I, who dropped out of CompSci after my first year, was a small-time shadow scholar.
It started innocently enough: I wasn't working, and a friend of a friend who was doing her Master's (in Education, wouldn't you know) needed help typing and formatting a document according to APA Style. I needed the money, so I visited her at the school where she worked. I took the draft she had penned and started reading.
I nearly vomited.
The quality of writing was atrocious. It wasn't just 'bad', or 'needing improvement'. It was shockingly, horrifyingly terrible.
Poor structure. Poor grammar. Not answering the question. excessive circumlocution. Hackneyed phrases every other sentence.
I diplomatically told her that I would 'change some of the words'. As she dictated and I typed, I changed sentence order and modified her word choices. When it was finished, there was a semblance of respectability. A few days later, I heard that the lecturer loved it.
That, dear friend, was the beginning. I completed quite a few assignments for her, but stopped after she started quibbling over the already small fee I charged. (Note to self: Always charge what you're worth.)
Sometime later, a neighbour in my building called me upstairs to help a friend of his. She was typing a paper for her degree to submit that evening, and he, knowing my language skills and typing speed wanted me to help. I went, sat down, and read.
Oh, dear.
I told her that in all honesty, it sucked. I made a few changes, typed up the rest. 'Twas enough for her to get hooked.
Over the next two years, I did several assignments for her. It got to where she would simply email me the research question, and I'd 'learn' the subject (yes, in 2 hours), get references, and like 'Ed Dante' divide the paper into sections, and prepare material. I could do a 10 page paper in one day, which would probably net a 90% grade or better. This was after never having heard of the topic before. She would get wonderful comments from lecturers about her 'wonderful exposition' and 'excellent analysis'. This from a girl who, although not dunce, could never verbally put sentences together half that well. I often wondered about the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of her teachers.
It's a smug feeling, walking around as a college dropout while knowing that you can run intellectual circles around people with graduate degrees. I should note, though, that these were all humanities subjects: Use 10 words where 1 would suffice and make up some bullshit, and you're good to go. It doesn't have to make sense because Most teachers aren't going to read it anyway!
For those of us here on HN, who are in all probability above the average, it might be difficult to understand how stupid most people are; but take it from me: they are. Very.
I'm done with it now, though. I hated researching stuff that bored me, although I sometimes learned a lot. The most important lesson?
And you certainly did your part in helping the world that direction.
You were willing to undersell yourself in allowing people to pass off your work and knowledge and skills as your own, and then you wonder why everyone around you seems to be so amazingly stupid. They're stupid because you provided them absolutely no incentive not to be. You made ignorance cheap, and as a result, it is precisely what you got.
There must've been some incentive for you, I presume. It probably wasn't the money, because you already said your fee was small. It wasn't the desire to wise these people up, because there was nothing for them to do once you were done. Why did you do this? I certainly hope it wasn't just for the sake of walking around smug amongst the uneducated masses, because then you are damning a monster you helped create.
Before I dropped out of school altogether, I decided I would try devoting as little time to it as possible. I started forcing myself to write essays faster and faster. It got to the point where I would sit down in front of my computer for five to ten minutes and literally write a stream of consciousness vaguely connected to the topic. I could turn it in for a C or a D. We've all heard about the 80/20 rule, but it seems like there's a 60/1 rule too. The hardest part about it was putting my name on such low quality work. But if you just want to optimize returns on your time, it's amazing how little effort is required.
> I often wondered about the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of her teachers.
I suspect it's an issue with the quality of work they are used to getting from their students, or perhaps simply the nature of the subject. I was personally commended for the work I did in a gen. ed. class on education for papers I knew my high school AP English teacher would have given me a C+ on at best. They either just get crap most days, or the subjects are vulnerable to BS'ing, that's the only way it makes sense.
Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?
I vividly remember the slackers of my generation (college/law school in the 1970s). They took the basket-weaving classes on the cynical assumption that it was a short-cut to getting an "easy A." They padded their papers with junk - that is, whenever they couldn't avoid having to do a paper. They feared the demanding teachers and ran from them. They continually looked for outline-level materials (Cliff notes, Gilberts law summaries) by which they could try to cram for a test without really having to master any of the materials. In short, they did everything possible to avoid having to think or work at the process of learning and, hence, they graduated, if at all, miles behind the hard-working students in their ability to think or to work as they turned to face real-world challenges.
I have never understood this mind-set. For me, the challenge was always to take on the harder challenges if that meant developing either your substantive knowledge or your skills in writing, analyzing, communicating, or whatever. Wasn't that the point of being there, after all?
The one precious commodity you have as a student that you will likely never have again is the privilege of being able to devote large blocks of uninterrupted time to diving into any given area and mastering it. Once you get into the real world, it is very difficult, if not impossible, ever to have that resource available to you again.
Whatever you do, don't squander this resource but, instead, use it to advantage. You will sacrifice in the short term as you watch your friends party away while you slave away, but you will develop depth of knowledge and habits of discipline that will endure for a lifetime while those who choose to cut corners, sadly, will not.
Cheating does have its victims. Those who cheat, however, will one day realize that the primary victim of that cheating is none other than they themselves. Caveat discipulus!
"Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?"
In a word, yes.
You see, education, for most people, is NOT about learning. It's about getting a job.
We HN types value learning for its own sake, and would happily curl up with a copy of SICP or TAOCP and feel content. The average person wants the whole thing to be over as quickly and painlessly as possible. In the words of some of my classmates, concerning cheating:
Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?...I have never understood this mind-set.
There is a certain degree of faith needed to want to make progress toward some distant and difficult goal. If you don't believe the rewards are going to be there when you complete the journey, there is really no point in even starting down.
The two rewards I can immediately think of with respect to learning are: the ability to approach the problems you find in life with a deeper and more enlightened understanding, and as a result are in a better position to generate a lot of value for humanity; and the feeling of satisfaction from having gained understanding into something that isn't trivial. You have to believe one or both of these things will happen before you start, otherwise you'd being doing something difficult for no reason at all.
The reason why it seems beyond my comprehension, and perhaps the reason why it feels beyond your comprehension as well, is that there are people who don't believe this. They think that there is no sense of enlightenment at the end of learning, or that this sense of enlightenment isn't worth the effort. They think that whatever they end up learning will be of no practical value, and that it is only practical things that hold value to people in general.
They believe, quite honestly, that learning will get them right back to where they are now, except for the practical value of the sheet of paper they receive at the end.
In short, I think people, if they ever had it, have lost the faith. It doesn't matter what you learn, so you should make the process of running in circles on as flat a plot of ground as possible.
The difference, at least for me, is that I haven't yet lost the faith. I see value in learning, both in an intrinsic sense of accomplishment, and a societal effect of being able to make a bigger impact on things people use. The positive feedback loop is there now; unfortunately, it has been with me for so long, I can't actually recall what got it started.
If the positive feedback loop doesn't start though, the lack of it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You end up in social groups where learning is discouraged, and where things that are practical now are much more valued. Once you fall in with the social group that fits your point of view, it takes quite a revelation to reach escape velocity from the same.
So, this comes down to yet another question, which I still don't know the answer to: how do you motivate people to take an example as part of a more fundamental truth, rather than an exception that proves their point of view? I wonder if it involves forcefully weaning them from the teat they've discovered the more intelligent amongst us are willing to provide and for far less of a cost than the value people get out of it.
I really wonder, as I did in another comment on this article, how much of this is really a product of past behaviors of those of us who love to learn. It seems as though we thought positive reinforcement is the answer; maybe we should revisit that.
Keep in mind who buys his stuff: Mostly people who don't have "the privilege of being able to devote large blocks of uninterrupted time to diving into any given area and mastering it". If you work full time and go to school, and possibly have a family, you're forced to go to school for career, not learning.
I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for an e-mail.
I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonesty policy, which would lead to--at least--failure of the course. It didn't happen. The student came up with a lame excuse, I was chided for harassing the student, and it was all swept under the rug. I was tempted to resign in protest, but kept with it for two more years before quietly leaving academics.
I enjoy teaching, I think I'm good at it and my students tended to agree. Unfortunately, I can't make myself teach in the current educational system here in the US.
I only taught for 2 years as a graduate teaching assistant, but we were told in training to never accuse anyone of cheating ever. It opened the university up to being sued, and made everyone's life more complicated.
I guess this particular part has never greatly bothered me about academia, though plenty of things are quite broken and bother me.
I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring myself to care that much about that, though. To me the important question is whether people who want to learn are able to; not whether people who don't want to learn slip through or don't slip through.
The much bigger failing in my mind isn't that cheaters aren't sufficiently punished, but that motivated students who want to learn things other than exactly what they're assigned are given virtually no assistance, and often actively discouraged (the side-projects-are-bad, keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you're-told mentality).
Sounds similar the story about a week ago where are professor is being disciplined for recommending that a grad student's degree be revoked, because the student did not meet the requirements.
Robin Hanson from OvercomingBias says it best: School isn't about learning:
I was a lab instructor for one of my favorite professors after excelling in his class. I caught one of his students cheating blatantly (assembly code was nearly identical to another students, just shifted around a bit)
The professor is a good man, and was very upset. It was almost kind of sad, he was angry but it was almost like he could've alternatively started tearing up at any moment. Damn administration didn't do anything about it though, and that very student I caught cheating has since been in several classes with me. Burns me up.
Guess it shouldn't surprise me that the prof. hasn't had any courses for several quarters now. I swear, the good ones don't seem to last. The only one we've got left in the department that cares about the students, I'm not even sure how he manages.
I am involved with a startup working on this problem (http://GuruFi.com).
Fundamentally this problem is derives from the fact that it is difficult for people to learn how to write and structure their ideas. Hell thats basically the whole point of PhD programs, and people spend years finishing them.
With the internet, it becomes really easy to just pay someone else who already knows how to write to do the work for you.
The only real solution to this that I see is to make these services legitimate as a teaching outlet rather than as a cheating outlet. Force people to write a draft. In editing, don't rewrite, just comment and give people feedback as to how they can improve the structure of their document. In general have the people feel that they are getting taught rather than just getting a product.
My hope is that creating a legitimate service will encroach the market people like this target, and will actually force students to learn something through their writing assignments.
This seems like a great service. The world is moving more and more towards using English as a universal language, and I think that plenty of non-native speakers are at a disadvantage, because they cannot communicate their ideas well enough. For example, of the best-selling business authors, how many are non-native English speakers? I bet not that many. That means that English speakers have a disproportionate influence.
It looks more like an essay-writing service than a educational service to me.
Two of the reviews of the #1 "Editor/Tutor" http://www.gurufi.com/editor/brian, don't seems to reflect students who learned anything about writing their own coherent sentences:
* "He knows what I want to say more than I do. Thank you for your clear and professional writing. "
* "It was the second to have you edit my article, and it was also the second to feel so surprised when I read it! Thank you!"
The #2 "editor" has a similarly uninspiring review:
*"Simply, Josh is a perfect. I got revision from him until I satisfied. I'm so happy with his revision. Additionally, his comments are very constructive to me. I learned about writing SoP from him. Thanks a lot Josh. "
About three-quarters of the reviews seem generically unoffensive, but many of them are cause for concern.
While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
What's scary is how far the lazy rich kid will be able to go with this, with a promising career in management. I wouldn't want to work for someone like this, but it is easy to imagine him being very effective. (For all I know I could have worked under one of these before, and not even hated it.)
I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging.
On a more serious note, I think a key benefit for computer science as an academic discipline is that much work is published in conference articles, rather than journals as in most other fields. This means that computer scientists must be able to communicate complicated ideas on 8 pages, rather than 30-40. It really forces the communication to be terse and efficient. I've done course assignments together with people who only publish in journals and it's amazing how these people can blabber on for ages. We had a maximum page length of 20 pages, which left about 3 pages per author. I was very puzzled when some people wrote 6 pages of stuff which I could have easily expressed in 1.5 pages without any loss of clarity, but I'm blaming the culture of their fields, where many words are better than few, and no hard limits are imposed.
I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject?
Yes: journalists do this routinely.
My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. We routinely write on subjects that we initially know nothing about; we described some of that process in a post about writing Department of Energy grants: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/ .
Granted, this is not "academic text," exactly, and neither is journalism. But neither is what the guy cited is doing; he's really just regurgitating stuff that sounds okay. This works surprisingly well surprisingly far into the educational system.
I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging.
You could, if you wanted to. The "want" is the key part here, and the skill is not as easy as it sounds: it took me many years to be able to write proposals efficiently and synthesize unknown information efficiently.
"Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph."
I almost find this more depressing than the rampant cheating in which this author engages.
> I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject?
If it's anything like the reports I wrote for my own humanities classes, you can skim a bunch of relevant materials and churn something out in a rather short time. That said, you're much better off if you can wrangle things around to write about something you already know.
I seem to recall that for one class, I managed to get out of some weekly writing assignment by turning it into one huge paper about a topic I had already read about. I then wrote it for about 10 hours straight (naturally, the last 12 hours before the assignment was due...) and had an ~80 page paper freshly printed out and in my hand just in time for class.
My teacher loved it and asked to be able to use it as a class reading assignment in the future. It was a first draft, hastily written brain dump of everything I had ever known about the subject. But there was no need to pad out my writing to fill pages and I think that's why my teacher liked it.
It's far easier to write four to five pages of bullshit than to sit there, come up with creative thoughts, then think about how you would say it, back it up with citations, and then condense it for 8 page papers.
Four to five pages of crap is pretty easy. Like the author said, all you need is a toolbox from the "style guide" of bullshit.
I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject
I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.
Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even better-paid assignments (supply vs. demand, after all) to interview with the Chronicle.
Why is there such a large focus on writing long essays in US education?
When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing them was always done in school, as an exam, i.e. sit down for three hours and write. And the grading of our essays were never on length, it was always on grammar, spelling, style, form and coherency.
University was largely the same. Granted, being a CS major you're expected to write a lot more code than essays. I took a few courses that had essays as part of the requirements such as technical writing and history of technology, but those were outliers, and not the norm. I mean, my Master's thesis was "only" 45 pages, and again, the professor was a lot more interested in it being coherent, correct, and actually saying something, rather than being long.
So what's the point of long essays in every subject? To me, it seems like that will just make students write a lot of voluminous bullshit without ensuring that they actually learn what they write about?
I was a double major in Communications and American Studies in my first go-around at an undergrad degree. It's not so much the fact that essays are necessarily the problem, but the expectation of length as the ultimate point of the exercise--from professors and students--that causes confusion.
As a writer, I hate filling prose with word soup just to fill space, but early in college I often ended up writing in 15 words what could be said in 5. By my junior year, I stopped caring about meeting the length requirements and focused on solid research and arguments in my papers.
Most profs didn't seem to dock me for it when I showed competence in the subject matter. Those that did were reasonable after speaking with them about it.
But, that's the difference between me and the people that hire ghostwriters. I made it clear to my teachers I was there to learn and grow, regardless of many of the arbitrary milestones and requirements. I was there for the journey. People who enter university simply to pass through a series of checkpoints on their way to an end goal focus entirely on the end goal of getting a degree (and presumably shortly thereafter, a job) rather than getting an education.
To a very limited extent, schools have tried to protect themselves from such cheating by requiring students (or prospective students) to compose writing samples under controlled conditions.
The Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for instance, requires students to write an essay. The essay is not scored; rather, it is forwarded to the schools to which the student has applied. The schools then compare the LSAT essay to the personal statement submitted with the student's application. A gross disparity between the quality of writing seen on the LSAT essay and that on the personal statement presumably raises suspicions that the personal statement was ghostwritten.
Perhaps such measures should be implemented more widely.
While this is an interesting way of comparing, I'd be slightly worried if I were applying to law school. Given that you have a limited amount of time to write your LSAT essay, and an essentially unlimited amount of time to write and polish your personal statement (plus have professors, friends and family look over it), I could see there being a large but legitimate gap between the two.
This is why I like HN so much---the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process. It's extremely focused on whatcanyoudo?
An hour spent hacking to make something useful or cool is never a wasted hour. But wouldn't it suck to realize that you spent years in grad school without even learning anything?
In any case, this sort of news---the rise of cheating---is both good news and bad news for founders. The good is that your competitors are probably hiring these people. Especially so for folks like AirBnB who are competing with hotel chains, etc.
The bad, of course, is that when hiring, you might run into people like this. But if your hiring process>your competitor's process, then this is very much a net gain for you.
...the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process.
I think the entire culture is aimed at a much broader motivation than that. It is aimed at a culture of intense intellectual curiosity, which makes the community self-selecting in meritocratic way.
This carries into startups as well, because they are as much about what you can learn as what you can do. Presumably, most startups are exploring at least some uncharted territory. How curious you are about that territory will suggest how much you can learn from it, and what you can learn from it will certainly have an effect on how well you execute.
As a result, startups end up as one of the primary focusses of the culture, but I think this as much a byproduct as it is an end to itself.
Parents, government, and everybody in between seem focused on pushing as many young people into university education as possible. But it seems to me that we have pushed them too hard if they are cheating on this scale. Lots of them just don’t belong there.
I imagine a fantasy future world in which ageing professors tell stories of the dark ages of their early careers; a time in which most of their students were not really interested in the subject of their degrees. A brave new world in which young people who might like to get a job, start a business, write a book, or just study independently of any official course, can go ahead and do so without putting themselves through three years of painful essay faking and pretense because “that’s what everyone else does”.
"It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal."
It's quite funny that such utterly dishonest people are so willing to accept someone else's word at face value. Also, that they place such stock in the institutional accreditations that they are proving to be worthless through their actions.
It's a shame the author didn't discuss where he worked, and how this industry is connected to other aspects of for-profit online education.
I 'edited' college admissions essays for a couple of years, back when I was a hungry grad student. The company I worked for, CyberEdit, was acquired by Peterson's, a subsidiary of the Thompson Corporation. When Thompson started divesting its education-based businesses, Peterson's (and CyberEdit) were acquired by Nelnet, which holds and services a large portion of federally subsidized student loans.
CyberEdit helps you get into a school you couldn't otherwise attend and Nelnet helps you pay for a school you couldn't otherwise afford - with all parties financially underwritten by your tax dollars. Great business.
Hmm, I suppose one way to go would be to require students to use a version-controlled word processor for their writing, and submit the version history. It could still be faked, but the difficulty of creating a good fake would make the economics less favorable.
If it's badly faked, then the version history would provide evidence that's more likely to hold up than a teacher's suspicion about the student's writing.
Make them write a smaller version in a test environment from only say a couple of pages of notes they can bring from their long paper. Style changes would quickly become apparent.
I live in a country where cheating is rampant (although it has gotten a little better in recent years). Most of the best students (in terms of grades) at my university were outright cheaters, or employed other indirect means of academic dishonesty. Most blamed the teachers for making the courses "unpassable".
You know what, no course is "unpassable". Its just something people make up to justify their incompetence and laziness. Yes, some educators are pretty bad, while others just don't care enough to stop this. But no matter what the teachers and authorities try, you cannot stop a reasonably adept cheater from using some way of gaming the system. People who are not interested in learning will cheat no matter what.
Trying to lay the blame on the education system and the students is like a drug dealer saying he is not to blame but the addicts are. By providing this service, people like him are making the cheating option easier for students.
I just seem to get the vibe that he is just frustrated that his novel got rejected by his university. This, compounded by financial (and perhaps academic and social?) problems, possibly results in him being bitter about university and the education system as a whole. He has every right to have whatever opinions he has. But IMHO he is no rebel working to dismantle a corrupt system. He's just a bitter writer exploiting and fueling the immorality of some people to make a buck.
(Disclaimer: I am not an educator (I work as a software engineer) and I don't even have any post-graduate degree. I just don't like people who go about buying and cheating their way through life while the rest of do it the hard way.)
Student cheating is a systemic part of the culture and there is nothing that can be done about it.
I mark logic papers. There might be a question where you have to provide a model that makes the logical formula come out as true or false - the sort of question which has an infinity of possible answers.
They never follow the particular method I suggest for working through these which would lead them to the simplest answer in each case (usually a model with only one object in the domain). Yet, somehow, one paper after another, they all come up with the exact same model, with the same number of objects in the domain, the same extensions... everything.
So they all just copy from one another. One student complained to me this year that a large group of them were copying answers from one another right in front of the office where they have to submit papers. Largely the university can't do much more than turn a blind eye - for without absolutely concrete evidence the students can (and often do) sue, and win.
There is probably a lot of redundancy. It's like learning a new technology. Your first project will take a long time, then, once you've solved the meta-problem, it gets incrementally faster each iteration until it reaches some lower bound. But the knowledge you gain each iteration gets lower too, until it's marginal.
I don't know. Isn't this a subsystem that hides the flaws.
Writing the article exposes some flaws but even then, most professors who read this aren't going to be able to pick out of a line up which of their students have used such services.
It's worse than the actions of individual students being dishonest.
The fact that someone can do this, for so many students, in so little time, along with the fact that the students themselves have not been called out for the obvious mismatch between what they write and the signals they send out in real life with other students shows that things are fucked in a strong way; if a particular school and student is named as being part of this, it's not just that the student is called out for not doing the work that represents the degree, but that it serves as strong evidence that the particular degree or school is worthless, and the school's accreditation should be called into question. Higher education has truly gone down the toilet.
[+] [-] oz|15 years ago|reply
It started innocently enough: I wasn't working, and a friend of a friend who was doing her Master's (in Education, wouldn't you know) needed help typing and formatting a document according to APA Style. I needed the money, so I visited her at the school where she worked. I took the draft she had penned and started reading.
I nearly vomited.
The quality of writing was atrocious. It wasn't just 'bad', or 'needing improvement'. It was shockingly, horrifyingly terrible.
Poor structure. Poor grammar. Not answering the question. excessive circumlocution. Hackneyed phrases every other sentence.
I diplomatically told her that I would 'change some of the words'. As she dictated and I typed, I changed sentence order and modified her word choices. When it was finished, there was a semblance of respectability. A few days later, I heard that the lecturer loved it.
That, dear friend, was the beginning. I completed quite a few assignments for her, but stopped after she started quibbling over the already small fee I charged. (Note to self: Always charge what you're worth.)
Sometime later, a neighbour in my building called me upstairs to help a friend of his. She was typing a paper for her degree to submit that evening, and he, knowing my language skills and typing speed wanted me to help. I went, sat down, and read.
Oh, dear.
I told her that in all honesty, it sucked. I made a few changes, typed up the rest. 'Twas enough for her to get hooked.
Over the next two years, I did several assignments for her. It got to where she would simply email me the research question, and I'd 'learn' the subject (yes, in 2 hours), get references, and like 'Ed Dante' divide the paper into sections, and prepare material. I could do a 10 page paper in one day, which would probably net a 90% grade or better. This was after never having heard of the topic before. She would get wonderful comments from lecturers about her 'wonderful exposition' and 'excellent analysis'. This from a girl who, although not dunce, could never verbally put sentences together half that well. I often wondered about the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of her teachers.
It's a smug feeling, walking around as a college dropout while knowing that you can run intellectual circles around people with graduate degrees. I should note, though, that these were all humanities subjects: Use 10 words where 1 would suffice and make up some bullshit, and you're good to go. It doesn't have to make sense because Most teachers aren't going to read it anyway!
For those of us here on HN, who are in all probability above the average, it might be difficult to understand how stupid most people are; but take it from me: they are. Very.
I'm done with it now, though. I hated researching stuff that bored me, although I sometimes learned a lot. The most important lesson?
The world is bullshit.
http://www.designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=3...
[+] [-] azanar|15 years ago|reply
And you certainly did your part in helping the world that direction.
You were willing to undersell yourself in allowing people to pass off your work and knowledge and skills as your own, and then you wonder why everyone around you seems to be so amazingly stupid. They're stupid because you provided them absolutely no incentive not to be. You made ignorance cheap, and as a result, it is precisely what you got.
There must've been some incentive for you, I presume. It probably wasn't the money, because you already said your fee was small. It wasn't the desire to wise these people up, because there was nothing for them to do once you were done. Why did you do this? I certainly hope it wasn't just for the sake of walking around smug amongst the uneducated masses, because then you are damning a monster you helped create.
[+] [-] JesseAldridge|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
I suspect it's an issue with the quality of work they are used to getting from their students, or perhaps simply the nature of the subject. I was personally commended for the work I did in a gen. ed. class on education for papers I knew my high school AP English teacher would have given me a C+ on at best. They either just get crap most days, or the subjects are vulnerable to BS'ing, that's the only way it makes sense.
[+] [-] grellas|15 years ago|reply
I vividly remember the slackers of my generation (college/law school in the 1970s). They took the basket-weaving classes on the cynical assumption that it was a short-cut to getting an "easy A." They padded their papers with junk - that is, whenever they couldn't avoid having to do a paper. They feared the demanding teachers and ran from them. They continually looked for outline-level materials (Cliff notes, Gilberts law summaries) by which they could try to cram for a test without really having to master any of the materials. In short, they did everything possible to avoid having to think or work at the process of learning and, hence, they graduated, if at all, miles behind the hard-working students in their ability to think or to work as they turned to face real-world challenges.
I have never understood this mind-set. For me, the challenge was always to take on the harder challenges if that meant developing either your substantive knowledge or your skills in writing, analyzing, communicating, or whatever. Wasn't that the point of being there, after all?
The one precious commodity you have as a student that you will likely never have again is the privilege of being able to devote large blocks of uninterrupted time to diving into any given area and mastering it. Once you get into the real world, it is very difficult, if not impossible, ever to have that resource available to you again.
Whatever you do, don't squander this resource but, instead, use it to advantage. You will sacrifice in the short term as you watch your friends party away while you slave away, but you will develop depth of knowledge and habits of discipline that will endure for a lifetime while those who choose to cut corners, sadly, will not.
Cheating does have its victims. Those who cheat, however, will one day realize that the primary victim of that cheating is none other than they themselves. Caveat discipulus!
[+] [-] oz|15 years ago|reply
In a word, yes.
You see, education, for most people, is NOT about learning. It's about getting a job.
We HN types value learning for its own sake, and would happily curl up with a copy of SICP or TAOCP and feel content. The average person wants the whole thing to be over as quickly and painlessly as possible. In the words of some of my classmates, concerning cheating:
"Better to cheat than to repeat."
or perhaps more poignantly:
"Don't be a hero and get zero."
We, my dear grellas, are not normal.
[+] [-] azanar|15 years ago|reply
There is a certain degree of faith needed to want to make progress toward some distant and difficult goal. If you don't believe the rewards are going to be there when you complete the journey, there is really no point in even starting down.
The two rewards I can immediately think of with respect to learning are: the ability to approach the problems you find in life with a deeper and more enlightened understanding, and as a result are in a better position to generate a lot of value for humanity; and the feeling of satisfaction from having gained understanding into something that isn't trivial. You have to believe one or both of these things will happen before you start, otherwise you'd being doing something difficult for no reason at all.
The reason why it seems beyond my comprehension, and perhaps the reason why it feels beyond your comprehension as well, is that there are people who don't believe this. They think that there is no sense of enlightenment at the end of learning, or that this sense of enlightenment isn't worth the effort. They think that whatever they end up learning will be of no practical value, and that it is only practical things that hold value to people in general.
They believe, quite honestly, that learning will get them right back to where they are now, except for the practical value of the sheet of paper they receive at the end.
In short, I think people, if they ever had it, have lost the faith. It doesn't matter what you learn, so you should make the process of running in circles on as flat a plot of ground as possible.
The difference, at least for me, is that I haven't yet lost the faith. I see value in learning, both in an intrinsic sense of accomplishment, and a societal effect of being able to make a bigger impact on things people use. The positive feedback loop is there now; unfortunately, it has been with me for so long, I can't actually recall what got it started.
If the positive feedback loop doesn't start though, the lack of it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You end up in social groups where learning is discouraged, and where things that are practical now are much more valued. Once you fall in with the social group that fits your point of view, it takes quite a revelation to reach escape velocity from the same.
So, this comes down to yet another question, which I still don't know the answer to: how do you motivate people to take an example as part of a more fundamental truth, rather than an exception that proves their point of view? I wonder if it involves forcefully weaning them from the teat they've discovered the more intelligent amongst us are willing to provide and for far less of a cost than the value people get out of it.
I really wonder, as I did in another comment on this article, how much of this is really a product of past behaviors of those of us who love to learn. It seems as though we thought positive reinforcement is the answer; maybe we should revisit that.
[+] [-] klbarry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twrensch|15 years ago|reply
I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonesty policy, which would lead to--at least--failure of the course. It didn't happen. The student came up with a lame excuse, I was chided for harassing the student, and it was all swept under the rug. I was tempted to resign in protest, but kept with it for two more years before quietly leaving academics.
I enjoy teaching, I think I'm good at it and my students tended to agree. Unfortunately, I can't make myself teach in the current educational system here in the US.
[+] [-] Female|15 years ago|reply
I only taught for 2 years as a graduate teaching assistant, but we were told in training to never accuse anyone of cheating ever. It opened the university up to being sued, and made everyone's life more complicated.
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring myself to care that much about that, though. To me the important question is whether people who want to learn are able to; not whether people who don't want to learn slip through or don't slip through.
The much bigger failing in my mind isn't that cheaters aren't sufficiently punished, but that motivated students who want to learn things other than exactly what they're assigned are given virtually no assistance, and often actively discouraged (the side-projects-are-bad, keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you're-told mentality).
[+] [-] oz|15 years ago|reply
Robin Hanson from OvercomingBias says it best: School isn't about learning:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
The professor is a good man, and was very upset. It was almost kind of sad, he was angry but it was almost like he could've alternatively started tearing up at any moment. Damn administration didn't do anything about it though, and that very student I caught cheating has since been in several classes with me. Burns me up.
Guess it shouldn't surprise me that the prof. hasn't had any courses for several quarters now. I swear, the good ones don't seem to last. The only one we've got left in the department that cares about the students, I'm not even sure how he manages.
[+] [-] thefool|15 years ago|reply
Fundamentally this problem is derives from the fact that it is difficult for people to learn how to write and structure their ideas. Hell thats basically the whole point of PhD programs, and people spend years finishing them.
With the internet, it becomes really easy to just pay someone else who already knows how to write to do the work for you.
The only real solution to this that I see is to make these services legitimate as a teaching outlet rather than as a cheating outlet. Force people to write a draft. In editing, don't rewrite, just comment and give people feedback as to how they can improve the structure of their document. In general have the people feel that they are getting taught rather than just getting a product.
My hope is that creating a legitimate service will encroach the market people like this target, and will actually force students to learn something through their writing assignments.
[+] [-] jorleif|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurker14|15 years ago|reply
Two of the reviews of the #1 "Editor/Tutor" http://www.gurufi.com/editor/brian, don't seems to reflect students who learned anything about writing their own coherent sentences:
* "He knows what I want to say more than I do. Thank you for your clear and professional writing. "
* "It was the second to have you edit my article, and it was also the second to feel so surprised when I read it! Thank you!"
The #2 "editor" has a similarly uninspiring review:
*"Simply, Josh is a perfect. I got revision from him until I satisfied. I'm so happy with his revision. Additionally, his comments are very constructive to me. I learned about writing SoP from him. Thanks a lot Josh. "
About three-quarters of the reviews seem generically unoffensive, but many of them are cause for concern.
[+] [-] rick_2047|15 years ago|reply
I wouldn't like my high school paper to be edited by a grad student at an Ivey League college
[+] [-] CoreDumpling|15 years ago|reply
What's scary is how far the lazy rich kid will be able to go with this, with a promising career in management. I wouldn't want to work for someone like this, but it is easy to imagine him being very effective. (For all I know I could have worked under one of these before, and not even hated it.)
[+] [-] jorleif|15 years ago|reply
I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging.
On a more serious note, I think a key benefit for computer science as an academic discipline is that much work is published in conference articles, rather than journals as in most other fields. This means that computer scientists must be able to communicate complicated ideas on 8 pages, rather than 30-40. It really forces the communication to be terse and efficient. I've done course assignments together with people who only publish in journals and it's amazing how these people can blabber on for ages. We had a maximum page length of 20 pages, which left about 3 pages per author. I was very puzzled when some people wrote 6 pages of stuff which I could have easily expressed in 1.5 pages without any loss of clarity, but I'm blaming the culture of their fields, where many words are better than few, and no hard limits are imposed.
[+] [-] jseliger|15 years ago|reply
Yes: journalists do this routinely.
My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. We routinely write on subjects that we initially know nothing about; we described some of that process in a post about writing Department of Energy grants: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/ .
Granted, this is not "academic text," exactly, and neither is journalism. But neither is what the guy cited is doing; he's really just regurgitating stuff that sounds okay. This works surprisingly well surprisingly far into the educational system.
I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging.
You could, if you wanted to. The "want" is the key part here, and the skill is not as easy as it sounds: it took me many years to be able to write proposals efficiently and synthesize unknown information efficiently.
[+] [-] spc476|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbokun|15 years ago|reply
I almost find this more depressing than the rampant cheating in which this author engages.
[+] [-] Natsu|15 years ago|reply
If it's anything like the reports I wrote for my own humanities classes, you can skim a bunch of relevant materials and churn something out in a rather short time. That said, you're much better off if you can wrangle things around to write about something you already know.
I seem to recall that for one class, I managed to get out of some weekly writing assignment by turning it into one huge paper about a topic I had already read about. I then wrote it for about 10 hours straight (naturally, the last 12 hours before the assignment was due...) and had an ~80 page paper freshly printed out and in my hand just in time for class.
My teacher loved it and asked to be able to use it as a class reading assignment in the future. It was a first draft, hastily written brain dump of everything I had ever known about the subject. But there was no need to pad out my writing to fill pages and I think that's why my teacher liked it.
[+] [-] Lewisham|15 years ago|reply
Four to five pages of crap is pretty easy. Like the author said, all you need is a toolbox from the "style guide" of bullshit.
[+] [-] rick_2047|15 years ago|reply
I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.
[+] [-] Eliezer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] groaner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebooktocome|15 years ago|reply
...
That actually kind of sounds like fun.
[+] [-] henrikschroder|15 years ago|reply
When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing them was always done in school, as an exam, i.e. sit down for three hours and write. And the grading of our essays were never on length, it was always on grammar, spelling, style, form and coherency.
University was largely the same. Granted, being a CS major you're expected to write a lot more code than essays. I took a few courses that had essays as part of the requirements such as technical writing and history of technology, but those were outliers, and not the norm. I mean, my Master's thesis was "only" 45 pages, and again, the professor was a lot more interested in it being coherent, correct, and actually saying something, rather than being long.
So what's the point of long essays in every subject? To me, it seems like that will just make students write a lot of voluminous bullshit without ensuring that they actually learn what they write about?
[+] [-] zecho|15 years ago|reply
As a writer, I hate filling prose with word soup just to fill space, but early in college I often ended up writing in 15 words what could be said in 5. By my junior year, I stopped caring about meeting the length requirements and focused on solid research and arguments in my papers.
Most profs didn't seem to dock me for it when I showed competence in the subject matter. Those that did were reasonable after speaking with them about it.
But, that's the difference between me and the people that hire ghostwriters. I made it clear to my teachers I was there to learn and grow, regardless of many of the arbitrary milestones and requirements. I was there for the journey. People who enter university simply to pass through a series of checkpoints on their way to an end goal focus entirely on the end goal of getting a degree (and presumably shortly thereafter, a job) rather than getting an education.
[+] [-] yinmoneyhuang|15 years ago|reply
The Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for instance, requires students to write an essay. The essay is not scored; rather, it is forwarded to the schools to which the student has applied. The schools then compare the LSAT essay to the personal statement submitted with the student's application. A gross disparity between the quality of writing seen on the LSAT essay and that on the personal statement presumably raises suspicions that the personal statement was ghostwritten.
Perhaps such measures should be implemented more widely.
[+] [-] mdwrigh2|15 years ago|reply
Perhaps it's not as great as I think though.
[+] [-] dcbell|15 years ago|reply
An hour spent hacking to make something useful or cool is never a wasted hour. But wouldn't it suck to realize that you spent years in grad school without even learning anything?
In any case, this sort of news---the rise of cheating---is both good news and bad news for founders. The good is that your competitors are probably hiring these people. Especially so for folks like AirBnB who are competing with hotel chains, etc.
The bad, of course, is that when hiring, you might run into people like this. But if your hiring process>your competitor's process, then this is very much a net gain for you.
[+] [-] azanar|15 years ago|reply
I think the entire culture is aimed at a much broader motivation than that. It is aimed at a culture of intense intellectual curiosity, which makes the community self-selecting in meritocratic way.
This carries into startups as well, because they are as much about what you can learn as what you can do. Presumably, most startups are exploring at least some uncharted territory. How curious you are about that territory will suggest how much you can learn from it, and what you can learn from it will certainly have an effect on how well you execute.
As a result, startups end up as one of the primary focusses of the culture, but I think this as much a byproduct as it is an end to itself.
[+] [-] djm|15 years ago|reply
Parents, government, and everybody in between seem focused on pushing as many young people into university education as possible. But it seems to me that we have pushed them too hard if they are cheating on this scale. Lots of them just don’t belong there.
I imagine a fantasy future world in which ageing professors tell stories of the dark ages of their early careers; a time in which most of their students were not really interested in the subject of their degrees. A brave new world in which young people who might like to get a job, start a business, write a book, or just study independently of any official course, can go ahead and do so without putting themselves through three years of painful essay faking and pretense because “that’s what everyone else does”.
[+] [-] jimbokun|15 years ago|reply
It's quite funny that such utterly dishonest people are so willing to accept someone else's word at face value. Also, that they place such stock in the institutional accreditations that they are proving to be worthless through their actions.
[+] [-] gyardley|15 years ago|reply
I 'edited' college admissions essays for a couple of years, back when I was a hungry grad student. The company I worked for, CyberEdit, was acquired by Peterson's, a subsidiary of the Thompson Corporation. When Thompson started divesting its education-based businesses, Peterson's (and CyberEdit) were acquired by Nelnet, which holds and services a large portion of federally subsidized student loans.
CyberEdit helps you get into a school you couldn't otherwise attend and Nelnet helps you pay for a school you couldn't otherwise afford - with all parties financially underwritten by your tax dollars. Great business.
[+] [-] hko|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|15 years ago|reply
If it's badly faked, then the version history would provide evidence that's more likely to hold up than a teacher's suspicion about the student's writing.
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forensic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mak120|15 years ago|reply
You know what, no course is "unpassable". Its just something people make up to justify their incompetence and laziness. Yes, some educators are pretty bad, while others just don't care enough to stop this. But no matter what the teachers and authorities try, you cannot stop a reasonably adept cheater from using some way of gaming the system. People who are not interested in learning will cheat no matter what.
Trying to lay the blame on the education system and the students is like a drug dealer saying he is not to blame but the addicts are. By providing this service, people like him are making the cheating option easier for students.
I just seem to get the vibe that he is just frustrated that his novel got rejected by his university. This, compounded by financial (and perhaps academic and social?) problems, possibly results in him being bitter about university and the education system as a whole. He has every right to have whatever opinions he has. But IMHO he is no rebel working to dismantle a corrupt system. He's just a bitter writer exploiting and fueling the immorality of some people to make a buck.
(Disclaimer: I am not an educator (I work as a software engineer) and I don't even have any post-graduate degree. I just don't like people who go about buying and cheating their way through life while the rest of do it the hard way.)
[+] [-] grovulent|15 years ago|reply
I mark logic papers. There might be a question where you have to provide a model that makes the logical formula come out as true or false - the sort of question which has an infinity of possible answers.
They never follow the particular method I suggest for working through these which would lead them to the simplest answer in each case (usually a model with only one object in the domain). Yet, somehow, one paper after another, they all come up with the exact same model, with the same number of objects in the domain, the same extensions... everything.
So they all just copy from one another. One student complained to me this year that a large group of them were copying answers from one another right in front of the office where they have to submit papers. Largely the university can't do much more than turn a blind eye - for without absolutely concrete evidence the students can (and often do) sue, and win.
[+] [-] BoppreH|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obiterdictum|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] light3|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Detrus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielN|15 years ago|reply
Writing the article exposes some flaws but even then, most professors who read this aren't going to be able to pick out of a line up which of their students have used such services.
[+] [-] partition|15 years ago|reply
The fact that someone can do this, for so many students, in so little time, along with the fact that the students themselves have not been called out for the obvious mismatch between what they write and the signals they send out in real life with other students shows that things are fucked in a strong way; if a particular school and student is named as being part of this, it's not just that the student is called out for not doing the work that represents the degree, but that it serves as strong evidence that the particular degree or school is worthless, and the school's accreditation should be called into question. Higher education has truly gone down the toilet.