, usage and syntax are probably written by a young woman or man in Africa.
18
I understand some colleges have set up phony essay writing web sites to entrap and discourage cheating students.
2
Here is a great resource as well http://thesis-and-dissertation.com/
1
As someone working in higher education I find this industrialized dishonesty terrifying. Cheating has detectable societal ramifications when only a handful of students are doing it, but civilization can only handle so many stupid, lazy cheats in positions of power before things start to really fall apart.
14
This is the best way to make writing essays useful. At least someone makes money by that pointless exercise. Essays and their grading is too subjective, and the courses that need them are usually the ones that are not rigorous. Science, technology and math, rarely need students to fill in a fixed number of pages with words.
3
No scientist ever needs to write a research report, right?
@A Clear organized thinking and associated writing are not subjective. Grammar is not subjective.
1
@A If you can't write well, how do you get your knowledge of science, technology, and math across to other people?
1
I think it's important to point out that the foreign essay writers quoted had college degrees and aren't/weren't able to find employment, which led them to do this. Lack of opportuniy is an issue everywhere in the world and having a degree doesn't protect one from experiencing that whether they are in the U.S. or Kenya. So when are we going to have honest conversations about the role of higher education and what kind of work deserves to be paid a living wage?
8
Before we spend another dime on education, we need to take a hard look at who attends college and in what numbers. If the economy needs 100,000 subject X majors to graduate next May and there are 200,000 subject X majors entering their final year of college this month, the problem is one of supply, access and entitlement not of insufficient opportunities or wage levels. An aptitude and selection process like the ASVAB would ensure that there are never too many lawyers and too few truck drivers in the workforce. Both are serious private sector economic issues detailed in the NYT within the past year. Furthermore, those students who aren’t selected for a college track could be prepped for jobs where they will be needed earlier and at less cost than we have now. It is inefficient and wasteful to the point of obscenity to have college graduates serving coffee, high school graduates performing repetitive and menial tasks and allowing anyone headed for big box employment to have more than the sixth or perhaps eighth grade education needed for those jobs. Each typical Walmart, Lowe’s or Amazon warehouse with 125 workers represents the waste of more than $15 million tax dollars (NYS avg of $20k/pupil x 125 workers x 7-12 grades). Multiply that by the total number of locations nationwide and the numbers are staggering.
2
I will gladly pay my share for every child to attend school through 12th grade. We should not be placing students in different tracks at the end of 6th grade.
This goes beyond essays. It’s also becoming more common in computer science classes, where students who can’t code but chose the trendy major outsource their programming assignments.
4
@Fefi
There’s no way this could work out. If a person can’t code, it will be immediately obvious on the job. Of course if the plan is to never code by, say, getting a law degree on top of a CS degree, it might. Still, I have to assume genuine incompetence would become apparent at some point.
2
@GiGi I see these students all the time. Many of them think they are going to hit it big in the gaming industry, not believing they need actual skills to get hired. Companies usually give candidates programming tests as part of the interview process. What happens to the students who can't program is that they end up working helpdesk or installing PCs, jobs that they could have gotten with a much cheaper 2 year associate's degree. What a waste of time and money
2
@Fefi I have to second that an inability to code would cause immediate problems for a job requiring programming skills.
2
My significant other discovered a student cheating on his final assignment. Caught, he came up with a cockamamie story about feeling unsafe and discriminated against for being Jewish. My SO is also Jewish so go figure. The university said pass him so he will go away. Crazy times.
12
Writing compelling, concise comments for sites like the NYTimes is hard. Our writers will help you establish your bona fides as a MSM commentator for as little as ....
10
@Wade Nelson -I would pay good money to make it to the New York Times pick-list!!
The net result of this is a transfer of wealth from the rich but dumb American students to the poor but smart Kenyans, on a global level this seems like a good thing.
6
It seems to me, Ms. Mbugua is putting her education to better use than the idiots requiring this service. Bachelor degree = high school diploma. Let’s see how well our graduates perform in a masters program.
7
So now we will be producing idiots in our Universities, already we have student who graduate who don’t know much, except drinking and playing video games
4
I suppose I should not be surprised that, while reading this article, an ad appeared for a dissertation service promising “more than just simple proofreading.”
9
It's too bad we can't identify and kick out the lazy American students, and give their places to the Kenyan authors, who are actually willing to work for their educations.
10
I’m not surprised. We live in a kleptocracy wherein cheaters are advantaged on every front while those doing their work and fulfilling their responsibilities as citizens are not only disadvantaged but made subservient to the klepto class. Everywhere you look, every profession the cheaters and thieves are elevated to position of exaltation. Beat them or join them...So you tell me the answer. I saw it in my medical school in Portland, Oregon. It started at the top with the president and you could go on down the list into the professional organizations, the faculty, and their pet students right into residency positions and then into practice in corporate agglomerates and government run clinics. It’s everywhere. You glamorize results based in cheating - on tv and in the media in general, in a criminal justice system that is itself criminal - and this is what you get. And with unindicted criminals running the social media scene, there is literally no place to hide. Seriously I’m glad to be nearing the end of my expected lifespan. Maybe hell has some honest people hiding out there I’ll be able to relate to. The liars and cheaters who represent the heavenly side make me prefer the former. It’s a topsy-turkey world and apparently afterlife as well.
8
At the height of the Great Recession, as my freelance writing business -- as well as my options -- dried up, I turned to a service based in Canada to stay afloat, writing essays for $13 a page. Ironically, I did this as I earned my masters degree in English and was ferreting out cheaters myself in the freshman composition class I taught. I hated virtually every minute of the work, and even more so if a "client" complained about the quality of the product, which at times tempted me to turn them in to their college. When my business improved after about a year and I was able to drop this work, "ecstatic" would not be too strong a word to describe my feelings.
138
@Ron S.
I am glad you resisted the temptation to "turn him/her in to his/her college." That would have been unethical times two. As a fellow English major, I once wrote a college entrance essay for a student who was barely literate. I don't remember what I charged, but whatever it was, it was not enough. After selling my soul, I felt like taking a bath. How many prospective students were rejected whose writing was better than hers, but not as good as mine? Glad you found your calling.
15
@Ron S. It would have been more honorable to flip burgers.
16
@Boggle Honor doesn’t pay the bills. I did it for a few months during the Great Recession when eviction notices started popping up in my mailbox. I was also mowing lawns. Starbucks wasn’t hiring- a lot of those places and burger joints won’t hire overqualified/overeducated people. I’m sure you’ve heard all the stories of the PhDs and degreed people who were out of work, etc. - I was in the same boat. I think a lot of people who did it turned to the work out of desperation.
13
I never thought of doing this in college- I was there to get educated, learning to learn, and plagiarism or buying pre-written essays would have defeated the purpose. I think students who violate academic & cheating rules should be expelled, as they have proven their ethical intransigence and lack of commitment to being educated.
That said, I did TYPE papers for students after I graduated ($0.50/page) and needed lunch money. And I did ocassionally correct their spelling, grammar, and syntax. But their ideas & conclusions remained their own.
If you're going to buy academic work and pass it off as your own, why not skip school and go directly into business (or politics), where you can cheat all you want and probably be rewarded?
13
The sad fact is that these ghost-written essays by foreign students are better than the essays the American students would have written, even if they had begun the project early and devoted effort to it. The research and writing skills of many native-English American students are woefully poor. Foreign students who took my classes almost always did more and better work than their American counterparts.
The one place where American students have upped their game is in the area of cheating. Twenty five years ago, at the dawn of the internet age, it was child’s play to detect plagiarism; whole phrases lifted out of books and placed next to unbelievably bad writing, material lifted from websites that were at the top of a google search, passages copied directly out of the course readings without acknowledgement. I used to wonder whether students thought their professors were dolts who could never detect the fraud. Turnitin was a useful tool, but often not even necessary to catch academic misconduct; its benefit was largely in detecting recycled essays. Now with the advent of contract writing, American students seem to be willing to pay more for the extra service. And I doubt that Turnitin will be able to detect such fraud because to do so will demand having a sample of the student’s genuine work, long enough to determine unique style elements. My investigations of determining authorship of historical documents suggests that it is an inexact art. Fraud is American exceptionalism.
13
Like many of the other writers, I teach at the college level. Although much of my career has located me in large famous universities, I now teach in a small college, with small classes. I won't say that cheating is impossible but it is more difficult when the syllabuses evolve from semester to semester, the instructors form relationships with the students and more course work takes place in the classroom.
I have also found that easy access to scads of data on the internet makes the definition of intellectual honesty more complicated. I have taken to designating acceptable online sources, besides those available through our library.
We all knew about those who cheated when I was in grad school (1980s) but opportunities now are more plentiful and resources easier.
However, we owe it to our students find ways to force them to read, research and write or we are forfeiting our obligation.
5
A professional I know recently approached me to write an essay for her son, who was applying to grad school.
She was surprised when I said no.
I might have said "no," but what I was thinking was "hell, no!"
I guess at a time in history when our first lady is an unrepentant plagiarist and the president knows his way around a black Sharpie (and isn't afraid to use it), it's not all that shocking.
23
An indispensable skill in today’s world
is the ability to successfully delegate.
I applaud this students for getting their projects executed
in a professional and timely manner.
Carry on.
61
and that’s exactly why the world today is so screwed up.
congratulations on such a genius strategy.
41
@New World
An even more indispensable skill in today’s world is the ability to communicate through writing. I feel sad for these students.
44
@New World the end justifies the means. Though I agree that appears to fit with the expectations of many employers - no matter that what they say on the careerrs pages is often more high minded.
6
This is not new. Lawrence Block, the wonderful author, had a character in the late 50s and early 60s, Evan Michael Tanner, who made money writing papers for challenged university students. I am sure he didn’t invent the idea. In my experience, the good news is people eventually sink or rise to the level of their abilities. These cheaters will too.
3
I don’t understand how this works. The majority of the papers I wrote had to draw on themes from class. If I wrote a paper on Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and didn’t incorporate any learnings from class discussions, wouldn’t that be a red flag for the professor?
Maybe they are too overworked or don’t care.
78
@Russell Perhaps you went to a real college. It would be interesting to know where these papers go: online? for-profit? adjunct-taught? There are many institutions of "higher ed" that survive by looking the other way, or having faculty that look the other way. Dark times.
21
@Russell
As a professor I can say that a decent but somewhat off-topic paper would probably get a decent passing grade. Anyone hiring someone else to write a paper will probably be satisfied with that.
15
@Jeoffrey As a professor, it's easy to spot these things. The problem is proving it.
30
Seems like the best solution is to have more in class exams. Maybe the age of the term paper should end.
12
@Sarah. Right, because learning how to research, organize and clearly express information doesn’t matter in the “real” world.
1
Someday the Internet clouds will part and the real from the fake become apparent. Until that day, 42 word max.
1
I have no proof to verify my accusations only my observation of one who can’t string a single sentence together coherently with another sentence verbally and of whom it is reported that this one doesn’t like to read, President Trump most likely hired people to write his college essays.
Sure Trump didn’t have the Internet when he was at Wharton, but hiring paper writers has been a fact of college students for decades. As I stated, I have no proof of this just my observations but there’s no convincing me that President Trump can write an essay, even a freshman level one, “stable genius” comment not withstanding.
9
Some of the awkward phrasing and misuse of local vernacular should be triggering some questions. "buck up and take the walk" - seriously?
Who is grading these essays anyway?
10
Post-graduate students.
I personally know someone in India is doing exactly this after passing out of a private engineering college with B.Tech. degree. She earns more than 200,000 Indian Rupees (equivalent of $3000) per month. She is doing it knowing it's illegal. The job market in India is so uncertain and saturated (and shrinking) in India she thinks she has no choice. There are many such companies grew in India for last couple of decades and some of it became part of Indian IT industry.
There is also an extensive racket of actual companies who almost openly sell "experience certificates" to anyone who can pay. Those are mostly related to IT industry and to get US visa and/or jobs. Some are used to get admission in US universities.
5
There is also an extensive racket of actual companies who almost openly sell "experience certificates" to anyone who can pay, particularly who have internal connections. This is just an extra source of revenue for them. Those companies are mostly related to IT industry and used to get US job and visa. Some are used to get admission in US universities as well.
Indian academia worked on the same principle for long and that's why value of degrees from almost any Indian University/Institute is insignificant in terms of knowledge and professional expectation (i.e. ability to solve technical problems.)
4
@bonku
The job market is uncertain for people from diploma mills. If she was as talented as you say, there was no reason for her to go to a private engineering college when a reputable college would have accepted her.
There are many reputable universities and many multinational employers in India.
1
@Viv, you can read this one.
Why should USA and other western countries minimize students from countries like India and China, where education, mainly basic education, is ruined, to allow only talented ones to join higher education and research sector in these western countries?- https://is.gd/0NgLJ6
I guess American college students are following the model of American business: when you need work done, try outsourcing.
9
From an economist's perspective, this is a well-functioning market.
The demand by our society is for credentials, not expertise; branding, not quality.
So the market supplies credentials, not expertise.
What was Tony Schwartz's "The Art of the Deal" other than a giant paper purchased by Donald Trump?
284
@Eben That's an important point. Ghostwriting is widespread and fairly well-paid. How many celebrities and politicians write their own books? Few because they are a brand that can buy talent to do it for them. Students know this con and see little difference in their own situation.
28
@Eben
I wouldn’t hold out Trump as a gleaming example. He’s self absorbed fake.
9
@EE
Ghost writers write for celebrities who have something to say. The content and ideas are from the celebrities. Plus the assistance of the ghost writers are acknowledged. Students hiring writers is using ghost writers’ ideas and words as their own. And that is cheating and plagiarism.
25
I hope someone will give Ms. Mbugua a chance to study at one of the schools she has already been doing assignments for. She has proved that she can already to the work, is more competent than a great number of American students, would have a better chance of getting a job, and it seems like something she wants to do. That is the other part of the equation, of course: we can't just keep pretending that conditions and economies across the ocean don't matter to us in the USA. They affect us continually, and engagement with the world is a much more productive stance than nativism and protectionism.
179
@reader
+1
Mary is exactly the kind of student I would like to see our universities enroll. Mary is exactly the kind of immigrant I would like to see come to the United States. People like her make significant contributions. Study after study shows that immigrants are very highly motivated both contribute to the economy and the society of their new homes. (And refugees doubly so).
31
Excellent article. What did I say about stupid Americans… Add lazy and stupid, because people from other countries are willing to work twice as hard just to be NEAR, — in some small way, writing a paper or something — America
15
@reader I would prefer we let in immigrants who are hardworking AND honest. She knowingly made the decision to accept work that is dishonest and unethical. Why when she comes here would she suddenly "get morals"? Hardship is no excuse. As Warren Buffet said, he looks for people "with intelligence, ambition, and integrity, and of the three the last is the most important, otherwise the first two will kill you." I am a college professor and this practice makes me sick. Should professors and academic administrators try to devise ways to prevent this? Absolutely. But how about demanding accountability from students as well.
9
Sounds like colleges urgently need to implement a zero-tolerance policy.
A strictly enforced, university-wide penalty for false authorship would probably have significant impact.
As the parent of two kids who worked hard to complete degrees at major American universities, I am outraged.
6
After the ‘princes’ in India outsourced tax collection to the East India Company - it soon became a colony. The US is trending towards being an intellectual colony.
4
One of my professors told this story: the local fraternity provided an biology paper that had been used many times before to one member of that class each year. It had a picture of a fish on the front and an essay about the biology of the fish. Each student retyped the essay but kept the fish. Three years go by, the essay continues to receive an A and the fourth student to submit the essay is in a hurry and leaves off the page with the fish.
The essay received an A with a note: what happened to the fish?
12
There’s nothing new here, except perhaps the volume and the outsourcing to “third world” countries. (I will admit to having written assignments for pay for fellow students when I was in college many years ago. I am proud of my writing skills and speed, I’m now a professional writer, but not at having abetted cheating.) Based on the brief quotes in the article, I would not have graded Ms Mbgua’s papers for hire very highly as the summaries quoted are glib and not thoughtful, probably a C+ or B- at best.
One area this article doesn’t cover is the vested interest in the plagiarism software companies in publicizing this problem. In fact, as a parent of a college student, this software brings its own set of problems—-making it hard to submit a paper with a properly attributed internal quote, for example.
Learning to write well requires practice, so to some extent cheaters who buy papers will be punished eventually because they won’t learn. But the rampant cheating in our society is very troubling, along with the folly of keeping talented immigrants out.
70
@Fulsome Bradshaw As a professor who has used the plagiarism software you mention as being problematic, rest assured that actual humans read the papers and assess what the software flags. In my classes and among my colleagues, there was never a danger of docking a student who had successfully incorporated quotes.
Without those tools, many more students who actually do their work as they should would be at a disadvantage compared to students who farm out their essays to others to leave more time for, say, studying for other exams, writing other papers, participating in extracurriculars, or pledging fraternities.
6
@Fulsome Bradshaw Not that I like to play the gotcha game, but since your criticizing Ms. Mbgua's writing (based upon very little), I note that this is a run on sentence with a dangling modifier: "I am proud of my writing skills and speed, I’m now a professional writer, but not at having abetted cheating."
16
I am quite amused that the authors think that this is a relatively new phenomenon. When I started college, Lyndon Johnson was our president, and when I went to graduate school it was Richard M. Nixon. At that time there was no electronic anything, no internet, no computers; only typewriters and mostly manual ones at that.
In 1965 people were writing essays for other students and professors were taking every essay to the school library to check for plagiarism. Believe me the phenomenon of writing papers for others existed even then. Let me add this though; if a male student didn't place in the top half of his class in the 1965-1966 academic year he lost his draft deferment and was sent to Vietnam to save the world from communism.
Money may never have changed hands, but friendship is friendship, I suspect even now. There is desperation on both sides of the equation in your story. The writers must survive in an impossible world, as must the students, who are told constantly that without a college degree they will get no where. Want to eliminate this, create excellent trade schools as they have done all over Europe and those people who aren't academic will be able to earn a fine living without college.
234
What’s new, I believe, isn’t the existence of custom-written papers (nor do the authors of this article in any way imply this); rather, it’s the internationalization of the problem, with the papers in question being written by people in places like Kenya. That’s what the authors of this article are trying to draw attention to.
12
@Joel Friedlander You are correct this has always existed, for many reasons. My father (at UCLA in the 1930s) wrote a term paper or his girlfriend, and one for himself for the same class. Her's got an A. His got a C minus. Love! A wonderful thing!
16
@a reader
Again, this is not new. As more colleges accept international students solely for the increased tuition money they pay, these services if course become global.
Notice that while the focus is on the producers, there is nary a mention of who exactly is buying these essays. Since transactions are by credit card, they of course know who their customers are.
9
None of these articles--add this one to the pile--surprise me. I teach at the high school level, and the "farming out" of writing tasks to professional tutors is rampant. For that reason, I have my kids do more and more writing in class, on the spot--as if it were a math test. Dispiriting, for sure, but one of the things the internet has brought us.
583
@Opinionated Pedant That only works if the student has not also contracted out their classroom attendance... IDs might need to be required.
13
@Opinionated Pedant I was going to add a comment that this form of cheating is prevalent in high school, but you’ve done that for me. I don’t blame the internet. The web did not raise some kids to have slippery morals and look for shortcuts. This cheating is something that their parents have fostered. On the bright side, as a teacher I have so much more respect today for the majority of kids who could cheat like this, but don’t.
31
@LG "That only works if the student has not also contracted out their classroom attendance... IDs might need to be required."
When I was a young college instructor in a calculus class, I had a student who wasn't who he claimed he was. Instead the real student hired someone else to take the class for him. Of course, when that was discovered the student was expelled from the University.
It is also the case that students taking computer science classes can pay to have programs written for them.
36
This is not much different from what went on in college in the late 60s, early 70s. Only then, before computers and the internet, students would lift passages from the World Book, or other reference material. All was done by hand, and then included in the finalized, typed paper. Quite a bit more laborious, but the results were the same. It seemed professors never caught on.
There also were students who made a living of writing papers for others. Or, older students (juniors and seniors), who would sell their already graded papers, to freshman and sophomore students taking the same course.
There has always been a way to game the university system. I suspect there always will be.
11
Hmmmmm....there might be something to be said for the Oxford tutorial system, where one had to read one’s essay out in the weekly meeting with one’s tutor (i.e., the academic one was studying that subject with, not a tutor in the auxiliary sense) and then be able to defend and explain one’s line of argument. I suspect that if I hadn’t done the work myself, there would have been no way to get through this weekly grilling! (And that was also excellent preparation for the ongoing process my grad school department here in the US made us go through of presenting work in progress on an ongoing basis.)
But of course the education system here in the US (and in India, where I did my first degree) is oriented towards large numbers of students, so this kind of one on one attention rarely exists. Having been through the grad school grind here of reading and grading piles of undergraduate exams and papers, I don’t know if there really are any viable long-term solutions to what will effectively become a sort of technological arms race between providers and those looking to police the process - short of finding ways in which to make the student have to stand up and be able to undergo a level of academic scrutiny which the system isn’t currently set up for.
12
Profs need to include the risk of an oral exam in their syllabus. If students want to buy the work, they better be prepared to study it hard in case the prof calls on them to discuss the contents verbally. This is not the way things are supposed to work, obviously, but it's a good backstop.
Of course the big question is 'why are there so many unemployed humanities and social science grads'? This is part of an identity crisis in higher ed: is it a business or a place of inquiry? Much of it is already a diploma mill or a (class) protection racket so we shouldn't be surprised if grads join the scam. Sad though.
4
@EE
I agree an oral exam and/or randomly select students to summarize the previous assigned reading in front of the class.
Humanities and social science grads are important particularly for their ability to think critically, to analyse different theoretical frameworks, and the various outcomes from different frameworks.
Today society and business needs critical thinkers more than ever in an era of "alternative facts" coming from politicians, some media organisations, and social media. We need people who can quickly grasp whether the facts are factually correct and whether the arguments are logical. A humanities or social science student is more likely to be able to recognize and challenge someone if an argument does not stack up.
I am not sure what you mean when you say there are "so many unemployed humanities and social science grads?" Initially, most people graduate without a job. They may have to take a menial job (or a number of them). However, as these grads accrue experience they typically take on jobs with more seniority and remuneration.
I am a retired college English instructor and thus can attest that cheating has been common for a very long time. I found that many of the worst plagiarizers were the "best" students--they were the ones clever enough (they thought) to pull it off. They forgot that I was smarter than they were, or at least more experienced. But then, I graded my students' papers myself--I didn't have TA's to do that for me. I could spot such things as linguistic oddities, non-American spellings and punctuation, etc. I also made the assignments very specific, which made it harder to find ready-made essays on the topic. Of course, I never considered education a business.
9
From experience, having to write an essay, in class, using those "blue books" is the only way to ensure original work. I realize that doesn't fit every situation, but I have no better answer.
What astonishes me is that when students DO cheat, there really are no repercussions from it. For example, a fellow student asked me to review his senior thesis. The writing was so good, it looked like it was simply copied from a book (I think he did). Professors don't want to become entangled in accusing students of cheating or plagiarizing (like they would want them back in class again!).
6
One possible course-correct for this issue is smaller class sizes and closer mentorship-style relationships between students (and students' thoughts and work!) and professors.
Outsourcing a college paper is easier to get away with when a professor only ever sees the final version of a product. It becomes a lot harder, however, when professors--or their TAs--are actively involved in their students' entire writing process--throughout brainstorming, outlining, researching, drafting and revising.
16
@Former Writing Instructor
Classes where tests and exams have essay components also give writing samples to compare to the writing on term papers and substantial homework assignments. Requiring journal entries as homework (depending on the type of class) also provides a cross-check.
Long before the internet was a factor I caught a case of plagiarism because a student who had great difficulty expressing himself in writing turned in a term paper that was radically different in quality from anything else he wrote. It's been a long time, but I think it was Cliffs Notes submitted pretty much verbatim.
4
The opportunity for plagiarism increases to the extent a professor's performance is rote: conventional texts, conventional topics, conventional lectures and conventional essay questions, never adjusted or re-framed in terms of particular discussion and issues raised by students in a particular class. Unfortunately, that probably describes most professorial performance under pressure of too many students and too many classes to teach, or mistaking one's own research and scholarship for one's true job.
During the years I was teaching, I made it a point always to do my own reading assignments, looking each time for something new. Yes, that takes time one's schedule must permit, but it kept things fresh for me, made plagiarism easier to recognize, and gave me a rough handle on when I was asking too much of students. (Usually.) Proving plagiarism has always been more difficult and situationally explosive than recognizing it. Online searches and tools help against the worst and most common cases. But fresh lectures, discussion and questions make it easier to downgrade fairly clear instances of plagiarism as simply non-responsive. Students get the message. They know you know. And in my experience, they don't soon go back to the same well again.
5
Some people will always cheat if given the opportunity.
You can’t stop the will to cheat in a lesser person - and yes if you do this you are lesser than others.
Just take away the opportunity. If you cannot apply what you have learned during an exam in the classroom, you either haven’t learned how to apply what you were taught, or you simply didn’t bother to learn it properly. Or perhaps you’re not good at a skill you’ve been trained to master since the 1st grade - test taking.
Either way, you get an honest grade.
2
I have a newfound admiration for the resourceful minds in Kenya and India, like Mary and Roynorris, who are mastering difficult academic material and gaining experience as writers and thinkers while their American counterparts (our future leaders) are doing ... what? Making social connections? Partying?
22
@Rowland Hazard
I suppose some are out partying, but every student whom I caught cheating or submitting plagiarized work was burning the candle at both ends, working long hours at some low-paying job to afford rent and other necessities. Many complained that the workload was too great for someone working full-time and attending school full time. When I went to college, I don't recall anyone attempting both.
Outsourcing our education overseas could lead to woefully uneducated and unprepared population that could lead to... ugh. Never mind.
12
Some of the most out to lunch people I have known were, coincidentally, the best educated. Want to know anything about an ant, this guy is who you want to talk to. Government, politics, lit, time of day, sports, daylight? Go talk to your TV. And, many of these guys were full professors as opposed to the half full variety. I was often asked by my high school kids, does college make you smarter? It can, if you want it to and put in the effort, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. If you’re messing around in my heart, then I really hope you were paying attention the day “heart” was discussed. If you’re flying my airplane, then, did you pass “landings”? Psychology, Marine Biology, General Studies, Humanness? I don’t care. So, sir, if college doesn’t make us smarter, “why do we need to spend the time and money”? Because, my dears, without that piece of paper, for the really good paying professions, you won’t even get an interview. But, my dad says, he didn’t have no college degree and he done good. I have no response to that. So, why? After managing to cram 4 years of education into 5 or 6 years, you didn’t quit. You hung in there, put up with the whatever, drank some underage beer, and managed to put together enough degree program hours and graduated. You made some good friends along the way and now you’re 22 or 26, depending, and we’re going to assume you know enough to learn what we’re going to teach you about the job you’ll be doing. Smarter? Maybe. Better for the experience?
2
This is why all English profs should be awarded additional degrees in linguistic forensics. Every year I have to learn new skills to catch cheaters. Oh, and we also deserve free security software to protect our computers from the horrible websites we need to visit in order to verify plagiarism.
My favorite plagiarism story involves a student who changed the place name in a short story in the style of Jack London. It began like this: “The wolves howled among the snowcapped mountains of Tallahassee, Florida . . .”
33
This is so funny, and at the same time, so sad. Who knew my moonlighting had a name - linguistic forensics. Great!
1
Kinda like that Disney movie that has Pocahontas swandiving off a cliff. Because cliffs in Tidewater Virginia —
4
Cheating may work in college, but once these “scholars” start their careers, those who cannot wrote, think critically, or complete projects will find themselves on “performance improvement plans” and then terminated. It might work for trust fund babies who don’t need to work, but no one else.
3
I wish that it were so, J, but in many fields their skill set will be absolutely welcome.
3
@J. Yes--and at its worst, many people (patients, clients) could be seriously harmed by "professionals" who received their degrees this way: lawyers, accountants, doctors who are woefully under-educated and inept.
2
I am continually amazed at the absence of apparent shame and embarrassment when cheaters are caught red handed. Certainly this existed prior to Trump but, while I have no way of proving this, I believe this attitude has gotten far worse under the current administration, where people see the president double down even when exposed daily as a liar. Often people do not seem to know, or perhaps care, about the difference between right and wrong, only what they can get away with. When celebrity parents caught up in the college cheating scandal appeared at court, their main concern seemed to be looking good and flashing their red-carpet smiles.
7
One office visit never fails.
45 years experience.
5
The only answer is to make students do the writing in class.
7
This is the state of the world now. Instagram and "looking" good. It's not whether you wrote the paper, but what grade you got. Everyone cheats, so why not me? I suspect the kids paying for these papers are not in the humanities. Maybe they think learning how to write is not too important these days. I don't blame Ms. Mbugua for finding a way to make money. I am just sad for all the people like her who are unable to find work that truly utilizes their intelligence.
3
I have a hard earned advanced degree complete with student loan debt. I feel stupid for not cheating. Cheating is evidently the American way.
We now have the truth about higher education: we allow fly-by-night “universities” like Trump U; we force kids to pay their student loans after being duped into attending the fake U’s; rich parents pay to get their kids into top tier colleges; rich parents pay for their kids to get high test scores for admissions; schools exploit disadvantaged kids by encouraging lifelong debt on the guise the kids will more than earn enough to pay it back; Universities overlooking pedophile donors like Epstein; and now buying essays.
Isn’t America grand?
5
And elite college still continue the charade of the all important college essay or on many cases, several essays! What a waste.
2
One time ever, in a psychology course, I had a paper written for me. I got a D.
Do the work. If you can't do that leave school, sell hotdogs or something.
4
Don't get me started! Whether it's hiring an amanuensis or a gifted student to write a paper, it is something a student should not do but it's done every day. Another area of academic deceit is selling papers to these students in search of a quick 'n' dirty way to satisfy an assignment. I've had no control over my published papers absconded with and used by those who are making money off my intellectual property. It's prostituion of the worst kind!
3
Let them cheat. Their "education" will show in the working world. They may never know the difference for many years.
4
This story is a great advertisement for offshoring US jobs or increasing immigration. Take your pick. I'd hire a successful contract writer in a moment. Great communication skills, versatility, analytical and critical thinking skills.
10
Absolutely despicable. Not on Ms Mbgua's part, she is a poor person trying to survive. I am tired of mediocre wealthy and semiwealthy kids and their parents with every conceivable advantage seeking even more advantage over more deserving students. This is lying, cheating, and stealing. There is absolutely no nuance here. My guess is that if there was any interest whatsoever in cracking these rings, it would be relatively easy to do so. But there is not. This kind of acceptable cheating at the collegiate level helps to explain the immorality in the financial and business sectors.
I am a semi wealthy old guy who will no doubt help my grandson financially when the time comes. But this stuff? Sink or swim, baby.
5
We are in danger of becoming a nation of Trumps, where those who don't cheat are considered chumps.
9
Do you realize that the US economy will be better off if you allowed this hard worker Kenyans as legal migrants into the US? in the long run immigration protection allows US elite to no longer have to work hard.
9
Forget about the American students (who can barely speak/write/read English) cheating on exams. (BTW it's also who you know, who your parents are when it comes to the job market.)
Think about the woman in Kenya or the man in India who cannot get well paying jobs .. and do this to make a living. (All English as a Second Language.) I guess I might add we don't manufacture the stuff we use here.....
And I want everyone who read this to know there are three online platforms for FREE MOOCs - courses taught by college professors on line --open to one and all but often streaming for a limited period. Check out Coursera, EdX, Udacity... Finally, I wish teachers would stop with the Wikipedia is inaccurate nonsense. OK sometimes it is, but most often not.. and in any case it's a starting point not a cut and paste to put tog. an essay site.
2
I've done a lot of editing - for free - but
never wrote for a student. My effort was to
show them how to write better, with much
detailed commentary. That actually takes
more time than original writing would~!
Is that unethical? Still asking myself...
1
No. Especially if you sat down with the person to talk about it. I edited my older siblings papers so the time. I've never and never will feel bad about doing that.
2
LOL!
As a former college professor, I have to laugh over the notion that assigning specific essays or papers that require research, even scientific, will prevent students from hiring others to do their work!
Nonsense! They may have to pay a bit more, but the pressure to succeed is so great, that such cheating is rampant. Professors who think *they* don’t have this problem are deluding themselves!
By the way, presenting someone else’s work as your own is the classic definition of plagiarism. It’s also cheating. So, works for hire are both.
——————
Note: I was too busy to write and post this comment, so I hired Ms. Pembroke to do it for me! 😎
7
What goes around comes around.
You remember remember accounts of the young Winston Churchill. Whose illustrious pedigree got him into Harrow--second oldest public school in Britain.
And Latin and Greek were sine qua non. But the boy HAD no Latin and Greek. What he had was a brain. Teeming with ideas. And the ability to put those ideas into clear, cogent English.
AND SO--
--he hired out his services to another boy. With a wizardly ability to translate Greek and Latin at sight--
-but no ideas. And rudimentary skills in his own language.
He did translations for the young Churchill. Who composed his essays for him.
And it backfired. Almost.
One of his essays was SO clear and cogent, the headmaster called him in to discuss it. The boy was tongue-tied.
"After that," recalled an amused Churchill, "I was at pains not to make my essays TOO brilliant or thought-provoking."
Do what Oxford and Cambridge USED to do--and maybe they still do. I don't know.
Sit down in a room somewhere--and oh yes! NO electronic devices of ANY sort WHATEVER!
Have 'em compose something on the spot. On a given subject. Which (perhaps) they've been allowed to research. OR--something in a field in which they are presumed to have studied.
My heart goes out to those gifted young people from Kenya. It's a wicked world. And you gotta live.
But paying someone to compose you a research paper.
That don't cut it.
3
This article is disgusting but not surprising. When I was in college years ago, most term papers had no connection to class work and were often not even read by the professor. They were meaningless make-work projects, as if we had didn't have enough work to do already. (I was not a slacker and didn't know anyone who was.) There was no term-paper industry then but I am not surprised that one developed. And I feel so sorry for this young woman in Kenya who can find no outlet for her talents except (let's call it what it is) a kind of prostitution. Welcome to the real world!
3
The lamp-posts around the University of Toronto are plastered with ads offering to write everything up to a Ph.D. dissertation for students.
However...Intense teaching in small groups may not solve the plagiarism problem. As an undergraduate in Cambridge, I shared tutorials with another student. She used to concoct essays using paragraphs from our tutor's own publications. The tutor was always complementing her on how well she had written.
13
In a sense, then, tutor and student probably complemented each ofter.
@Oriole
How did you get through Cambridge without knowing the difference between 'compliment' and 'complement'?
We've raised these kids in an environment where we contract out all the work we don't want to do, and now we're going to complain when the kids do it? This is actually perfect training for their future work life as a manager in an American company, where one of their most important duties will be to outsource work to low wage countries.
Who makes the goods these students buy from Amazon? Who cut the lawn and cleaned their house when they were growing up? Have they witnessed American workers being rewarded for doing the work, or American managers being rewarded for outsourcing the work?
...whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
16
Today's universities are all about making a profit, period. As far as educational excellence, that has fallen by the wayside. The business model has taken over education and it's interesting that foreign students are the one profiting from their writing skills while our students in the US continue to go lacking in those same skills.
4
I saw many professors here suggesting that writing an essay in class is the way to avoid the problem. I just want to share my experience. I went to college in the US and just graduated this year. I don’t think that the suggested solution would be fair for slow writer and non-native English speaker like myself. In college I enjoyed writing essays but I usually spent a significant amount of time on the tasks because sometimes I would scour several research papers for relevant information that would eventually be condensed into just two to three sentences in my paper. Also it can be time-consuming to make sure that the wording is unbiased, precise and not redundant, and that the information is presented in a logical order. I guess for some classes, in-class essay exam may work well to reflect students' writing ability and knowledge, but for others, it doesn’t.
And I’m actually surprised that the essay writing service charges such a low price. 15 dollars a page? Personally I wouldn’t consider it worthwhile to write a paper for so little money given the time I spend on writing.
9
When I was a doctoral student (1975) at a major university with a Top Ten football team, I failed the varsity quarterback for submitting a paper that had been used the previous year. After much dispute with the coach, the head of the athletic department and my advisor, the student passed but I was forced to end my studies. The student passed the class and ultimately received his B.A.
I resigned and moved to Berkeley CA where a graduate student offered me $10,000 to write his doctoral thesis. I declined, although I needed the money. I got a job driving an airport bus instead. A sad ending to a promising academic career.
22
Why do American students need to buy an essay from someone else? All they are taught now in high school is how to take a test. Testing results are the king. No writing skills or research skills are taught hardly. If they get to college without having to really focus on writing any kind of essay, then they are pretty much lost. This is a problem we have created - all the testing in the world is not really going to help them. They need to be putting writing and research to use almost every day in their classrooms.
4
@vivian Students pay people to go sit their in-class exams too! Introductory and intermediate classes at big schools can easily have hundreds of students. There's nobody to notice that Dave turned in an exam with Mike's name on it.
I teach at a community college. I caught a student selling answers to pre-nursing lab assignments from my class and others classes last fall on one of these sites.
The Assistant Dean wanted to know why I wanted the student expelled on violations of the student conduct code. So much for ethics and the dean majored in philosophy! Only after I pressed it, did she agree to even meet with the student. Then she asked me if the student had apologized. No—-the student disappeared. Most likely to the community college down the freeway.
Accountability all the way up the chain would help stem this, but the administration doesn’t appear to really care. Students are simply not held accountable. I can fail them but I’m not allowed to tell other instructors that they are a cheat. I can move more weight to exams versus labs which deemphasizes critical lab skills. Or I can continue to pick them off, one at a time. Which I will do starting again this term.
18
Obviously, the writing’s on the wall. Until our country values actual learning over putative (and occasionally falsified) accomplishment, we will continue to gradually slide down the international learning curve. We give more weight to yield curves, curveballs, shapely body curves in determining fiscal outcomes, than we do to the knowledge and moral responsibility that actually drives a sustainable world.
3
I am a college professor for an American university in Europe. Cheating is not only prevalent, it is a pandemic. My students have to write a weekly summary of key events within the class online portal. For some, these weekly essays are inferior quality to term papers and exam essays because it appears that they have used an outside source for the latter. Since the work is original, albeit from a fraudulent party, it is impossible to verify the cheating. This has led to increasing brazen behavior of those who want to take the easy road to a degree.
2
A way to capture students’ individual thinking characteristics like that of a fingerprint need to be developed, papers then need to be matched to both before they can be graded and given credit for. It’s an easy and obvious solution.
2
I think it's perfectly ethical for the students to out source. They will need these behaviors in business.
We surely have come a long way since the college professor parents of a college classmate would assign term paper topics to their students that were needed by my classmate. They thought there was nothing wrong with this. Amazing then and more amazing now!
4
I've been reading pieces more or less like this one about the growing plagiarism-industrial complex for decades. Lest readers think that American institutions routinely sanction this behavior with expulsions, or suspensions at the very least, that is sadly not the case. Private institutions are leery of lawsuits, and at cash-strapped public institutions like mine, a serial plagiarist's tuition dollar is as good as anyone else's. Instructors are passively discouraged from pursuing cheating and plagiarism (click on the link for the body that deals with academic misconduct at my outfit and an error message appears, after which you learn that the committee hasn't met in years; go to a faculty workshop on plagiarism and get told that it's your fault; go to the relevant associate deans, and they're unsure of the procedure, etc).
3
@Jack
Universities are leery of lawsuits as well.
1
I am a professor at a large public university. I have my students write in class essays. They do not know the question prior to the exam. It is all in class work.
Some of the essays are horrible, others are excellent. The grades they receive reflect this difference in ability and effort. Those who fail can rewrite for a better grade.
7
It's inevitable when some people are more than desperate to put their children in more financially lucrative jobs than they are capable of or interested in. Such naive while some utterly corrupt to the core parents neither realized the value or meaning of education nor that of thier lives.
These parents fail to understand that you surely can force or trick your own children to become a very average or substandard doctor/Engg/ Lawyer/Manager (MBA) etc. who would almost always remain unhappy and constantly feeling professionally threatened. That kid could easily had been much happier kid, who could have enjoyed his/her profession in a more confident way and contribute to the society and the country in a far better way, if the p allowed they to flourish naturally and join a career they themselves liked., The lives of those kids would have been much better when a more qualified doctor treat his illness, a more qualified Engg built his home and other infrastructure, worked under a better leader/manager etc.
Almost each and every unethical and corrupt practices we seen in developing countries like India are spreading fast in America, mainly in cities where number of immigrant parents from those developing countries are in high numbers. This practice is bound to affect not only those professions but also degrade the society and the nation in the long run. Some of the consequences are already visible in American society.
1
It should be noted that at least one of the papers was written for student from China. Universities have been so eager to cater to the Chinese parents’ hunger to get their kids an American degree that they often do not take into account an applicant’s language skills. Shame on these colleges for taking the money and not caring if these students succeed.
2
"A major scandal involving contract cheating in Australia caused university officials there to try to crack down on the practice. A similar effort to confront the industry has emerged in Britain, but not in the United States."
Well of course not. We love cheating. There will be a rush to replace Mr. Singer, and the crooks will figure out how to outsmart the plagiarism checkers that a few academics use on suspect student papers.
Maybe the more interesting question is how many students in the U.S. actually pay other people to attend the classes for them. We know contract test taking clearly exists.
Considering who's in the White House, hand wringing over this festival of fraud is a joke of the highest order.
This isn't about cheating. This is about ethics. When a college student chooses to 'sell' their ethics for such a low figure, a few hundred dollars, it is a window to who they will become in our society.
1
I went back to school in the 2010s to finish the degree I left unfinished in the 1970s. There were new things to learn, mostly due to computerization, but, other than those many things, everything else was pretty much the same--except for the cheating. It was shockingly common compared to my prior experience, & not even regarded as cheating by many of the cheaters. Of course, the teachers had funny anecdotes about obvious "caught" cheaters, & some used cheat-checking software, but there was much more discreet & insidious cheating going on, i.e., writing center peer tutors who simply told students what to write (much easier than actual tutoring) & oftentimes providing actual content for students who had not a clue. (In a small school, all students take the same core classes from the same instructors, so the tutors had most likely taken the class.) There was a bit of showing off in this among the tutors. In another case, a faculty member routinely proofed, edited, suggested additions, etc., via email for students from her church! (Because church values, right?) When I asked the student how this was not cheating, she said, "Well, it's not like she writes them for me," except she (the faculty member) kinda did. The belief that cheating is a response to academic pressures is baloney; it's the result of degraded, "success by any means," ethics . Of everything I learned & experienced as a 2nd-time college student, this is what stuck with me most. Once a cheat, always a cheat.
4
While teaching a course in management and marketing at a pharmacy school, I required written assignments. When I had the temerity to take off points for spelling, grammar and syntax I was absolutely blasted in my students' course evaluations. "Dr. Xxxxx, thinks he's teaching a rhetoric course!!" Yes. I dared to require that Pharm.D. candidates have written communication skills commensurate with the clinical doctorate credential to which they aspired. And, no, I'm not referring to ESL and/or URM students, many of whom had writing abilities far beyond US-born students. And don't even get me going about the 10 to 15% innumeracy rate I witnessed. College for all is a sham. People have differing abilities, skills and interests and I think we have failed and deceived the younger generation via the academic student loan industrial complex aided and abetted by a K-12 system geared toward students' standardized test scores. Little secret. The scores may sort the applicants, but almost everybody gets in somewhere these days whether or not they are truly prepared for university-level work. The institutions collect tuition and far too many students are left at the curb having flunked out or with a useless undergraduate degree that didn't exist 10 years ago. In either case they are saddled with crushing student loan debt and no way to pay it back. I lay the blame on failed starve-the-beast government policies and greedy academic administrators.
11
Re: Diploma Mill
In business, you live on customer satisfaction.
US Universities have become hundreds of millions of dollars businesses operations
Consequently, an important component of tenure evaluation is now student evaluation of your teaching
Clamping down is risky. Safer to give everyone an A
2
And what’s the practical result of a society that waters-down its education standards as severely as the United States has? You need look no further than the guy currently sitting in the Oval Office.
6
This cheating profession is rapidly expanding in USA and other developed countries too.
It's inevitable when some people are more than desperate to put their children in more financially lucrative jobs than they are capable of or interested in. Almost each and every unethical and corrupt practices I have personally seen in developing countries like India and China are spreading fast in America, mainly in cities where number of immigrant parents from those developing countries are in high numbers.
This practice is bound to affect not only those professions but also degrade the society and the nation in the long run.
2
Sorry this is how a nation dies. Corruption in schools ends up as mass corruption everywhere.. No wonder so many are indifferent to Trump. Too many have been there done that. Sadly teachers now have to be teacher and detective.
5
I took an advanced Shakespeare class in my fourth and final year at uni (senior year). Our prof would make us write on the spot essay questions during our tutorial hour without telling us in advance. There were four such tests throughout the semester and she would grade them (with feedback) by the next week. They also had a significant weight in the overall grade for the course.
This gave us the incentive to know our material and also for her to have a chance to get to know our writing style. So when the final, big paper of the semester was due; no one was kidding themselves. It worked. It was honestly one of the most rewarding classes I took and learnt a lot more about analyzing Shakespeare’s work than may have been otherwise.
I will say with absolute pride that I have not cheated in writing any of my work during uni. And the originality of my thought shows up in my work to this day. - - For the ones who think they can get by through essay mills; just wait until you get into the real world. You are fools if you think your colleagues and coworkers (who actually put the time and effort) cannot tell if your lengthy email or report or presentation is nonsense. In the long run, your poor comprehension, thinking, and writing skills will show themselves and you will be left behind. No matter how much money you, mummy or daddy have in your bank accounts.
6
It's all so petty and contemptible.
I know that vast numbers of students, of human beings really, lack the self-respect and pride in their own thinking and writing to buy the work of others.
But there must be many who would never demean themselves that way. Mustn't there? Some students must get their parents to pay for college because they, you know, want to go to college, to learn, to prove themselves to themselves. Right?
I'd no sooner pay somebody to write my own thoughts and ideas for me than I'd pay them to work out for me, or to eat a fancy restaurant meal for me.
I know cheating, theft, underhanded dealing etc. are the norm in this world.
But this just seems like a person paying to insult his own intelligence and worth as a thinking being.
6
Interesting article and some...creative comments. But as a life-long memory challenged person, It seems many of these suggestions, essays written in a one hour class, closed book exams over days- it’s a test of memory, not ability, not even knowledge.
Writing a term paper, over weeks, finding sources, discarding, collating, prioritizing, word choices, spelling (also a life-long disability), polishing the final version- should be a college 101 class in itself, before assigned as an add-on in other classes. As one assignment, take some of these purchased papers and have students research, check, validate them as an exercise.
Knowledge gained from doing something over and over- is gained on the job. Regurgitated, memorized facts based on reading-rewards memory first, no matter how creative the answer.
Here, we make quick short comments, while the reporters, writers may spend weeks, months researching, verifying an article. If life were fair, the NYTimes would hire Ms. Mbufua and Roynorris as writers, researchers. Kenya’s loss.
There is no easy answer, save honor, to this dilemma. By not struggling, agonizing, slogging through all-nighters, students cheat themselves out of one of the best lessons learned- start that paper- early!
3
Education is a commodity- you buy access, papers, results...and expect it will get you a job that buys your kids the same.
I was one of these writers for about a year. I had just graduated law school, had grad school loans, and was facing the Great Recession (this was back in 2009/2010). I grappled with the morality a bit but needed the money more. With my academic qualifications I had first pick of many assignments and I’m pretty sure my writing assignments were highly valued by the company I wrote for. I did everything from random term papers to a masters thesis, and I was very well paid for the latter. A few of these projects and I had enough money to get by pretty comfortably before I could find an honest job. I don’t regret it, I could have gotten on the pole or sold eggs or tried to find a sugar daddy... this just required more brainpower. Speaks more about the state of the world that these are the options recent grads have if they need to earn decent money and can’t readily get a job.
91
@ACL "I don't regret it" I would call this a rationalization for your own behavior. Someone with your brains could have found honorable work, e.g., buy a software for dummies book, learn programming and get a job in that industry, which was not hurting during the recession. And you did not help your customers in their learning journey, you simply postponed it.
Life is long, and carrying knowledge of one's own immorality without acknowledging it as such, it becomes heavy. Value yourself. May I suggest, you are better than you appear to think you are.
12
@ACL
" I grappled with the morality a bit but needed the money more." I assume that after graduating from the law school most likely you will be practicing law in some capacity. In your professional life would you act differently or would money still trump morality? If so you will not be the first one; some well known names in the legal profession in the news of late have made that choice in favor of money.
10
Reading this, I am going to reduce the homework assignments I give out. But I do one thing that might be inadvertently reducing the chances of such cheating (or at least making the student put in more work than sending an email and a credit card information overseas) - in my smaller classes, students who work on their research essays at home also have to make a classroom presentation of the essay, with cross questions and discussion to follow. I began doing this because I was getting some excellent essays that I learnt from and wanted the rest of the class to do so as well; now I think this might also a be way to see how deeply students understand the material they produce in a home assignment.
As I said, research essays, even by undergraduates, are sometimes very original and interesting - so I learn from them even if it's a writer in Kenya or India that i have to thank for this.
3
This is all the more reason to have a substantial part of a student's grade be based on in-class examinations, especially written essays. Online courses will never overcome this problem, and are simply money grabs by departments, not serious learning environments.
29
The other elephant in the room, which this article does not mention, is the role of tutoring. While our tutors receive training, and are not supposed to write programming code for students, the reality is that they are working with large numbers of students who are completely lost and understand nothing, and who are desperate to get their programming assignment done. I have seen tutors resort to dictating chunks of code to students because they can't see any other way to help these kids. I don't assign a lot of papers, but when I don, I know some students go to the writing center over and over, and I start wondering how much of the paper was actually written by the student.
Universities are all very proud of their tutoring centers and plug them constantly to students and prospective students, but I wonder if the overreliance on tutors is leading to some of the issues we are seeing with students unable to work on their own.
10
I once asked a friend who didn’t much like math how she passed her social work masters degree stat course. “A guy in my class helped me,” she said. He basically dictated her take-homes and assignments. By the time of the final, she had a better idea of the subject and squeaked by. This was 43 years ago, at Syracuse University.
1
@csgirl
Then the tutors only failing themselves.
@Allen Braun The tutors are in a difficult position. The university advertises them as the solution to all difficulties. But in reality, they aren't paid much, they don't get enough training, and they are faced with lots of students who are really, incredibly lost. Also, students will complain to the tutoring center supervisor if a tutor doesn't cooperate with their expectation that the tutor will do the work for them.
2
If Ms. Mbugua's work is acceptable at accredited American universities, what does that say about prevailing standards?
And having turned our universities into businesses, full of people who don't belong there, students and administrators alike, how can management complain when their customers seek out market solutions?
29
The "standards" might be just fine because the work submitted might be exemplary. The universities just have the wrong students.
2
Globalization strikes again.40 years ago when I was student the work was by done by Americans looking for extra money. I wonder is they use American or English spelling in Kenya?
Not new but now organized as a business model. As an undergrad in the '60s, I would write essays for fellow students basically for drinking money. In grad school, students frequently swapped papers to hand into different professors. There was always an underground available where a student could easily get their hands on a paper. The Internet has just made it easy and available to anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card. Colleges can no longer ignore what has always been a problem because it has been exposed by the media. Now colleges play the shocked victim claiming they never heard of college athletes taking easy A courses or getting paid while students for their on-field performance, or well-off parents using donations or contacts to get their kid into a top ten school, and now they are shocked about the pay-for-paper business. Apparently, I am the only reader of the NYT or WSJ who knew about these practices when I was a college student in the '60s.
42
I teach in computer science, and we see the exact same problem. There are websites all over the place that will write your programming assignment for money. I grade all of my students programming assignments myself, so I can usually spot these (a program that uses advanced constructs that we haven't covered yet, submitted by a marginal student, is a red flag), but lots of schools use TAs or worse, autograders, to grade projects so they have no way of spotting these. I wish we didn't have to teach programming to classes with 200 students.
65
This will end badly for them when they start looking for work and have to code in the interview. Perhaps you could emphasize that point -- programming is a performance profession and a diploma isn't enough to get a job.
2
Some comments have advocated for the in-class essay as an antidote to cheating. While that approach has its merits my favorite comment on the matter is in an essay "Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts" by William G. Perry, Jr.. I found it in a book called Persuasive Writing by Zender and Morris but the original is from Examining in Harvard College by members of the Harvard faculty. The essay focuses on an in-class exam essay which received an A- even though the student who wrote it had never attended a single class and was not even enrolled in the course.
The author has excellent advice for teachers which he is able to extend, although to a limited degree, to "STEM" subjects.
I cannot do justice to the essay here and although it is hard to find, I highly recommend it.
7
Even at Harvard, some professors will need to accept that students can demonstrate their genuine knowledge of a subject without the professor's lectures.
3
I work as a volunteer college access coach for high achieving low income students abroad and in the U.S. and what stuck me even before the article described Mguba's dream of going to the Eli Broad School of Business in Michigan was how hard it would be for her even with excellent credentials as a foreign student with no financial resources to be admitted to and to be able to attend any institution of higher learning in the U.S. I have to counsel students like her who come from abroad with no resources to apply to places in Asia and elsewhere that will offer both admissions and financial aid. Something is wrong with a system that allows someone like her who can write on such a range of topics to not be able to gain entrance and to afford a post-graduate education in the U.S. or to have gone to school in the U.S. as a college student.
33
@Jeanne d'Arc
No first world country (or even second world) offer meaningful financial aid to poor foreign students. There are private scholarships that have nothing to do with the school.
Besides this, regardless of the scholarships a student is due to receive, for student visa purposes financial means are required everywhere because a student has very limited rights to work in the country they want to study.
5
When I taught on the college level in the 1980s, I gave both in-class essay tests and writing assignments, so I could compare the students' actual writing styles with the papers they turned in.
It was pretty easy to tell which students had written their own papers and which students had hired someone else to write for them.
If the class is small enough, a professor can have the students write the paper in stages: first a one-on-one discussion of the topic, then a look at the outline and research methodology of the paper, then a first draft, then a revision. It's pretty hard to cheat under those circumstances. However, having lived the adjunct life myself in the past, I understand that many instructors simply do not have the time or energy for this kind of intensive teaching, not when they have to teach four large sections per semester to survive.
I must say, though, that at one of the Ivy League school where I did graduate work, undergraduate papers seemed to be an end in themselves and were often not assigned until the so-called "reading period," which was supposed to be devoted to studying for finals. This must have made the less honest and more affluent students eager to find ways to lighten their burden.
27
Standardized testing with ironclad identification procedures at test sites, video monitoring of proctors, and securely delivering all test materials is unfortunately the only known way to ensure college applicants are truly capable of doing college-level work. After reading this article, I am more aware of why many upper middle class parents are self-righteously "opting out" of standardized testing for their kids, under the pretense of concern about how stressful it is.
8
@Fern Stress is not the reason most parents are opting out of tests. It is a response to the privatization and corporate-based reform agenda in our education system. Standardized tests are not the way to ensure that students are competent; the tests can be gamed. As another poster said, requiring students to respond orally or in writing during class time will show who knows the material. Unfortunately, our country is not willing to pay for class sizes that small, or allow teacher the time it takes to score the assessments.
12
@Fern
Why does an applicant need to "prove" they can do college-level work?
Most European undergrad programs don't work on this principle at all. There is no private standardized testing industry like in the US.
How do they do it? They let everyone in based on their high school grades, and gradually weed them out as the program progresses. If you went to an easy high school, that becomes immediately evident when you flunk out the first year.
The completion rate for most degrees hover around 50%, and this isn't considered "bad" for the school, as in the US and Canada.
Exams are also given in two parts, a written component and an oral component to ensure that the student can actually verbally explain what they're being tested on.
Interestingly enough, the percentage of foreign students at these schools is quite small, despite the very affordable cost. The possibility of cheating successfully is eliminated and the change of securing permanent immigration proportionately so. That is why the US and especially Canada are very attractive targets.
2
@CarolEven work done in the classroom is open to the subjective assessment of the teacher and possible consideration of parental pressure to grade students more favorably.
1
When I lived in Taiwan in the kids 90s, as a guy in his mid 20s, college essays written by legions of westerners on behalf of Taiwanese students was a huge business. There were a number of companies in Taipei that gave “advice” to students on which US colleges to apply to and what to expect. But the main part of the service was actually writing the essays on behalf of the students. I had several friends who made a lot of money writing college essays. And as they tell it, they never met or knew anything about the students for whom they wrote the essays.
8
@Stephen: your point is spot on. Before one can write well, one needs to learn how to think critically. That’s the tough work. It’s no wonder students avoid writing anything in depth; it’s probably too overwhelming.
11
@Louisa Glasson...there wasn’t much critical thinking going on in your classroom of young students in Portwenn, either! Wink, wink.
Cheating on essays and papers...what would the good Doc Martin have said?!
1
@Linda: he would definitely be upset, but probably more so that I’m not identifying myself as Louisa Ellingham :)
Speaking of online cheating. How good are the degrees that many of these online Universities give out? I see a lot of ads on TV and in print. Some one should do a thorough evaluation by comparing these graduates with "regular" graduates.
4
I'm a non-tenured college writing instructor and not at all surprised by this article (though I am happy for the good reporting at the Times to bring it to light).
It's small class sizes and very specific writing assignments that build on what's discussed IN CLASS that solve the problem on my end. The essay mills can churn out sleek five-paragraph essays, but ask for something more complex and they won't be able to deliver a strong paper at least in part because an unmotivated student will have trouble explaining everything that's been discussed in class to an overseas writer when said student is simply anxious for a six-page essay.
But what to do about all the 100 and 200 person courses, with papers likely divided up and graded by TAs? Well, pay the TAs more (virtually all of them are underpaid) and have them work more closely with a subset of students from the class. While you're at it, pay us non-tenured folks a lot more, as well.
77
@Mel As a fellow university writing instructor, I agree with you that some of this issue can be solved through assignment design, that is, by making assignments so specific to what’s being taught that students can’t buy a pre-fab essay. But they can use one of these services to get someone else to write a tailor-made essay for them, as the investigation in this article shows and as I’ve increasingly seen in my classes.
Worse, some students, when caught plagiarizing, know they can avoid disciplinary action by complaining to deans. Universities, fearful of negative publicity and competing for enrollments, must concede to keep students, their customers, happy—especially in their cash cow programs. Doing so may help their balance sheets, but it devalues their own degrees and denigrates their instructors for trying to uphold the university’s own academic integrity policies. It’s nothing less than corruption.
Big US universities act and behave like big US businesses, and the degrees they confer are little more than commodities traded on the employment market. As instructors we are no different than these Kenyan essay writers: over-qualified and forced by the need to earn a living to play our part in a system we know is wrong. US higher education, a mirror of our deeply unequal society, needs the structural and systemic overhaul so many are coming to recognize is essential.
5
Good point.
2
Late 1980s a family of professional essay writers in California earned so much money that they built that nest egg into a multi-million dollar business selling something else. This has been going on far longer than a decade.
8
I had a friend in the early 80s who had a business with another guy to sell term papers to college students in the Philadelphia area. It was very lucrative and allowed them to purchase apartment buildings, etc. I recall asking about the ethics involved—he was able to rationalize the whole thing. I think ethics disappear in many entrepreneurial endeavors. Term paper writing may provide a living for some in other countries but the students here (or anywhere) are the ones who lose out on the very skills and intelligence the college experience was meant to develop. Unfortunate situation.
4
I agree. I "lent" an "A" essay to someone a few weeks after it was returned to me, thinking the other student was interested in learning how it was written. Never got it back and later learned he was involved in this sort of thing. I still wonder...
2
Professors could find cheaters by randomly selecting sentences from the submitted essays, printing out the sentences, and testing students on their ability to recognize their own work. I graduated 20 years ago, and I am confident that I still could recognize my own work based on word choice and sentence structure.
14
Many years ago when substitute teaching for someone recovering from a serious auto accident, I offered extra credit with a choice of essay questions. I was dumbfounded when most of them came back nearly word for word verbatim. That was when I discovered Wikipedia. When getting a good grade supersedes learning anything in the minds of the students, we are in serious trouble.
26
@Chuck Burton So, what was your response to the fraudulent essays?
2
In a way it’s kind of a nice story. The rich kids get almost nothing, and the poor kids get an education. And not only that, the poor kid also earns some money.
21
@David Martin
The meager wages from writing homework are no comparison to the cushy, well-paying jobs that the rich kids get.
3
@David Martin The problem is that then the rich kid gets a job he's not qualified for, and the poor kid doesn't get the job that he is qualified for.
9
There were bootleg essays around when I went to college in the 70s. I remember a fraternity brother paying $10 for one. Exams written in the classroom on a random subject (plus oral exams) seem to be the only method of eliminating internet work-for-hire cheating.
9
Thirty years ago, students cheated by using papers and exams in what were called "frat files." The mode of cheating keeps evolving in response to technologies. I agree with those who say that professorial monitoring is necessary to counter the problem, but that's feasible only when class sizes are small.
In any case, college cheating exists in a larger cultural context. Students cheat because their parents "helped" with homework and college admissions; because insurance companies and big pharma and politicians and advertisers and the NRA lie and cheat. When were things ever different?
11
The value of higher education is being undermined, to the point where a diploma often lacks value. American colleges and universities are often themselves part of the problems. Over the past few decades degree requirements have been watered down, and rigorous coursework, especially in difficult STEM subjects, is no longer required, and less often taken by students.
Then there are the myriad tools for gaming the system, some frankly dishonest but difficult to enforce, like the papers for hire described here, or fudged admission applications, as credibly alleged in the Varsity Blue scandal.
One of the most popular frauds is demanding and receiving double time on examinations, through abuse of dubious diagnoses of learning disorders. Students and their families can purchase the necessary documentation with ease, and get double time not only on the SAT’s and ACT’s, but on all examinations. This process is enabled by very poorly written regulations from the Obama-era DOJ.
Many employers no longer trust the value of a college diploma; jobs may no longer require a degree, and employers often require in-house testing of applicants.
Unless US institutions of higher learning restore rigor to admissions and the classroom, the education they provide will lose all credibility. Even worse, graduates will come to believe the road to success is through manipulation and gaming, and not through honest effort and work..
7
@Alex The fallout from the issues you discuss is that many college graduates are not well-educated and lack the critical thinking skills that should come with a good education. They frequently do not know anything except what is in front of their noses. If the voters are poorly educated and informed, what kind of leaders can we expect to be elected?
2
To this day people ask how I can write both well and quickly. I credit my liberal arts education. I wrote so many papers that buying them (which was certainly possible even in the 1980s) would have bankrupted me!
22
As a high school teacher I read my students' drafts as they worked toward a final paper. This is called "helping students to learn how to write!" Apparently professors and their teaching assistants are too busy to teach someone how to write. Or, like high school teachers who don't want to teach students to read difficult texts, they think their students should already know how to write a paper.
9
Now that is a great idea! Rather than having ONE paper that's graded, you work upon draft after draft, honing and fine-tuning words, sentences, and paragraphs. This works on the collective process, rather than solely the final product.
I think it's an excellent and creative idea. Time-consuming, to be sure, and you can't have 200 people in the class either, but what a great way to learn.
3
Perhaps these universities could stop spending tuition dollars on fancy buildings and technology, or they could stop hiring ver more MBAs who expand bureaucracy but don't teach. Instead they could invest in substantive writing programs with fulltime, tenured professors and they could hire professional writing tutors instead of using inexperienced grad students.
Hmmm. Nah. Forget it.
38
Cheating at every level is rampant in education today. While it is true that cheating has always been part of school life it is now so common that no one gives it a second thought. While I caution students that they are "on their honour" as per assignments it has little effect. I suggest it relates to the culture in which they live and the extreme competitiveness in the business world today. The lack of ethical and moral guidelines have all but disappeared in every aspect of our lives...religious, business and, particularly, political. When students see no consequence for blatant cheating they feel that their actions are justified. Worst of all, those students who try to act honourably are often ridiculed and suffer an undue disadvantage in grades. One part of the solution is for proper "modeling" by adults and leaders. In today's world that seems like a hopeless quest.
7
In my experience cheating in college involves a broad cross-section of the student body - not only “the rich”. Words like “the tricks some well-off students use” is misleading - it minimises and distorts the problem. My friend Justin which worked at the Gap on the weekend to make ends meet while studying at our state college also used these services on occasions.
Please don’t make everything fit into a narrative about the 1% vs the rest. Given the 7% of student number you yourself provide, it is obviously a far broader problem. Cheating is clearly a prevalent and troubling issue that should dealt with without mixing it up with your political crusade on other topics.
8
I was always given the impression that college wasn’t supposed to be an experience that paralleled something like a vocational school, in which a student would learn a skill and then perform that skill in the job market for money. Rather, it was a constellation of different experiences that transformed a student’s way of thinking in order to better succeed in the nation and the world in which they would create a career and a life. Given what we see around us today in business, sports, and politics, what better way to prepare for the modern world than to learn how to effectively cheat like a scoundrel? All the most successful people seem to do it.
2
There is a solution to the problem which is as old as formal education : the Socratic method. Professors should be calling on the students constantly, so that a dialog emerges. Written expression should reflect various interpretations of that dialog. The student should submit drafts for iterative comments by the professor. Through tweaking, an essay emerges in the student's voice.
The scenario described can only happen if class size is small and preferably no more than a dozen students. However, university administrators want to direct the budget for their own salaries and bloated staffs. The administrators are not aiming for small classes but their opposite: massive enrolment through the internet. So, overpaid and underworked university administrators, usually mediocre academics themselves, turn a blind eye to the outsourcing of homework assignments. Understandably, the underpaid and overworked professors also turn a blind eye.
The students ostensibly pay for the downloaded paper. But who really ends up paying? The phenomenon of somehow graduating from "elite universities" existed long before the internet. The internet just aggravates the problem, perhaps exponentially so. Remember that "W" graduated from Yale and Harvard and The Great Orange Leader, from Penn.
Q.E.D.
6
Again, those that can afford it game the system. The solution, all essays should be written in class under a watchful eye. A knowledgeable student should be able to knock out a one or two page essay in one period.
4
My brother, a teacher in Florida has a different problem. Florida guarantees every resident entrance to state universities. He has many students that are barely literate. He provides a syllabus, grades by attendance, participation and the effort to complete the work. Many a student that fails to show up for class, does no work and when in class sits staring at a phone go nuts when they receive a failing grade. Off to the dean they run, only to be told that existing does not earn them a degree. He does teach ethics classes.
The Florida high schools are granting diplomas to kids that can barely read.
15
Someone should harness the ambitious, well-educated labor force in Kenya to do legitimate research and writing tasks that can be outsourced. I am not sure what industries could use this assistance. Perhaps a marketing firm?
6
@Guesser Being from Kenya myself I would recommend legal research for US law firms and all manner of reports for US profit and not-for-profit corporations.
I wrote my application-to-college essay about wanting to help other people.
Hundreds of thousands of essays are written every year by college applicants -- or by their fathers or mothers -- wishing to indicate their desire to help other people, or animals, or the environment.
In all of recorded history, there has never been a single one of these ever written that hasn’t been full of lies.
3
Once, in the days before the internet, I had a student I KNEW had plagiarized based on style, but could not find the source. I spoke to the student and he had some notes etc. But I photocopied the paper and filed it away. Next year, a friend of his turned in the same paper with a new cover.
8
The whole college institution system needs a complete overall. There are plenty of academia , the people who teach, engaged in plagiaries as well. The truth of the matter is that most people are not 'brilliant original thinkers' nor are their educators. Young adults are being shipped off to these places of higher learning with no value systems in place. Compound that with "safe spaces' and it is of zero wonder that people cheat, including their parents. The internet has only facilitated the fact that people can find anything they desire......witness love scams, also originated in third world nations......
This all bodes so very well for how they will behave in business, law, government, or medicine.
7
I knew a "boy genius" who came from a very poor background and was admitted to an Ivy League school on full scholarship about 40 years ago when he was still turning 16. He discovered that his natural writing talent could earn him good money from lazy fraternity members. He spent his freshman year churning out dozens and dozens of original and creative papers and had spending money for the first time in his life. But his own grades in physics and math suffered a bit and he ended up finishing in another college on the straight and narrow.
6
I recently had a conversation with some relatives my family hasn’t seen in decades. At some point, they mentioned that their son lived in Korea as a writing tutor, I believe. Then later they said something about how he writes essays for his students (it may have been for college admissions). I immediately said, that’s cheating, he can’t do that. They had a kind of “right but you know everyone is doing it” attitude about it. I was disgusted.
People mistakenly think the point of education is to have the name of a university on your resume or to get a certain GPA — it’s not. The point is to learn something, and if you cheat, sooner or later people will figure out that there is a mismatch between what’s on your resume and what’s in your head.
8
Producing the essays is not cheating. It's business. The act of turning them in, as your own work, as a student, is cheating. But, in the end, you get what you pay for...If you cheat your way thru school you basically will have a degree that means essentially nothing.
8
My classes have a range of graded activities, from show up points to in-class problem solving and essay. Lots of take-home, open book stuff, but students are warned: "I'll kill you on the exam."
My department head once told me that students were "terrified" of me. I don't cultivate the image, but maybe this is not a bad thing?
10
Let’s acknowledge that trump confirms the perception that cheating pays bigly; for he has profited—in ways both tangible and intangible—from The Art of the Deal, which was written by someone else. Indeed, the whole practice of ghostwriting validates students who purchase papers they didn’t write and then submit them as their own work. (To be fair, let’s also remember Biden’s plagiarism, which was and remains equally wrong.)
8
You are referring to something that happened in 1965 for which Biden admitted he was wrong.
Contrast and compare to the ongoing issues such as the Sharpie incident for which there will never be an apology.
Whataboutism is really getting tedious.
I would have thought that if the professors or their teaching assistants in North America were doing their jobs appropriately over the duration of any course that is taught they would be able to gauge accurately students' participation in course work and understanding of that work. When all of a sudden a poor student hands in an excellent paper would it not be obvious that the student had not in fact written it? The New York Times seems to be laying all the blame at the student level when a great deal of that blame should go to the professors and their teaching assistants for not knowing their students.
2
@J. David Burch
The papers are rarely excellent. Passable at best.
@Auntie Mame That is sad to hear. Back in the days when I was in university here in Canada i.e. in the late 60s early 70s I think most students were very serious about their education and understood how fortunate they were to be in university.
I wonder how much cheating occurs in medical school. A frightening possibility.
8
Rich kid gets admitted to a college they don’t deserve, skates their way through using surrogates and by cheating and after graduation gets a executive position because of connections. Absolutely incompetent but is paid millions of dollars a year to raid pension funds and cut wages for the working class to make up for their poor decisions, The American way.
12
Gotta love how the companies assert that their writers’ work is not intended to be passed off as a student’s product. They are just “reference tools.” Oh, sure. I have a paper that is due in three hours, and I will gladly pay you $42 a page for something that I will use only as a reference. The companies aren’t even fooling themselves....
5
This proves a single thing only.
There are far too many places for college students. Far too many graduates. If those who attend are not talented enough or energetic enough to do their assignments honestly, then what is the point in offering them the opportunity to earn a degree in the first place?
It means, in the end, that our "educated labour force" is rife with lazy cheaters. I suspect many of them rise quite high on the backs of others...
7
What about parents who edit or write their children's work?
I have always thought this was wrong, too.
11
"Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites . . . have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments."
No cheating is not new. I graduated college in (I wish I could censor this) in 1971. Before PCs and the internet. Some of my classmates purchased term papers even then through the underground. Of course they were found out and punished: one does not go from C+ to A+ work in a matter of weeks; quality shows. Fast forward to today. My wife has a daily battle with high school students in a nationally famous NYC border school district, where the pressure to excel is excruciating. The internet has only made it easier for them to cheat on their assignments, some better than others (don't try to pass off Dryden's translation of Vergil as you own). And despite school rules on cell phones in the classroom (including for teachers), I can't remember the number of times she has recounted their use during exams for cheating. Technology is great. Stupidity is boundless.
7
Maybe we should find these ghostwriters and offer them admissions to our universities. Such talent and nowhere to use it except to help others cheat! Very unfortunate.
7
The focus of the article seems to be on the people who are writing the essays. It should be on the cheaters. Looks like the author could make contact with people in Kenya but not a single cheater from US.
Cheating goes on from a very early level. Tell me, how many parents did their children's homework?
There is also meaningless homework assigned at all levels. That should be tackled first. More homework doesn't mean more learning. It is simply egotistical drudgery inflicted on students.
5
While deeply disappointing, this is hardly surprising. Lying, cheating, stealing - doing anything to make or steal a buck, is the new normal at the highest levels of industry and government. How can we expect our college students to behave differently?
6
Even the cheating jobs have been sent overseas.
9
College graduate writing skills have been atrocious for decades. I managed college graduates from the 1990s through the 2010s and it was a rare worker who could write a complete sentence. It never got better. Each new employee was grammatically illiterate. Of course this sad state of affairs can be traced back to this country's neglect of it's public high schools and it's low standards for entrance into state colleges. Unfortunately it's all about making a profit and it's rather ironic that this particular profit is being made by graduates of second and third world countries.
102
@Nessmuck
Of course this sad state of affairs can be traced back to this country's neglect of it's public high schools and it's low standards for entrance into state colleges.
Yeah, that it's versus its thing is a real stinker, ain't it?
27
@Nessmuck Credentialism is the natural result of demanding degrees, rather than skills, intellectual and practical. Supply and demand, baby.
10
@Nessmuck. I remember my father, a professor of history, complaining bitterly about college student writing skills in the late 1950s. There are plenty of examples of bad writing in current newspapers and magazines.
13
I am an English professor, and I teach both literature and writing courses. If you're a professor lucky enough to land a job with a reasonable course load, you can spend sufficient time with students to get to know their writing and prevent this sort of thing. Tenure-track positions are becoming increasingly rare, however, so students are often taught by adjuncts who must teach seven or more classes a term at different universities just to make ends meet. In our department we pay adjuncts $2500 a class (that's $100 per student for the entire semester). With so many students it's virtually impossible to offer quality time.
The larger issue, though, is that we don't really have a clear idea anymore (if we ever did) about the purpose of a university education. Most students will say they are in college "to get a better job," and of course that's one function of a degree. But the educational model that most American universities follow is still based on the Humboltian ideal of the early nineteenth century, which was more about imparting "culture" than life or job skills. So if a student simply wants to go into sales or marketing, what does it benefit them to know about (and write a good essay on) a work of literature or a specific historical event? It might make them more interesting people in some abstract way, but such skills have no tangible value for most of the jobs that will be available to them. In other words, there is increasingly little incentive for students to care.
39
STEM education does not suffer from the fraudulent essay problem of other disciplines. The curriculum and testing are also very objective. I recall physics exams years ago in college. They usually consisted of 4 or 5 problems to be solved mathematically within 50 minutes. We were allowed to bring any materials we liked, even our physics textbook, as the problems were uniquely designed by the professor and were not in the textbook. The test was designed to measure ability to understand and apply the concepts taught in class - either you knew them or you didn't. The attrition rate was high.
11
@Bill I'm a licensed engineer. I can tell you that State licensing boards and the national association have had to employ sophisticated statistical techniques and enhanced security to prevent impostor test taking and cheating with the use of technology including secretive communication devices for obtaining answers from outside the test room. Testing is moving to computers from paper and pencil testing, to enhance the security.
Your example from Physics illustrates how designing testing practices properly can make cheating less likely. However, the stakes in a physics exam are lower than in a professional licensing exam, so the cheating inputs to the latter can be much more intricate and expensive.
7
@Bill This kind of cheating is rampant in computer science. Students routinely pay people to write their programming projects for them. Since it is a popular major, our classes routinely have hundreds of students in them, and there are not enough people to grade the work so everything is submitted to autograders. No human ever sees the work.
3
@Bill
Lol The idea that STEM doesn’t suffer the same problems as social sciences is laughable. If anything, the haughty STEM students are worse at cheating in their social sciences classes because they believe they shouldn’t have to take them.
So many of them believe that social sciences are a waste of time. They feel like they don’t need to learn about Kant, or need to learn how to write in the active third person.
How do I know this? I’m an engineering student. I’ve heard the derisive comments about history majors, English majors etc. But, the social sciences are an incredibly important aspect of intellectual development.
Math makes for good engineers. The social sciences make good people.
4
Closed book essay exams, written in class, and graded by actually reading the essays (not simply turning the essay into a multiple choice exam by applying a rubric to it) are the ONLY way to judge college student knowledge. (Actually, from junior high onward.)
I taught college for a total of 20 years, and I gave students a list of essay questions two weeks before each exam -- broad, syntheticizing questions that could be answered 1000 ways -- and that required novel application of course materials. Then, on test day, in the "ritual of randomness" the question was selected by lot or die.
Students were 100% in control of their fates (having had the questions) and the knowledge had to be their own, and although they had two hours to write, I always gave them up to three. Of course, it was a huge amount of work for me to grade these mid-terms and finals, but I knew that students really learned.
Papers can be forged/"hired out"/plagarized, etc. Essay answers, written in class, are the only true measure of learning. It is hard work for everyone, but the great problem in education at all levels is that the pressures are on teachers to make the deal: "You pass me and I won't make you work if you don't make me work."
The "paper" has become a joke, unless you are going to have oral exams on each paper. Restore the closed-book essay exam, instead of assigning papers. If students cannot apply the knowledge to novel situations, they have learned nothing.
305
@Craig Mason totally agree — and such an easy solution to implement! Most exams in French universities and grandes écoles are taken this way: students sit in for 3-4 hours, closed books — not even knowing the essay questions in advance, just knowing the broad topics that may be covered. That forces students to study ahead and write on their own!
53
@Craig Mason An in-class essay is also limiting. One can't use/reference sources , draft, rewrite, etc. They are going for just showing if the students know materials taught, but not so good for taking things a step further. Also, many students simply can't write that fast or have anxiety under a couple hours of pressure, so again, all it will show is did they understand what was taught.
20
@Craig Mason.... "Essay answers, written in class, are the only true measure of learning.".....Not Really. If I was a little uncertain I always felt I could fluff an essay answer by providing some key words, mentioning a well known person and their theory, add some vague prose; and proceed to the next question. I almost always received part credit and sometimes even more. The real way to take the measure of a student's knowledge is the Ph.D. oral exam, in a room with half a dozen professors. And even then there are ways to game the system well known to graduate students. For example; if you know the answer to a question, respond in great detail and hold the floor as long as possible. They can't ask more questions while you are in the middle of an answer.
12
One way to avoid this is to get to know your students and be familiar with how they write (assign some short in-class writing too); when you notice anything that seems unusual, meet with the student and invite them to talk about the process that led to the writing of that paper. That usually uncovers what is bought and what is their own work. Teaching (& grading) writing is very time consuming.
77
@Religionistherootofallevil Ideally yes, but when you have over 200 students each semester like I do, this is practically impossible. I've resorted to in-class essays for the most part.
6
As a professor at one of the top public universities in the US I had a student that was paying someone to take the entire course for him (in person). They almost got away with it, and the stand-in student was good, near the top of the class. He even had a fake student ID with his picture but the name of the student he was impersonating. Still, we caught them, though with a bit of luck. The US system relies on the competence and attention of professors and TAs. Good professors who care can make it very hard for students to cheat. But this type of cheating will be almost impossible to stop in a large-classroom environment. I only wish I know how much the stand-in student was being paid.
86
@Will I suspect the surrogate was being paid better than most of the adjuncts at your school. And remember, your student was doing the same thing that American Corporations do. Whenever you read "designed in Cupertino, CA. Made in China" think about this.
11
Probably more than you make!
@Will
''As a professor at one of the top public universities.''
'' I only wish I KNOW how much the stand-in student was being paid.''
Knew.
'' He even had a fake student ID with his picture BUT the name of the student he was impersonating. ''
With
From a humble manual laborer. Who hired you to write this letter?
4
In my son's college, the writing is done in writing class. Proud to say that my son is an excellent writer! Sorry for the kids who are only cheating themselves out of learning, but not surprising in a time when parents are "buying" the kid's way into colleges.
16
As a professor who has to try to figure out whether or not my students write the work I submit I am appalled, but I certainly wish I could have Ms. Mbugua as a student instead of some of the ones I do have. Oral exams have always been very big in Germany, and I think we should introduce more of them. Oral reports always run the risk that students are just reading off Wikipedia or bought essays.
223
@kate
I am a college professor and I do give an oral final exam which I record in case anyone wishes to dispute the grade. It makes students study very hard because it is so up close and personal.
6
@kate A professor in France, also wishing she had more students like Ms. Mbugua.
4
These term-paper mills predate the internet by a long shot. When I was a professor at Queens College in the 1980's, I suspected that a paper had been ghost-written; furthermore, students had told me that they had seen ads on restroom stall doors for a number of these outfits in Manhattan.
I consulted with the College attorney, who in turn consulted with the office of the NY State Attorney General, Robert Abrams. We recruited my daughter, then a student at SUNY Binghampton, and an attorney for CUNY who was young enough to pass as a typical student. We drove around to about five or six such outfits in Manhattan, where they purchased papers with the Attorney General's funds. We were all then properly deposed.
Eventually, the State used the evidence that we got to sue these people, and they were *briefly* put out of business. There was even a picture in the NYT of State employees (I think) hauling crates of term papers out of the offices.
They were back in business within months, if not weeks.
My daughter and the CUNY lawyer saw students browsing through term papers in those outfits from a number of universities, including NYU and Columbia, and in at least one case with the student's mother!
43
@Chuck in the Adirondacks
Chuck, I swear I wrote it all myself. You gave me a B.
1
I'm a professor at a well-known university. MJ is incorrect in saying that scholarships for gifted kids from poor neighborhoods have dried up: they've in fact increased. There are also generous scholarships for students from such areas who have not excelled, the assumption being that limited cultural background has held them back.
However, s/he is correct that a degree, often just to check a box on a job application, has become a commodity, with the learning becoming secondary to irrelevant---which encourages the temptation to cheat. And, yes, too many schools do compete to entice prospective students with creature comforts.
10
@June Teufel Dreyer Professor Dreyer, Based on your long experience, can you compare and contrast this phenomena in universities outside the United State, e.g., at Tai Da?
People often make the assumption that the purcuasers of such esssys are rich and entitled, but do we have any evidence of this? It seems just as likely to me that students of more modest means will sometimes choose to work an extra shift to pay for a paper when their academic skills are weak. If there is no guarantee that you can pass the class by yourself, you can improve your odds by directly converting your hours at work into a passing grade. Paying $50 - $100 for a paper is a lot cheaper than failing a class and paying the tuition a second time.
50
Many colleges run soft ware to catch this kind of problem. Someone hires a company to write a paper, but the same basic paper is used again at another college. When caught, the consequences can be harsh for the student, including expulsion without credit earned. Be careful, students.
8
@Kuhlsue
You can catch plagiarism with software. However, the papers mentioned in the article are original, but written by someone else than the student. Plagiarism is a different kind of cheating.
This is common place. In the sciences there are websites where you upload the question and they comeback with the cost. Some sites guarantee that it will not be caught by the anti cheating software. Things get worse as you move up the ladder of higher education, imagine discovering the same PhD dissertation turned in for credit in two different universities. As one Chinese grad student told me when challenged "we make the most progress when carried on the backs of giants", not quite Newton's quote but interesting interpretation.
7
There are other ways to cheat at college and cheating is endemic. At least at the top 10 liberal arts college my daughter attends. Her former roommate’s dad, a Silicon Valley exec, does her programming assignments so she can get drunk each night, while my daughter studies around the clock. One of them gets on the Deans List, the other doesn’t, guess who? Her peers divide up their science assignments and do one each and share with the group, she does each of them herself, again guess who parlays their lack of sleep, honesty and effort into inferior grades? Just two examples out of many that don’t even involve essay mills.
These supposed cream of the crop students learn to cheat in middle school and high school, often the scions of rich parents who game the system themselves, and the connections forged at elite colleges propel them into top jobs in industry and government. There’s no accountability in the system, and our institutions and businesses are being run by people lacking in both intellect and character.
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@Xoxarle
Not just rich people but athletes, special admits. Randomizing admissions would make a lot of sense.
4
@Xoxarle
Let me take a different interpretation of that.
Science magazine had a special issue on minorities in science.
There were some programs that did a good job of increasing the success of minority students. First they examined how students in general succeeded. Then they taught those methods to minority students.
One of the most important ways that science students succeeded was by forming study groups.
In my working-class high school, they taught me that you have to do all the work yourself. That's exactly wrong. Your parents are supposed to help you. Why can't your fellow students help you?
Science is collaborative. Scientists work in groups. They help each other. Einstein was bad in math, so he got a mathematician to help. The myth of the lone genius is a Hollywood creation.
I think your daughter missed the important lesson. To succeed in college, she has to join a study group. Today's world is too complicated to do it alone. In career terms, she might be better off going out drinking with the daughter of a Silicon Valley executive. Anybody can learn to program. The important thing they got from college was the social connections. A Harvard graduate told me what it took for his startup: a dozen friends who have $10,000 to lose.
Looking back, I've gotten more career opportunities from drinking (or at least, socializing) with people than I have from reading technical studies.
14
@Xoxarle
And at the very top, these students have our president as a role model for gaming the system.
7
Random audits by professors in which a subset of students are chosen to defend their submission - basing the grade in part on the quality of the paper, and in part on a student’s ability to crisply defend and explain their thinking on it, would heighten the risk of using these services. Most universities will expel for this kind of cheating, if caught.
22
@Al "Random audits" that would torture only a few students in a class? No.
4
@Al
Not a bad a idea, but way too much time for this overworked assistant professor with too many tenure and service obligations. The sad fact is that tracking down plagiarism takes a tremendous amount of time and mental energy.
2
Colleges need also to establish a policy of immediate expulsion, with no return of tuition paid. And have parents and students sign an acceptance contract detailing agreement.
Proof of such cheating shall be agreed as a student’s inability to explain to a review board how and why research followed the path it did. Random review would also need be done.
Sadly, this is just a part of the American chase of money. And, if well done, accepted by many businesses equally wanting $UCCESS by an means necessary. Ethics starts at home.
6
@Neil. Effective enforcement would be a big problem. The risk of being expelled for writing better than authorities believed you could--this sounds like a nightmare for minority students. (There is all too much testimony out there about the bad old days when talented female undergrads were accused of having their boyfriends complete their physics homework for them.)
3
@Neil
The problem is proof. It can't be suspicion or more likely than not. If you used likely as a standard you might convict someone who is innocent. So you would need to use beyond a reasonable doubt and that is hard to achieve in a rubbery, ill defined issue. The labor involved would be tremendous. Devaluing college might make sense. Most of the kids in college, me included, would rather be doing some productive job. The problem is that there are no jobs that provide pay and benefits that are livable in today's world without a college degree even though the degree often has no bearing on the job.
2
@Neil Why should anyone impose or experience these standards when our President and his associates demonstrate everyday that playing by the rules and telling the truth is only for losers?
1
While this isn't solely an Anerican practice, it is dishearting to read. It says to me that the idea of getting good college education, which during my time (90s) has amounted to just getting a receipt aka a diploma. The idea of having a rounded character, created by education and hard effort, is no longer valued. Seems like capitalism has eroded more than middle class status.
So much irony in this article yet it continues to support the idea of how much America is in decline.
15
There is an established ethical precedent for this: elected officials submitting legislation written verbatim by lobbyists.
326
@Jim S. Absolutely correct. In particular, all Americans need to be aware of the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
16
The students are learning an important American business skill: delegate the tasks you're no good at to others, then take the credit and reward for their work. Most of our CEOs are doing it, why not their sons and daughters?
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@Tom J this is it in a nutshell. We get the kids we collectively raise. It has been more important to be wealthy than to be honest for decades now.
23
@Chip
centuries
4
An even bigger problem in US universities is the uncontrolled proliferation of large, well-funded corporate websites that will sell solutions to STEM textbook problems. These have made homework exercises in large part irrelevant for grading as it is not possible to determine who actually solved the problem. It is a problem not only at the lower-ranked universities where students may not be as well prepared, but also at the highest tier of US undergraduate education. It is cancerous, and is metastasizing.
29
@Andrew In most colleges, the students don't turn in homework for credit. They use it to practice skills on their own. It's actually helpful for them to see the answers so they will know whether they understand how to do the work.
3
This is not necessarily a problem. Providing the answer to questions at the end of a chapter in texts on subjects such as mathematics and physical chemistry has always been done. The problem for the student is then, how do you arrive at that answer? This can be an effective educational tool.
4
@Andrew
As a STEM student I have to disagree. Often one learns more from how a problem is solved than from the text. Some things you can think about forever but never come up with the answer.
2
The problem begins much earlier than college. Parents who over involve themselves in their child's homework, and do half or most of it to make their child look good are sowing the seeds of cheating and undermining their child's learning. Parents also pressure teachers to give grades that have not been earned-this happens all the time. Parents are afraid to let their child struggle or fail but learning is essentially all trial and error. Teachers don't help by making success a one shot deal. If a student writes a paper and does poorly, I believe they should have the opportunity to
rewrite it, once they are shown where they went wrong-this is how learning happens. Better to accept a revision of an original work than a perfect fake one.
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@CJ Not all parents are like this. When one of my nephews was in elementary school, my sister emailed his teacher asking her to be more critical of his writing. My sister had tried to get him to revise his work, which she believed was quite poor, but my nephew would not do so. My sister felt that the teacher should be the "heavy" and criticize his work so he would be motivated to improve.
3
@CJ Not all parents are like this. When one of my nephews was in elementary school, my sister emailed his teacher asking her to be more critical of his writing. My sister had tried to get him to revise his work, which she believed was quite poor, but my nephew did not do so. My sister felt that the teacher should be the "heavy" and criticize his work so he would be motivated to improve.
@Guesser
Of course not all parents are like this; your sister is not and I was not. I meant that those parents who do take over their child's work are sowing the seeds of cheating and also, if they do not allow the child a chance to learn and make his own mistakes, he or she gets to college with no idea of how to do the work, thus giving them a motivation to cheat.
1
They existed more than a decade. You could get this done when I was in college in the ‘70’s
4
Maybe the students should be asked to submit the assignments in their own handwriting. Even if they got someone to proxy, they at least learn by copying themselves.
17
Professor over two decades watching undergrads anxious to help pay for expensive university work two or three jobs. I go around classroom start of every semester to appraise the demands such undergrads have: nanny, server, retail, admin. Only a handful of times did I suspect a purchased paper. Adjunctification of all of our US univerities makes 'office hours' to talk with professor a thing of the past. Wish the schools would offer a required class in academic writing and critical thinking skills. Wishful thinking.
26
Parents "assisting" their children's homework and building most of their science fair projects. Years later, we engage and pay for other people doing the work for students. Learning has become secondary to just getting through a system so that one can get a good paying job. It's an unsettling thought that the next professional that you rely on might have gotten through by cheating.
20
@Louis
No kid is going to win a science fair without substantial assistance from an adult.
When I entered the NYC science fair, I had the help of a teacher who took her own time to show me how to grow my Petri dishes. My father was an airline mechanic. He made a Tyndall box.
Then I got to the science fair with my cardboard posters and saw the first-prize winners. One kid made a van de Graaf generator. His father was an engineer. Another kid made a rocket. His father was a machinist. His rocket had a great nozzle. I couldn't figure out how to make a nozzle in my rockets with the tools available to me.
Nobody would pretend that a science fair project is entirely the student's own work. It's not even supposed to be.
Science education is not a race where everybody starts at the same finish line. Most of what you learn is a transfer of knowledge from father to son. It's not fair. Some kids' parents have more resources than others. What is fair is when you go to a public school and get some of the same opportunities that rich kids get.
Let's get rid of competition in education. If employers want grades to decide who to hire, too bad. If you want to see how well a graduate understands electronics, ask him, "What's your favorite circuit?"
PS: The biology teacher who helped me with my science fair project was black. If she had applied to Donald Trump's housing developments, she would have been rejected.
3
@Norman. I had much the same experiences growing up. My parents always insisted that all of our work be our own, which led to me presenting many an embarrassing posterboard project at our end-of-year Gifted and Talented fair (I got in to that program because, thankfully, no one's parents can take the test for them). Everyone else had run complicated studies and such. I get it: their parents were trying to help them learn something new based on their own expertise, but in the end the work wasn't theirs, and those of us (me, a couple of others) who did our own work looked pretty dumb. Boy Scouts were similar - my brother quit when it became clear that he was the only one who had made his own pinewood derby car. What we learned HAS served us well as adults, but still, the people who didn't do their own work often came affluent backgrounds and had an easy time going to elite schools and getting good jobs, so in the end none of it mattered. I'm glad for my integrity, but they still have million dollar homes.
4
@reader
The point I'm trying to make is that we're treating science education as competitive, as if it were a race, where everybody is ranked. Real science is usually collaborative.
Let's do without the pretense that every student's work is his own, and that his parents don't help him.
If your father is an engineer, that's cool. If he shows you how to build things, that's cool. The real question is, what can you (or your father) contribute to your community? When I was in high school, the other kids showed me how they built transistor circuits.
I'd rather go to a school without grades or rankings at all. Medical school is like that today -- their courses are pass/fail.
The teachers I know tell me that they can divide students into two groups: those that want to learn just enough to meet the requirements, and those who are really interested in the subject. I guess there are two more groups at the extremes: those who go way beyond the class requirements, and those who don't care at all. You don't need computerized tests to figure out which group your student is in.
The point should not be to sort students out by rankings that will determine their lives. The point should be to make every student the best he can become.
Why should our schools be built around the needs of HR departments, who want to be able to hire people based on grades without understanding their job?
1
Such essays could be given alongside the SAT, or at an SAT center, with random multiple prompts presented on the day of the writing sample. This would not be hard to do, and would streamline the process for both student and universities.
Nothing new here. I had a friend in the late 1970’s, who, having recently discovered Nietzsche, convinced himself it was okay to ghostwrite papers.
6
@GiGi I think the "new" part is the outsourcing to countries like Kenya and India. Of course it has always been possible to have a friend write your paper, but it has not always been a global industry.
1
If the universities want to stop ghost writers all they need to do is have the students write a one page essay, under supervision.
Then compare the essay to future assignments.
Call it academic forensic linguistics !
29
And, oh please, I know a woman at a local expensive private school who proudly told me how good she was in “helping” the students write essays and what colleges they got into. I am absolutely sure she is not the only one doing this and it’s not the only school. Private schools derive their reputations from their student placement - that’s too much to leave up to a bunch of 17 year olds.
27
How can this benefit any college student when there are required courses like set theory and calculus? Only a few of my grade-earning college work were handed-in essays. The real deals were in-class tests, which included essays.
This cheating is disgraceful. Once again we learn about another dark side of the internet. But colleges and universities have plenty of defense mechanisms to deploy against such fraud — even if they catch no one and are unable to use punishment as a deterrent. They just need to wake up to the Digital Age.
5
Among other things, this article reveals how much Turnitin over-sells itself. In this "arms race" facilitated by the internet, it's hard to see how this sort of thing can be stopped, particularly at the undergraduate level. One strategy has been to insist that students at that level do their writing in class, the downside being that that takes away from class time, and will only work for short papers. But perhaps even worse is the spread of this sort of thing at the graduate level. I have actually seen even PhD dissertations that plagiarize long passages without attribution.
Who can fault the writers of these papers? Instead of blaming them, perhaps we need to look closer to home, at some of the perverse incentives built into our current academic model that encourage such cheating.
3
I work at a music school and we accept video auditions for overseas students. We have had more than one submission that was clearly dubbed. In a get-ahead-at-all costs world, esp. in developing countries, this is not surprising. Depressing, but not surprising. The way the US is heading, I won't be surprised if it begins happening with American submissions too.
9
I taught at a culinary school and required an essay on a biology-chemistry topic. A student demanded to submit a paper on homosexuality. The paper was submitted with a colorful ink-jet printed cover but the rest of the pages were photocopied onto a strange, onion-skin type paper and was written in a professional style that suggested it was bought.
A college advisor looked over the paper in concluded that the references were excellent but were ten years older than appropriate. New editions of the referenced books had been published. He concluded, as I did, that the paper was “a ringer.” Unfortunately the school had a policy of not failing students because it messed up their future schedules. So I lost my job for refusing to pass the student.
Cheating has consequences.
33
@DrBobDrake. Ain’t that the sad truth.
2
This article just reinforces the general attitude that a college degree is something you “get” in order to obtain a good job. What are these kids going to do when they are expected to actually perform in that position? I have hired young kids whose written efforts I’ve had to completely rewrite from scratch to make intelligible - one had a Ph.D. from a reasonably good school. College isn’t something you get. It’s a place where you work hard, ask help from your professors to acquire real life skills, and end up with a body of knowledge that will make you a great employee.
16
In the US today increasingly the end result not the process is the goal. For example, profit is to be made by any means regardless of collateral damage. Look no further than a pharmaceutical industry that knowingly pushed sales of opioid drugs on false claims of low addictive liability. Profits over responsibility produces the opioid epidemic. In the political arena, do we not have glaring example of distain for facts and intellectual process? Opinion and power are speaking and acting to “deconstruct” the government and regulation with impunity. Human rights abuses in detention facilities are broadcast on the nightly news and denied as the vice president stands on the other side of the cage. Political power trumps integrity and truth. With these examples why not buy a better essay than I can write to get the product I seek, the grade, the diploma? It’s all about the deal! The commodification of education is eating away at the educational process. Education at all levels is increasing driven by money or lack of it. Budget cuts have curtailed essential services while a strapped system then looks to for profit enterprises as solutions. These are the examples for young people on how to succeed so an enterprise to market essays as product is consistent. For admission into college,there have long been businesses to “assist” with applications including essays. If you have the money there are abundant services to do the work for you.
6
@JMC—the thing is, most of those purchased papers AREN’T better, but reasonably written intellectually empty pieces of fluff. Most of the ghostwriters aim for rhetorical smoothness over content.
50 years ago, long before the internet, I lost a paper to a cheater.
The professor of an English Literature class collected our papers, graded them, and put them in an open cubbyhole in the department faculty office for us to pick up. Unfortunately for me, someone "picked up" all of our papers, a treasure trove of future papers to use or sell.
14
@Marilyn—same here but not quite that long ago. Luckily I had a photocopy of my paper. I always kept copies.
1
Makes this English teacher want to go into hibernation! Colleges and universities, however, clearly aren’t that interested in knowing about applicants’ writing skills. I was a fan of the now-defunct SAT writing portion because it revealed an applicant’s unedited writing ability. Unfortunately, College Board scrapped that section, in part because admissions rarely actually looked at it.
9
Anyone working in academia is no longer surprised by these "revelations". It's been going on for years. Mostly from international students.
7
Why don’t we just get rid of papers? No one wants to write them. No one wants to read them. And just about none of them are interesting. Why don’t we instead spend just a fraction of the time (and money) being spent on “papers” (reading, writing, and out sourcing) on figuring out new ways to develop critical thinking. A new way. Is anybody out there thinking about this?
12
I would like this idea IF indeed it were the case that students, in their later careers, were assured of never having to write anything longer than a paragraph ever again. But that’s not the case. Reports etc. need to be written—who’s going to write them if students haven’t been taught how?
@Stephen. The convincing email might be a good skill to acquire.
1
@Stephen—speak for yourself. Some of my most intense intellectual experiences as an undergraduate involved deep dives into material, and the process of writing. (Maybe that’s why I went to grad school.)
1
Technology did not invent this problem which has certainly been around for as long as there have been schools. My generation had Cliff’s Notes. Technology has made it easier and more pervasive and technology can fix it too.
The way AI is works now, it is possible to scan all work by a student into a speech, concept and reasoning recognition system to be able to tell if essay work is actually done by the student in question by comparing it to all past work. This solution can be the future SOP of universities to ensure that the student getting the diploma is the one that actually earned it.
1
The other issue here is in out societal fixation on STEM learning, we are neglecting the teaching of expository writing. Writing well is inextricably tied to thinking well....and crafting a solid essay takes great skill and effort. Teaching a student to write analytically, persuasively and clearly takes a great deal of time. Look at the number of Ivy League schools that have a writing requirement. (Often teaching very basic stuff...the rudiments of sentence construction, etc.) These schools know that their incoming freshman, supposedly among the nation's strongest students, simply don't have the skills.
22
I have news for you.
This has been going on a lot longer - not quite that infamous industry that humans have engaged in - but at least 5 plus decades.
I was born in India and took SAT, GRE etc to get admitted to Caltech with a scholarship.
And I graduated from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) which admits on a percentage basis less than Harvard admissions. Of literally thousands of kids who take its admissions tests - barely hundreds are admitted in an academic year.
In India, admitted to IIT - folks immediately look at you differently.
Even then, I knew of fellow students who paid others to take their exams, had stuff written for them. Even at IIT, this cheating continued.
One even managed to have someone take his GRE, GMAT etc to get admitted to Sloan at MIT. Of course, getting admitted is one thing and then passing at Sloan is something quite different.
So, this shocking news is really not that shocking.
6
It may not be incredibly shocking to those already “in the know”, but it’s still worth reporting on so more people will be aware of it.
Plagiarism is so routine that I've taken to requiring all assignments to be hand written in class. My favorite plagiarism story is the very bright young woman, who might have done excellent work on her own, but instead submitted a transparently plagiarized paper taken directly from one of the major crib sheet "study guides." (A web search took all of ten seconds to find the source.) Presented with the evidence, the student didn't see any problem -- until she realized that the person she'd hired to write the paper had cheated. That's who was to blame, not her, I learned, as I passed the tissues to her.
481
@Robert F. Sommer Your student's lack of awareness reflects the general normalization of an ethos pushed for 40 years that has culminated in the Trump Presidency.
Paper buying is just another form of arbitrage and outsourcing so admired in our market-driven society.
A course that taught how to buy papers without being caught would have fit right in curriculum of Trump University.
37
I once had a graduate school classmate whose hired research paper heavily plagiarized an article written by the professor who had assigned the paper. And that was the end of that student’s graduate school career.
38
Students should sign off on a form in which they promise that whatever work they hand in is original.
The penalty for such cheating should be loss of credits and the tuition paid for that class, along with the episode remaining a permanent part of their school records.
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@Chris Manjaro
This is in fact what happens. In the CUNY system, students can be penalized with a failing grade, i.e., no credit and wasted tuition. The formal procedure requires students receive due process, which having been accused of cheating, they should. Most CUNY classes are taught by adjuncts, who receive a little more than $3,000 for more than 3 months of teaching. There are no material incentives to combat plagiarism and disincentives to do the right thing.
Ending the adjunctification of higher education might reduce the disincentive to doing the right thing.
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@Chris Manjaro
Such a handwritten, signed pledge is required on EVERY test, paper and lab report at my university. The only exception is group assignments where collaboration is implicit. I have not found it to be of much consequence. The little darlings still cheat if they think they can get away with it. That's the American Way!
@Chris Manjaro
All this happens and happened. And that person goes on to grad school anyway.
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Oral exams would fix this; paper writing has gotten out of hand as the only means of grading (in some fields). When I studied overseas for 6 years, I had to take oral exams for each of my classes. One question, ten minutes, on the full semester's material. I never studied so thoroughly in my life; and each exam was both a challenge and a thrill. My professors engaged me in real time, zeroing in on exactly which points I had not fully mastered, forcing me to think on the spot. By contrast, courses where I had to write papers (the US model) I basically forgot anything not related to my paper. I would have loved to give oral exams when teaching in the US but was discouraged from it-- I guess a paper trail was important.
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@Kirby
I had to pass oral exams as well but I would not argue that they are a fair method of assessment.
I did well because I am fairly gregarious and comfortable engaging with the material in real time.
I would suggest that my undergrad classmates almost universally loathed the oral exams and a significant number underperformed - they knew the material but they performed horribly in front of a panel of three Profs.
The easiest way to deal with this essay problem is to include a final exam and an in-class participation component.
That being said - I think I can confidently assert that a paper on a Philo topic written by an Kenyan engineer would border on horrible.
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I was told oral exams left places like medical school because of assumed racial bias. I guess this is true, but i can imagine a large group of professors working together could minimize this. It’s a great idea and would stop this problem.
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@Kirby
Writing is a skill that needs to be learned and mastered. Oral presentations or tests are valuable too. But simply memorizing information and verbally regurgitating it is not a skill. Essay writing involves research, style, proper grammar and syntax, organization and rhetorical skills like argumentation. Essay writing is immensely important. But as you point out, so us oral report. We can have both. It doesn’t have to be an “either or” situation as you suggest.
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I work as a college instructor, and before that, as a scientist in a lot of different companies. In industry, I worked on teams with salespeople, marketing people, managers, business consultants, computer and applications people.
In industry, everyone picks up on which coworkers 'know their stuff' and which don't. The latter are quickly ignored.
A person can learn their stuff in college, or outside college on their own.
The degree is a foot in the door. After that, a person sinks or swims based on what they can deliver to others on their team.
Some (not all!) students clearly see college as a hump that they need to climb over, so as to get to that job and start their career. Anything I want them to learn irritatingly adds to that hump, so any device to clear the hump is fair game.
I urge them instead to think of their time in school as an opportunity to learn things so as to contribute to their future success. I can't know if what we teach them is helpful, but I think at least some of it is. The thinking and writing skills I learned in college and graduate school were immensely helpful once I started working and--unlike in college--I got admired because of my basic knowledge.
Yes, students need to have fun and friends, but the 'I'm too cool to know stuff, let's party' attitude doesn't work in industry. At all!! At least that was my experience. Students should realize they are paying for an education, not a degree.
I hope this makes readers feel better.
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@KTT
sadly no. They pay money for the degree. Anyone who wants an education pays with effort. Have you ever met a professor who would refuse to let a person in their class for free-just to learn, no paperwork?
1
“...while you take care of the more interesting aspects of student life.”
Competition for students has resulted in colleges and universities creating those “more interesting aspects of student life” that make the college experience less academic and more like living at a resort than going to college. The laser focus by teachers and students on scores and grades over learning and understanding also creates a culture of exchange in academia where students do work for teachers (an audience of one) and receive points in exchange. Teachers need to help students understand why practicing these skills are so important for navigating their worlds.
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@Paul I'm a university professor and neither I nor any of my colleagues have a "laser focus on scores and grades over learning and understanding."
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@Kim Hansen
Perhaps “laser” was too strong. I’m now in my fifth year of being pointless in my high school biology courses. Student work has become far more authentic now that accumulating points is no longer at the center of their focus. Rethinking how we get the grade can help reduce cheating.
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At first, I thought, but this betrays the whole reason to be a student - to learn as an exercise of mind. Then, I realized, what does it matter? Wealthy, entitled students already presume all they need is that diploma and they are set for life. It is a sad statement on how our education has just become a commodity for the taking, at least for these students.
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@robcrawford I would not assume wealthy kids are the only ones doing this. These papers are cheap. Lazy, dishonest, and possibly overwhelmed kids come from the entire spectrum. Don’t make this a class issue.
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@robcrawford Like the Trustfardian is sweating the $300 on an American history 101 paper. Trusty is a business major, will take a year off after graduation, then work in Daddy's firm.
Yeah, upper education is really a diploma mill. My friend wrote essays for U of Michigan students during the 1980s. The business has been going on for a long time.
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Not just foreign students. I met a teaching assistant who makes more money writing papers than teaching. At least one freelance platform has job offers for writers to write literature reviews and complete assignments for students. Writing services openly advertise for writers and students. There’s no shortage of applicants on either side as it pays better than adjunct teaching.
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Not just foreign students. I met a teaching assistant who makes more money writing papers than teaching. At least one freelance platform has job offers for writers to write literature reviews and complete assignments for students. Writing services openly advertise for writers and students. There’s no shortage of applicants on either side as it pays better than adjunct teaching.
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“If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every accredited university into a diploma mill.”
I've got news for you. Most universities today are already diploma mills. That's what happens when the costs sky rocket and the scholarships for gifted students from poor areas disappear. It's also the result of making college the new High School. Higher education used to have value in and of itself. Now it is seen merely as a ticket to a better job. We have degraded it to a mere commodity by enticing students with great football teams, lazy rivers, and gourmet cafeterias. Perhaps some of our candidates have it right. A year of service for HS graduates gives young people a chance to see what is really important in life and to learn some life skills. If students were encouraged, or heaven forbid required, to do so, parents wouldn't panic that their kid will be behind everyone else's. Young people in this country are already far more service oriented than older generations. After all, they've been told they have to "do community service" to "get into college". We should just take that mindset and make it more formal. As for plagiarism, the policy should be immediate expulsion, no exceptions. That has worked for generations. And professors should be required to give in class essays as a way to accurately assess the student's knowledge and writing style.
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@MJ Even as early as 2003, I heard rumors of wealthy students contracting out classroom attendance (and therefore assignments, tests, etc.) at a highly selective bay area university. The internet has just made parts of this cheaper to do.
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Hi @MJ:
I agree with more in-clss exams, with eessay answers, done in computer labs to avoidhavign to read hadn-written exams.
I taught forensic accounting and had in-class 3-hour Haravrd-style case exams for my students.
The students could not cheat as I had written the case myself for that exam and they were in a locked computer lab with with exam security.
The students were required to role-playe being an analyst in a forensic accounting firm and being asked by their manager to provide an initial assessment memo with recommendations.
The exam had two components; analytical skill for a problem AND being able to write clearly and professionally.
Thus, i am confident the marks my students received were earned, thugh it took more effort to amrk the case exams.
And during the course, from initial in-class case to midterm to final, I could see the improvement in the communication skills of many students. Students whom I have met after they had graduated stated I had pushed them and it has helped them in their careers.
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@MJ As a college professor I have been moving more and more towards in class writing, for this very reason. Thank you for including this in your comment.
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it isn’t just foreign students who are producing undergrad essays. When I was a grad student at a US school, I (along with the other grad students in my program) regularly received emails offering to employ me to write ghost essays for undergrads in my subject area. I forwarded them to the office in charge of undergraduate disciplinary matters.
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Politicians and administrators of colleges and universities (and especially their trustees) are to blamed for this. By representing degrees as 'widgets' to be produced rather than treating students as learning human beings, by increasing the use of non-tenured (i.e., powerless) instructors who teach many courses (it's cheaper!)—especially for the kinds of gen ed courses that typically require such papers— by increasing class sizes, increasing administrative requirements for faculty (useless bean-counting paperwork), they have created a situation in which the emphasis is no longer on the quality of the education. Solving this particular problem of cheating is fairly simple, but involves a lot of time and effort on the part of instructors, which they no longer have (and it's expensive for the institutions because they have to invest in their faculty). It's much harder to plagiarize when you have the students submit the paper as a set of assignments: annotated biblio, rough draft, final draft, etc. Since few instructors have the time for this anymore, few do it, and the students quickly get the message.
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@headnotinthesand Your proposal to have students submit essays in pieces (bibliography, rough draft, etc.) might be appropriate in a freshman writing seminar (for schools with low enough student/faculty ratios to allow it), but I teach upper-level undergraduates who are supposed to know how to compose essays. My university department specifically recommends against allowing non-freshman students to submit rough drafts for professor comments. College students SHOULD know how to research and write (although many do not).
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@J
College students by large are under 26 when the human brain finally matures. They may have encountered Turabian or, unlikely, "The Chicago Manual of Style" in the junior year of high school. Writing footnotes is hardly second-nature (and PS many ways to skin the cat). Most high school writing consists of opinion pieces or did in my day. One is proving a point quite different from research that digs to discover.. sometimes not very important stuff. As an undergrad at a prestigious college, at grad school, I was only asked for finished products. (And now having finished the dissertation I understand why. It's hard to give guidance based on bits and pieces. ) OTOH reading The NYTimes I see that standards have changed. Slang-- to me unfamiliar expressions used; words used incorrectly, the personal touch abounds even in what are factual descriptive essays.
PS for some people writing esp. up against deadline is a huge ordeal. (And frankly, the college academic year is too short -- and spring break is too early in the term -- not necessary -- should be spring write papers week.) Have mercy.
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@J “My university department specifically recommends against allowing non-freshman students to submit rough drafts for professor comments.”
I am amazed. Does your university treat graduate students this way? The first substantive chapter of my PhD thesis went through many drafts, each with detailed comments from three professors. I eventually learned to criticize my own arguments, but without the feedback I would not have learned.
Freshman courses may teach students to be fluent and competent writers (We hope!), but it is the business of upper-level courses to teach how evidence and argument fit together within a specific field.
Comments on a draft that the student needs to revise are much more useful than comments on the finished paper; they also make the point that serious work always needs more than one pass.
The only argument against students submitting drafts is that the comments take time for the teacher, but that is just a matter of balancing the course design: A five-page essay with feedback on one or two drafts may be more useful than a 15-page essay with no feedback.
Requiring drafts also makes it harder for students to cheat, but I see that as a secondary benefit.
Guy Carden
Pullman, WA
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As a person who taught college courses, my paper assignments were too specific for students to hire a writer. The papers involved extensive scientific research and the use of certain citations. However, nothing is impossible with individuals who want to cheat a system.
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@Just Love,
I teach the same way you do and it does make a difference in the integrity of the essays. Online courses, however, can be much trickier. I have had at least two cases in the past couple of years where the internal evidence convinced me that the student in question had someone else taking the course. Sadly, these are almost impossible to prove.
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@Just Love, I used to think this was true. I taught an upper-level science course at a Tier 1 for years. The course included a scientific term paper. The students turned in references early, signed a pledge stating they understood the university definition of plagiarism, and uploaded their final paper to Turnitin.com. Yet every year, fully 25% plagiarized their papers. I would call them into my office and show them the plagiarism, line by line, and they would still deny it. Or claim they "didn't know" it was plagiarism. I deduced that, what happened, was that they waited till the last minute, and sat before their laptops and lifted sentences from the papers they were supposed to read and critique. At that point, I gave up and dropped the writing assignment, because I wanted to teach and not be a policeman. I much prefer how we test knowledge in graduate school, which is to have them stand up and explain what they know. Haven't figured out how to do that in a class of 70. Flipped classrooms may be the solution here.
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I am a university professor also. I require several steps to the research paper: outline, 1st draft, class discussion, peer review, and final paper. I take off 50% if they do not turn in the outline and first draft. Occasionally I have received a paper that I did not think my student wrote supported by the fact that they did not turn in a first draft. While I cannot always prove it, the student receives a failing grade because of not having turned in a first draft. I think my students do this, not necessarily out of laziness or just wanting a good grade, but because they don't think they write well and are embarrassed about that. This is one of the reasons I support them through so many steps of the writing process. The current generation of college students seems even more self-conscious than ever before -- fear of failure is high.
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Out of the total volume of college papers written, these cases represent a very small proportion. Most competent professors will assign essays or research papers that require extensive review of literature or the consideration of concepts that were taught previously in the class.
The problem of ghost writing is not distributed evenly across universities and academic departments; the extent of it is a proxy for poor academic quality.
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@Odin. However, an increasing proportion. There are abundant online sites to get prewritten papers. Otherwise why is Turnitin such a successful enterprise ? Why are they developing more algorithms to detect these papers in addition to plagiarism?
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@Odin. Companies say they want employees with good communications skills, but they don’t. They want employees like themselves: transactional, with shoddy habits, slipshod morals, good teeth and hair, a ready, vacant smile, an ability to fake sincerity and an ability to look busy.
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@JMC Turnitin made bank with detecting plagiarism --- a sentence here, a sentence there, copied directly from an article a student found via Google. But true, there are millions of students around the world languishing in English language Business Administration classes, learning little, with writing assignments that are ripe for ghost writing.
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I’ll bet there are people out there writing phony papers on ethics.
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@Kevin Ethics? Ethics has degraded to: "it's cheating only if you get caught." Further degraded to" So what?"
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I’ve seen those essays in my business ethics course....
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@pendragn52
And the supreme role model for this "philosophy": Trump.
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Lots of insight here--
The plight of a young and intelligent woman in Kenya, who found a way to make better money catering to the young and less intelligent with money in other nations. She gets a couple of bucks for her efforts and perhaps the ultimate client gets into college. Exploitation?
A multi-national industry that built on a cheating and the lame excuses it generates to make it seem legit. Ms. Mbugau describes it correctly, "this is cheating". This industry exists to enable cheating. Cheating is not new but this is a far more sophisticated effort than the old days.
The further decline of higher education in the USA. No doubt it will respond as the inspector did in the film Casablance--"I am shocked to learn there is cheating going on here"
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@Sendero Caribe And the cost of a higher education is the biggest cheat of all.
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@Sendero Caribe
Famously, that quote is "shocked, shocked." The second "shocked" is significant, and shouldn't be omitted.
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Getting into College and getting through College seems more important than learning.
I think in Middle school and High school they should introduce courses on Ethics and how to avoid sociopathy ,or else our future generation will cheat and lie and “do everything and know nothing”
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@Vineet In some countries, philosophy is a mandatory subject at the high school level. That can never happen here, because the very last thing that's wanted in the US is to bring up young people who are capable of thinking for themselves and can detect illogic and spurious arguments. After all, Socrates was put to death for "corrupting the young" -- in other words, giving them the capacity to see through the lies they will be told and expected to believe.
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@Vineet--Getting into college and getting through it has been more important than learning for decades. Instead of hiring some destitute grad student to do the writing, they have off-shored the industry at prices that are very reasonable given the current costs of higher education.
As for you suggest curriculum changes, ethics was part of every subject I took in primary and secondary schools--don't cheat.
I believe cheating is discussed as part of orientation in colleges. Student choose to do it regardless--out of laziness or perhaps the thrill of beating the system.
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@Vineet
Courses in ethics won’t make people ethical. Many lawbreakers, financial wheeler-dealers, corporate moguls who are mistreating workers even attend church every Sunday!
One needs a different school culture with different pedagogy and relationships.
“else our future generation will cheat and lie and “do everything and know nothing”
What do you think is already happening now?!
The undergirding force powering al this is capitalism — a system based on greed and where the market is king.
It is not surprising to read that college students with credit cards are buying diplomas. Our son attends a large private university in the Northeast that admits students with inferior research and writing skills who in some cases major in business and have no interest in taking the time and making an effort to develop their stunted writing abilities and pay their colleagues to write papers for them at a much lower rate than $36/page. Higher education providers need to take appropriate steps to ensure that students they admit have the basic fundamental writing capabilities when they enter school and should institute in class research and writing exercises and examinations to build these critical skills in all students. College students regardless of major should know that the their written and verbal communications are important tools in all professions. Do the work. It will pay off.
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@J. Daniel Von Bruin
When I started at state U in the eighties, freshman year composition was a weed-out course. If you couldn't write, you had no place at university. Are weed-out courses still a thing?
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@J. Daniel Von Bruin Doing the work is irrelevant. All you need is a rich father in the NY real estate world, and you might become president one day.
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@MHB. Not really, not in the humanities. And not because professors have wanted to lower the standards: it's because of the complaints of parents and students, who wield a lot of power when it comes to university administration, and continual efforts on the parts of university administration to take in tuition dollars. Of course, at public schools, this stems also from the lower and lower amount of public (govt. $) support for higher education. Less taxes to higher ed = higher tuition + more need for students paying full tuition = more capitulation to students and parents = less rigor of instruction and lower expectations for students. Combined with low quality K-12 education, which stems partly from how poorly we support, compensate, and in some cases train teachers.
4