YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating
bbc.com
bbc.com
You want people to learn when the stakes are low. This is better for them, and it's better for all of us. School should gradually go from low stakes to higher stakes, not be a low-stakes zone the whole time that then tosses people into the real world. Otherwise you're presented with terrible choices like expelling a 20 year old for a habit they learned when they were 8 and never got called on, vs letting them get away with continuing to cheat.
Making it easy to cheat and lie when the stakes are low helps create situations like "we can't trust anyone who says they know how to program so we have to waste a lot of interview time on tedious crap."
The first solution that occurs to me seems to be smaller class sizes and differently structured assignments with more of a "tell me about why you wrote this" type interactive stuff. The same way you'd do when looking at someone's github, to see how deep their understanding of the code there goes.
Cheating amongst foreign students, particularly those from India and China, occurs at elevated frequencies [1]. But there is money to be made. Universities earn fat tuitions. And parades of scumbags take exams, write papers and falsify figures for a fee. The result is limited enforcement in the specific, i.e. against offenders and facilitators, in favor of a presumption of guilt in the general, i.e. against all foreign students from China and India.
I personally know honest individuals who had to overcome a presumption of cheating at school, at interviews and in the workplace. And it isn't just the cheaters who are complicit.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...
This is assuming that the school actually reached an incriminating verdict, ignoring possible incompetence and/or apathy towards catching and "convicting" cheaters.
1. Girls asking their would-be boyfriends to complete their essays and attend modules.
2. Purchasing completed essays from Taobao.
3. Copy pasting others work from Baidu with only name alterations.
4. Paying exam setters for exam questions.
Of course this is anecdotal but she has often tried to explain the culture of "Getting. good result is more important than how you got it". Cheating and succeeding shows you're resourceful. Getting caught is the only shame. The pressure and competition drives people to cheat because if you don't, you're left behind by everyone else who is.
Possibly amusing anecdote: I know a smart* technical colleague who wrote at least 2 PhD dissertations for former romantic partners. As in "best dissertation award" + famous people on committee + etc , etc. The former romantic partners went on to have distinguished careers in management.
* Depending on your point of view.
This is very hard to believe. From my experience this just couldn't work without near full time commitment by the ghost writer. The cheater would also have to be very familiar with the dissertation--to the point where they could have just written it themselves.
Pulling this off twice (or more since you said at least twice) is basically beyond belief (unless we're talking about a very disreputable university).
A PhD dissertation isn't something you can just turn in and you're done. And it's generally the result of years of work.
Also, you can't cheat on a defense. If you can, then your Ph.D is worthless and the institution you got it from is near worthless.
Reread learc83's comment and it's really true. You can't just turn in your thesis. Moreover, you have to defend it, and your committee will tear into it even on the minutiae (happened during my defense) so it doesn't matter how well you know it if it isn't your work because if it isn't your work, you won't be able to defend it. The only conclusion I can see is they are crap profs/schools but that doesn't square with the "famous people on committee" bit.
I knew a PhD who in a postdoc would routinely plagerize work (lifted verbatim from other papers, passed off as own work). I would be shocked if they didn’t do this to some degree in their thesis too.
This was from a relatively good university in the UK.
Also it takes a good bit longer to get a PhD in the US compared to the UK. In the US most STEM PhDs take around 5 years to finish--that's a long time to fake it without anyone noticing.
External examiner who is in a related, but not same field for example. Or they’re just a buddies with the advisor and only give softball questions etc.
The defense in the UK is not seen as a big deal, I don’t know anyone who has failed.
Also to even get to that point were the advisor thinks you're ready to defend would require constant back and forth your advisor. Then committee is going to grill you. And finally the vast majority of dissertation defenses end with recommended changes. It really would require full time devotion on the part of the ghostwriter, and excellent acting on the part of the candidate. Not to mention familiarity with the thesis to the point that they could have just written it themselves.
I can see someone helping out a lot with writing it, but there is no way someone could just do your dissertation for you at a reputable US school in a STEM field outside of some very rare fluke. A person doing this 2 or more times with different SOs--someone is lying.
Many people in the US have a low opinion of UK and Continental PhD programs. Perhaps this is part of the reason?
I guess I’m skeptical that any qualification is 100% effective at evaluating/training (but that possibly says more about my own biases).
It’s really hard to even have your work accepted by the review board if the empirical evidence and the methods aren’t solid.
A PHD is not a candidate or a bachelor, it’s where your work is reviewed by a board of experts in your field. Often some members of the board won’t necessarily want you to pass either, because it’s very likely they disagree with your thesis.
I mean, it’s a cute anecdote but there is virtually no chance it actually happened.
I'm not sure if any data is available/accessible on the topic, but I'd be willing to wage that the young Chinese person who is the first of their family to attend university cares much more about understanding the material so they can then get a high paying job than those who can afford to buy essays from Taobao.
The BBC article to which this thread is attached talks of a company advertising "essay[s]...starting at just $18.00 per page" [1]. Furthermore, the documented frequencies of foreign students cheating is too large to explain with solely income discrepancy.
Where did you get this idea? Foreign students are overwhelmingly paying the foreign student tuition (much higher than domestic tuition) without receiving any financial aid.
I totally agree with this. However, I'm not sure that students in middle/high school realize that the stakes are, in fact, low. The teachers and programs emphasize exactly the opposite.
"Oh this is going on your permanent record", whatever that is. "If you screw this up there's no way you'll be ready for university-level classes." On and on, and what a load of bull it was.
On the other hand, in countries with huge populations like China and India, it seems that cheating is rampant because the stakes are so high? Can't recall what happens in India, but in China, the university you're allowed to choose is limited based on your final gaokao (high school examination) score. That in turn also determines what you're allowed to study, and that in turn determines what kind of jobs you can get when you graduate.
Pressure exists because it all comes down to a single score. But on the other hand, because of the scale of the population, I imagine it becomes an issue of efficiency. If it didn't come down to a single score, can't imagine the monstrosity that would be the admissions process for all the top universities. For example, I hear about Canadian universities that now say they don't prioritize GPA; they'll consider extra-curricular activities and so on too. Good luck with that if your admission applications explode a hundredfold.
So like someone else commented in this thread, the many become suspected instead. One department at my alma mater decided that GRE scores were not reflective of quality of students coming from China for masters degrees. So they threw GRE out the window and decided to only look at students that came from top ten universities in China when it came to Chinese student applications.
As with most things, the issue is multi-faceted and complicated.
You seem to be claiming that at some point the stakes become "truly" high, and thus we ought to artificially punish plagiarism so that people learn that there are consequences.
Or have I missed your point?
The high-ness of the stakes at the college level seems to depend on if you have scholarships or similar - I've seen those be pulled, but haven't seen people I've known personally be actually expelled. So if you're fully dependent on them, it's bad, otherwise, it's no big deal. After college it depends on the type of job - some bigco or government orgs seem perfectly happy to carry a bunch of dead weight around.
Pre-college is mostly a super-low-stakes area for kids these days, but complicated by something 'tcfunk points out in a sibling comment, where authority figures lie about that - claiming everything is dire - but the kids also know their teachers/administrators are full of shit. My friends and I were very good at finding out which rules we could break with impunity - having too many rules, if anything, watered down the seriousness of the important ones.
So where you see problems are e.g. kids who could get away with anything suddenly running afoul of drug laws, or losing their scholarship over rules that didn't have teeth in high school, etc. Of course, the better off you are, the more easily you can weather that stuff - but to me, the root is that we're very opaque with our kids about what you'll get into real trouble over or not, and it changes in a very lumpy manner.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8g33nv/tifu_by_plagia...
They were allegedly expelled for plagiarising a 500 word essay.
> She sent me to the dean with the recommendation that I be expelled. Now the dean told me I can't graduate. I spent 4 years working on an engineering degree. I have over $100,000 in loans, and I can't be hired without my degree. My life literally vanished in the matter of 20 minutes.
The irony is they could have literally scrawled anything on the paper and flunked, but passed the year.
Whether or not this story is true, universities certainly have grounds to expel you immediately if you're caught cheating. And if you've spent $100k on a degree that you need because of professional accreditation... those are quite high stakes.
After all, surely the main upside of acing university is to get into a high-stakes position.
...or believe they are.
...or are made to believe they are.
...or are given so much pointless BS to do that even though they're not, they are.
What you are really saying is money. You need more money to do your solution.
A) Cheating happens more then it doesn't. In a Philosophy Class which had a dozen seniors all cheated in Spring Semester. Professor flunked them all by giving them an F and told them they were lucky they weren't expelled. President Graduated the students and fired the professor. Then on appeal the President was fired and the Professor rehired with a raise.
B) Shocked that YouTube or any stock traded company would allow these videos to stay up. Morally this is wrong since cheating hurts everyone in education.
EDIT:
C) No one was ever expelled for cheating, ever at my school.
> is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US
B) Because student at top universities (For the most part) have higher GPA in high school and a higher SAT scores already. Unless your morals require a strict bell curve of 10% F, 10% A, 40% C and 40% B?
And if you don't - you could make a solid case that the extreme ends of those skills may not be that useful in general outside of academia - than do Harvard et al need nearly as much money as we throw at them today?
I'd rather give students PRoPS, which is to say "percentile ranking of passing students". But that would require some means to normalize different professors teaching from different curricula, with variations in the capabilities of their students across different classes.
Automatically failing x% of your students every semester is as cruel and pointless as stack ranking. Clearly, if a student can demonstrate a minimum objective level of understanding, independent of the performance of their peers, they should not fail the course. Equally clearly, if a section is full of geniuses with perfect understanding, they should be graded more highly than a section full of normals that can barely get it after intensive study.
If you pile up enough testing data, year after year, it would be theoretically possible to construct a mathematical model to compare with some confidence the student achievement across disparate classes, professors, and institutions, as well as to say definitively who the good and bad professors are, and whether they write difficult or easy exams.
If you get a 100% on Dr. Aardvark's CHEM220 final at Example U., that may put you at PRoPS of 80 for "organic chemistry, milestone one", whereas if you get a 60% score on Dr. Zymurgy's CHEM235 final at Hypothetical Institute, that may actually have a PRoPS of 95 for "organic chemistry, milestone one". Dr. Z's exam was simply written to be impossible, and scored very harshly, while Dr. A's exam was built to be more forgiving, and maybe left out some elements that the Example U. chem faculty prefers to save for later courses.
This will, of course, never happen. Firstly, you would have to get academics to agree on the essential elements of a given subject at a particular checkpoint in a course of study. Secondly, institutions that rely on selective admissions and political connections for prestige would never participate, if there were even a shred of possibility that the objective evidence would show that they do not actually produce the quality of graduates that they would like to claim. Imagine if Ivy Limestone Woodpanels Law cranked out PRoPS for complete J.D. from 30 to 85, and Bigcity Urban Campus Law ranged from 50 to 99. The former is selective and does a lot of networking, but then passes anyone who still knows enough to not embarrass the school in a connected job, whereas the latter takes everyone, presents a huge challenge, and quickly flunks those who can't master the coursework and get hired through sheer merit. Those numbers would be a huge blow to the former's reputation.
Grade inflation is thus a natural by-product of institutions trying to be a "top tier school". It goes right along with publishing in the highest impact journals and wheedling more money out of your alumni. Schools that benefit from institutional prestige want to keep their reputations polished and shiny.
Further, grade inflation at top-tier US schools has nothing to do with the stats on incoming students. I don't even understand why you think that would be relevant.
grade inflation is real, but at least it effects everyone equally. cheating allows dishonest students to get ahead by paying $$$. moreover, you can adjust for grade inflation, but you can't adjust for cheating.
I don't think the issue is your disservice to higher education in general or grade systems as a whole, but to your customers, who never receive the education they were meant to, and that they paid for.
Further, you're just completely discounting the agency of my customers here. They knew what they were doing, and how it devalued their education experience.
Failure is arguably an important part of the process of learning.
There's a thing that happens with loopholes. There's the guy that finds the loophole and tests it out for himself. Then there's the small group that follow him in if it suits their needs, and then word spreads and a good proportion of people also follow. If the loophole threatens the existing system in any way, then the upholders of that system will attempt to barricade the loophole. A few upholders might change the system itself, but that is rare.
The one guy who first used the loophole will always be on the lookout for new loopholes, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can say it's wrong, you can say it's not fair, but it's a fact of life. And by using that loophole that one guy can create change all around him. He can change it himself, or he can open the door for other people to see the change that needs to happen. Maybe it's good to patch the loophole, maybe it's good to change the system in which the loophole was found-- either way, it comes down a great deal to our explorer friend. He learns from failure too, but his goals are different and that's fine.
I do however agree ethics are system dependent.
The effects of unethical behavior on the system are objective however.
Stealing is usually harmful to any group, which is why we haven't seen any real change in how we look at stealing. Cheating, however, is undergoing change. What is a hacker if he is not a cheater? We have jobs for hackers now-- it's called penetration testing. An increasing number of people see many of our dominant systems as being flawed-- thus, an increasing number of people may begin to cheat the systems to get where they need to go. This is important because if those systems want to exist, they either need to change or they need to be more secure. You will see moral opinions change along with this entropic state until an equilibrium is reached which will continue for some period of time until another relevant variable changes.
> Morality is only useful when the majority agree with it...
This sounds a lot like a moral relativist stance. I hear it’s not a very popular stance among ethicists, so I don’t have any recommendations off the top of my head for philosophers to study. Basically moral relativism just means that morality is defined by the standards of a culture.
> Morality is only useful when ... the outcome of that belief helps the group in context.
This sounds similar to what a utilitarian would believe. They focus more on the result of an action and the sum total happiness it creates and they judge higher sum total happiness to be of higher morality. John Stuart Mill is probably the biggest proponent of utilitarianism.
I write a paper for someone else to turn in as their own? In a situation where I know more or less nothing about the client? The outcomes are both unknowable and in most cases impossible to tie to my act directly.
You breached academic code and, if money was exchanged, potentially the law. Given you wrote the paper and received the money, the act is quite simple to tie to you.
>potentially the law
Yeah, show me the law that tells me it's illegal to write something for someone else. Thanks.
Writing papers for someone else is not illegal. (The student presenting the paper as their own violates your copyright, and potentially other laws.) But if you market and sell your papers for the purpose of cheating, particularly with respect to students pursuing degrees they intend to use for licensing/certification (e.g. law or civil engineering), you're aiding and abetting fraud.
Did you get paid for them? If yes, they had a market value. That's the most basic definition of a market--a buyer and seller negotiating and agreeing upon a price for a good or a service. "Market" doesn't mean commodity. Hopefully you weren't writing anyone's economics papers...
The ship is sinking already, so it's OK if I set fire to it.
The 'ship' that is the US higher education system doesn't seem to hold much value, imo. Set it ablaze.
"Your honor, you should not judge me for stealing. For I could have also murdered."
Not the paper writers and some of the students who can benefit from it.
Have you even done a shitty job? It's soul-destroying. In high school I answered an ad in the paper and ended up doing "charity fundraising" by telephone. It turned out that the charity only got ~15% of the money raised. The people working there were all sleazeballs. I'm sure had I stayed there I would have ended up a sleazeball as well.
- flexible time
- potential to earn lot of money
- sheer enjoyment of writing
- improve one writing skills
As more companies and individuals smell the money to be made off tempting students to use this form of "contract cheating", governments are considering legislative responses which could result in the creation of criminal penalties for essay mills. ( https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/21/plan-to-cr... )
Beyond any possible governmental responses, the essay mills create a large pool of risk just by collecting user data. What happens if criminals target the essay mills, looking for lists of people who may then be blackmailed? What if the essay mills themselves decide to cash in on the extortion potential? Cheating and cheating support are both dirty enough activities that people would probably not want that to be exposed. Google for "essay mills blackmail".
The more advanced a person becomes in their career, the higher their extortion value. How many future politicians, leaders, or other influential people are creating extortion/security risks for themselves? As an employer, how many frauds are in your company and what risk do they bring with them? What ethics do they bring with them or fail to bring with them? How many product failures, delays, firings, lawsuits, sexual harassment cases, violations of company policy and general anti-social behaviors are caused by the group of people who enjoy cheating for personal gain? Will the essay mill companies realize they have large lists of corrupt and corruptible people? Will other companies want to buy these lists so they can know more about who to hire or not hire and for what positions? Will credit companies start using this to adjust people's credit scores?
For all of the people with no regrets for using or participating in the contract cheating of essay ghostwriting and sales - would this turn into regret if the activity was exposed? For that matter, do government intelligence agencies already know who did what or at least have that data laying around?
The more I think about this, the more it seems like such a stupid risk. You can stay stupid by preventing your own learning, corrupt yourself, participate in the corruption of others, reduce literacy, reduce the value of institutional degrees, reduce trust in educational institutions, create an electronic trail of your cheating, and all for the low price of lifetime risk of exposure, extortion, and lower literacy.
What could go wrong?
Back in the pre-internet days, paid cheating support was hard to arrange. How would you find the person? How would you evaluate them, hire them, and get the goods in time for an assignment due Thursday? The things I knew of in school were all local, where the relevant people were under the same or related authorities. (E.g., students at the same school, or students at nearby schools.)
Now it's obviously much easier. Which makes a societal response much likelier.
If scientists could spend all their time performing experiments, statisticians did all the statistics, and technical writers did all the writing, the replication crisis might not be as bad as it is and everyone wins.
Your viewpoint is basically that we should overspecialize. I believe that the more diverse skills a person has. The better they are. Would you ask a romance author to write a highly technical piece? You wouldn't.
Papers help with communication. Communication is a skill that a lot of people lack.
I still talk to a rubber duck when writing code that I don't have to explain to anybody (probably).
The purpose of an academic paper isn't to explain anything, it's to force the student to form an idea about a thing, then find and apply evidence to support that idea. The purpose is learning, and demonstrating to the professor proof that they have learned.
None of those boxes get ticked if you pay someone to write your papers.
And nah, Shakespeare lit 101 is not the place where you "learn how the world works" by demonstrating how you can "game the system" by paying someone else to do the work. The professor is concerned with the students learning about Shakespeare and maybe a bit about literary criticism, that's it.
My computer science courses were the easiest part of my degree. Meanwhile I was up late into the evening for my British lit, psychology, and other "soft" "101" courses. Those were the courses I'd have been most tempted to cheat in if it was possible.
So you're only speaking for your own uni experience.
My university flunked cheaters with an X instead of an F, a mark that carried onto their official transcript. By the time kids are in college, I think it's fair to be so final with judgements in respect of integrity.
That's hilarious. It's crazy that there was so much fallout from a case of cheating.
Is it Youtube's job to enforce morals? Is it Youtube's job to prevent anything that might hurt education? If it was determined that memes hurt education (by distracting students from studying) should Youtube ban memes?
Wrong frame. YouTube’s ethical responsibility is dictated by their ethos and that of society.
It’s Youtube’s ethical responsibility to not have videos which promote academic cheating products.
Today we are repeating debates addressed by 1A and its surrounding laws, by virtue of the fact that private companies aren’t currently subject to 1A.
It’s a healthy debate to have, but we should be aware of the pitfalls - namely that the introduction of 1A upon the old “town squares” freed us from tyranny. Failure to do it again for the new town squares will invite tyranny, and would inevitably bring it back.
This includes the laws which restrict 1A (“shouting fire”, etc.) which cover the old town squares. For the new town squares these are the “content moderation” policy cases online venues struggle with.
The first thing which needs to be done is to bring 1A and the surrounding legislative framework to the new town squares. Then we have the task of crafting laws in that framework which address cases special to the information era: IP, impersonation, disinformation, incitement ...
Unfortunately, the law is behind the curve.
When I was at university I happened to be 'fluent' in 68000 assembly language, so I was able to do that assignment within minutes of the task being set, no cheating needed. I actually understood what I was doing and wrote an assignment that was not cribbed from the work of others.
I thought this was going to be marked well, passing was expected. However, when the results came out a 'see me' was on the board. The lecturer was angry at me because I wouldn't say who I 'copied my work from'.
But then I remembered showing my code to a colleague in the minutes before handing in the assignment. Mine worked perfectly the first time but when I ran it again it failed. I realised I had cleared a 'byte' instead of a 'word' and changed my work accordingly before handing it in. Nobody else had this change, just my work. That one byte of real difference showed I knew 68K assembly when nobody else did.
So it turned out that my original 'done in ten minutes' code had been fished out the bin and typed in by someone else, they had then spread this around and everyone on the course except for a few mature students that were out of the loop had copied my stuff.
Now this was just one incident, as well as that there were other problems with groupthink which is not the same as cheating. I was behind on one project and submitted a simple diagram. Everyone else submitted reams of stuff, all returned with red pen on most of the pages. My assignment had just the one tick for perfect mark. Had I huddled with my colleagues in depressing group think panic sessions and done my own version of the 70 page assignment they were doing then I would not have got that perfect mark.
In my opinion plagiarism is just scraping the surface, beneath that there is a bigger problem of original thought and problem solving. Most people go along with what everyone else is doing.
Now before people dismiss such out of hand there are far too many who believe what is presented here because like many they are guilty of believing stories that reinforce their beliefs.
But there is a meta question here, why does a youtube "star" even succumb to the idea of advertising/promoting a cheating product, when doing so might put all of their Youtube revenue at risk? Maybe it is because they get crap Youtube revenue and 'several hundred dollars' is enough to push past their moral compass.
People put a lot of heart and sweat into their Youtube channels. Perhaps it is that Google is increasingly sucking more and more of the money that used to go to the channel in order to prop up their service which can't get advertising revenues to support it.
I wonder when the Screen Actors Guild is going to figure out they have another battlefront to engage on.
These deals are worth at least 5 digits, sometimes 6.
Where do you get the 10's of thousands of dollars figure from?
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-...
Suggests you can get low five figures for an endorsement with 100,000 viewers.
I am thinking about people on the bubble who have enough subscribers to be considered 'famous' but not so many as to be making bank like the top 3% do. The economist article suggests that revenue as a 'youtuber' drops really hard from the high end, into the not so high end personalities.
It reminds me of the days when some YouTubers would promote/endorse products without specifically saying they were paid to do so. Or worse, promoting products for gambling sites that they had business interests in.
It's interesting to see all this play out, it almost feels like it's the wild west on YT right now. Every time the regulators try to come in and enforce some policy, people still find the loopholes to create a quick buck.
As a grad student, it was hilariously easy to spot these for several reasons. One, the writing style is usually inconsistent. You'll have a student writing at about a high school level suddenly start using huge $5 words? Highly unlikely. Or a student who writes almost exclusively on one topic (our school had a ton of ag engineers so anything farm related was a favorite) and then suddenly is interested in the micro-economics of island based economies? Yeah, that's a big rad flag too.
As a University, our golden rule to clamp down on these was to require all local sources, no internet sources, and have the ability to go back and look at other papers the student has turned in for comparison. We'd normally bust students, then give them two or three days to turn in a paper they actually wrote with no penalties.
Most of these situations were just due to being lazy and not caring (I was in the Sociology department) so it wasn't so much about cheating as it was just getting the students to think critically and write better.
I don't regret it at all. It helped me become a faster, more efficient author, and in my experience, the sort of student that would pay someone else to buy a paper will end up failing out one way or another regardless. I knew people that paid for papers in undergrand, and most either flunked out, or barely graduated and ended up worse off than our other classmates in terms of job/grad school prospects.
And who knows: maybe the cheaters are completely capable of meeting the requirements of whatever job they end up in.
And also devalues the degree their peers actually worked for, even if only a little. I've been in a lot of interviews where I'm wondering, "How the hell did this person graduate from ${school}?" and the obvious answer is "a non-zero amount of cheating".
I don't think you should beat yourself up over it but I also think but it's also important not to rationalize it away either.
Do you see how that's a rationalization strategy? Maybe you honestly don't but discounting the value of the degree to zero makes your actions victimless. But, if the value is non-zero, damage has been done.
How did his action compares to stealing ?
Can you justify why it would be bad to ghostwrite ?
Do you disagree with the first sentence or the second?
But that might not be the case here?
Helping someone do something immoral is also immoral.
Can you explain under what circumstances you don't think my reasoning that "Helping someone do something immoral is also immoral" would not hold? And how those circumstances apply to this case?
And I don't care about the consequences for the cheater, as long as it doesn't fallback on someone innocent or who did not voluntarily agreed to be part of the scheme
The case we are talking about is the OP, who knowingly helped people cheat. Students asked him to write their essays for them and he did so. This isn't like making a computer that someone could potentially later use to do something immoral, the OP knew in advance what would happen.
But if people are going to argue about it? Sure, I'll raise a counterpoint.
That and people splitting assignments up and then bringing together each persons contribution and copying it. It was done far more often than not, and in the open right down the hall from a teachers office hours. I decided it really wasn't an environment I wanted to be in and just moved on.
I was working towards a degree in the social sciences at a top 5 (for my field) university/top 10 in general. I was mostly disillusioned by the professors that put little to no effort into leading engaging seminars (some of which were the top living 'experts' in their fields), and the fact that so many other postdocs from other top 5 schools were adjuncting at my university and just sitting in on my classes, with no hope for actually obtaining a tenure track position anywhere.
you sure about that?
Just because the jobs they wound up in didn't impress you, doesn't mean that they didn't beat out other honest competitors on the margin for those jobs
When you're profiting from it, it makes it hard to fairly assess those externalities. The rationalizing in your post is pretty apparent.
I think there are a lot of legitimate concerns about the idea of class grading and hiring metrics etc., but "I might as well profit from others' dishonesty" is maybe not the right way to respond to that.
A few questions would trivially expose them.
Clearly universities simply don't check. And frankly, we all know that this isn't an individual oversight, but a policy.
Maybe the schools should put more effort into catching and punishing cheaters. But they shouldn't have to -- if the students were being honest.
The easier and cheaper it is to cheat, the more tempted the students will be. You can lubricate that market by providing the cheating-materials, maybe even by marketing them. Cheating numbers will go up, thus increasing the cost to detect and catch and appropriately deal with cheaters. The last bit is probably the expensive part.
And the more the schools crack down on easily-detectible cheating, the more sophisticated it will get. Sure that means increasing the cost of cheating, but that's an arms race that can only be won by a culture that values honesty. You reinforce that culture by not selling cheating-materials.
You talk as if cheaters haven't existed before. As if this is new. You cannot prevent this market from existing, the university simply needs to check.
It is probably in the interests of someone with a Master degree to devalue all Bachelor degrees.
But it is also perfectly understandable that those with Bachelor degrees who actually earned them would be super pissed at you for helping a bunch of useless idiots achieve exactly the same institutional recognition, but without the same level of actual mastery, thereby ensuring that they would all have to pass a stupid bozo filter in every job interview for the rest of their lives.
Please try to regret what you have done, just a little bit.
I don't believe you. I think you do regret it and that's why you're spending so much time here today talking to people about it.
This one is clearly just a stock photo: https://edubirdie.com/writer/public/750289 http://www.humanresourcestoday.com/diversity/?open-article-i...
They send you messages in broken English like this:
"hello esteemed customer. kindly assign me the order. i have read the instructions and understood them clearly as the assignment falls under my field of study.Thus i can guarantee high quality work, free from plagiarism and grammatical errors. Timely delivery is also my priority."
This seems like an essay mill out of India, which isn't surprising.
Isn’t learning how to arbitrage time / money / skills a critical understanding for the Gig economy?
Also, don’t we praise ignoring rules that don’t serve you and force your resources into lower yield activities? (Uber, AirBnb, etc)
Where else in the real world do you get penalized for paying someone else to develop IP for you? You can have books ghost written, copy for articles, pretty much anything.
Have there been any studies that show people who outsource papers fair worse later in life?
Aren’t Universites largely a scam to extract money for credentialing leaving students with gross amounts of unbankruptable debt?
- Devils Advocate
If you don’t like school, just quit. Trust yourself and endure the pain of going against the mainstream.
Following your bliss and intuition will be the hardest and most rewarding experience of your life.
Find mentors, ignore people who are still contracted in their own trauma / nightmare who will try to hold you back.
If you like, come join us on Majagual.org, I will gift you a journey with us.
TBH if I was applying myself I'd be pretty tempted as usually its just a time suck.
Personally, if I suspect somebody is a liar or a cheater, I won't hire them. I build teams that are low on micromanagement and high on independence and trust. Somebody inclined toward fraud can be a big problem in a context like that, both because of the direct damage they do and because they lower ambient level of trust.
I recently had somebody apply for an internship claiming extensive iOS experience with a nice iOS project on GitHub. But the commit history was shallow, so I did some digging. Turns out it was a group project, and one of the other people did almost all the work.
That person was instantly dead to me. They surely got a job somewhere, but I feel sorry for their coworkers, who at best had to pick up a lot of slack, and at worst had to put up with a bunch of new rules and micromanagement because one employee couldn't be trusted.
That would send a very strong message about how dishonorable academic cheating is. Anyone promoting it is unfit for higher education, for obvious reasons.
Cheaters have no place in academia.
Cheating is too easy now. There's a website where you can get solutions manual for free. I've even seen websites that give solutions to Kumon homeowork. For those who don't know Kumon - it's an after school curriculum to help kids develop academically, to get to grade level if they are behind, of to accelerate ahead even further if they are already ahead. What's the point of cheating on those...
When I was in high school in the late 90's, babelfish had come out and kids were cheating on their Spanish homework because it would spit out poor Spanish. Now with the gig economy I'm sure you can scan your homework, upload it and a native Spanish speaker would give you the perfect translation. I remember reading that adjunct professors writing essays to supplement their dirt poor income.
As far as YouTube Stars getting paid to advertise...meh.
Smh. Cheating at Kumon is pointless. It's the process that matters, the end result is meaningless.
Isn't this a blue book exam?
Also, you can cheat a blue book test by hiring a stand-in. There's a story about Ted Kennedy being caught at a pub by his TA, at a time when he was supposedly taking a final exam at Harvard.
Furthermore, if someone is ghostwriting for you all semester, the ghostwriter's voice is the voice that the teacher knows.
This is also true. My agencies took care to assign repeat clients back to the same writers.
In the US, the bulk of cheaters buying academic papers are in huge class sections where a majority of grading is divvied up between graduate assistants. Even if the professor strongly suspects that a student turns in a paper that isn't their own work, it's rarely worth the effort of escalating unless the paper is an obvious and provable case of plagiarism. Plagiarism is a very hard claim to prove when the paper one submits is bespoke.
They say they can write your PhD thesis for you. How on earth can that work? You'll have years of intense one-on-one tuition with an expert in the field and they're not going to notice someone wrote the thesis? How are you going to withstand several hours of viva for something you didn't write? How can the EduBird author make an original contribution to the field on demand?
Though a sibling comment mentioned that this might be a complete scam, which I wouldn't doubt. Or none of their writers actually accept offers to write an entire thesis, and they just advertise the possibility of someone on their site doing it.
They claim they can write a PhD thesis, but they can't check their own prose.
Getting a shitty paper from them is going to be like buying powdered sugar from a coke dealer.
- im sold
I honestly don't care if people cheat.
Cheating would be much harder this way.
Should it be condoned? Obviously not, but the point is this cheating thing is only a symptom of a much bigger issue
And yes, I know, whataboutism. But aren't faculty supposed to set examples for students?
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"You have to do all of your work on your own. But let's say you decided to copy someone else's homework. Well, to make sure you don't just plagiarize it, you're going to start changing variables and function names, and maybe alter the structure of the code altogether. As it turns out, the more you alter the copy, the more it actually becomes your own work and eventually you would have, in a sense, done the work yourself."
Let me restate the argument, not in favor of cheating but why it's not the moral issue that everyone makes it out to be:
1. Cheating is only an issue in the artificial world of academia, where it goes against how the system is supposed to work.
2. We only think it is a moral issue because it's been drilled into us since we were kids, and that we think it is not fair to those who don't cheat and devalues the value of their degree.
3. The current system is stupid. Academic grades and degrees, to the extent that they affect your life after academia, should be based on what you can accomplish or explain, not how well you can write answers.
4. Employers should be using other methods to screen prospective employees -- looking at past projects, word of mouth, etc.
The sooner we can put to rest the notion that we should spend ages 6 through 22 in an artificial system that has no relation to the real world before we can enter the real world as functioning adults, the better.
1. Help the student learn (by applying theory in homework and encouraging internalization for exams), and
2. Verifying that students have learned the material
Cheating destroys both of those. A student can copy a solution to a general relativity problem, but that doesn't mean they understand it, and likewise they can obtain the exam before they take it and memorize the solutions, but then the exam only measures whether they've memorized the solution.
That is, cheating completely eliminates the purpose of obtaining an education.
In a real-world sense, cheating hurts nobody except the person doing it, if even that.
Now say, for the sake of the argument, that this happens a few more times. As a hiring manager at the lab I'm going to be less likely to seriously consider candidates from Foo University (because all of the 4.0 graduates I've hired from there don't know anything). Others will live need to work harder to overcome this bias because of the action of the cheaters.
It's very myopic (and a very difficult position to seriously hold unless you're rationalizing past behavior) to assume that cheating doesn't hurt anyone.
I still see this as a contractual matter. If his employment contract strictly forbade him from doing this (and it might very well do so), then that's grounds for termination. Just like how copying homework could be grounds for suspension from school. But still a different effect on society than stealing.
Another thing to consider: he's making the company management look bad. The smart thing to do would be to promote him for his smart thinking.
Instead, he secretly outsourced his entire job and pretended to actually do the work himself so he could get paid to do nothing.
The company fired him because he didn't operate in a way that was good for the company, only in a way that benefited him personally.
People like him don't belong in management, they belong in jobs that don't require any trust, because they aren't trustworthy people.
I don't get why this is being brought up as a matter of cheating rather than leaking, which is the big elephant in the room.
Still shows a lack of ethics though.
You say "the current system is stupid", "academia is an artificial world", and "past projects and word of mouth" are what matters. Past projects and word of mouth are both systems that are ripe for manipulation by having the right social / marketing skills. Coincidentally, you can also appropriate other people's work and pass it off as your own, perhaps without getting caught. I think I'm beginning to understand why you value these highly.
I don't disagree with schools having penalties for cheating. But on the moral severity scale, it's really an infraction rather than a felony. Would you call jaywalkers bad people?
If you want to see why I have such a disdain for academia, here's my story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16726402
Perhaps GP's point was that since degrees don't actually correlate with 'you have learned x information', degrees don't inherently have value in the first place?
I think they are projecting their own disillusionment after they themself realized the degree doesn't represent knowledge or whatever personal meaning they had attached to it.
Like, by flagging cheaters and those who facilitate them. You're complaining about the disease as well as the cure.
People who cheat their way to a degree, are lying to future employees about possessing a level of knowledge that they do not have.
An academic degree is bestowed upon a graduate as a sort of symbol of authenticity, backed by the college/university's reputation, that the graduate has a certain level of mastery in a given set of topics.
This mastery includes both a broad base, the ability to make well reasoned arguments, perform basic research, write papers, an understanding of world history, and other undergraduate degree pre-reqs.
Cheating is a way for a student to acquire such certification without having done the work, and without having learned the skills that work imparts.
> Academic grades and degrees, to the extent that they affect your life after academia, should be based on what you can accomplish or explain, not how well you can write answers.
The cheating services being offered here are about writing essay papers, which are the most basic case of being able to produce an end product after having applied research and critical thinking to a problem space.
Being able to communicate, and think, in a clear and coherent manner is one of the very foundations of a classic liberal education. It is also one of the most important skills for almost any professional job.
Lying about possessing that ability is a form of deceit, and by common consensus, morally objectionable.
Not if they don't apply to jobs.
> Being able to communicate, and think, in a clear and coherent manner is one of the very foundations of a classic liberal education. It is also one of the most important skills for almost any professional job.
You can't assess that by talking to someone during an interview?
> Lying about possessing that ability is a form of deceit, and by common consensus, morally objectionable.
Agreed. That's a matter for when the person is applying to jobs.
If he just gets the degree and becomes a trust fund kid for the rest of his life, who is being harmed?
This does not apply to the majority of students going to college. Why should a tiny fraction of students be able to drag down the reputation of a college because they do not want to do the work that they signed up to do, paid tuition to be taught how to do, and signed a contract saying that they would honestly complete to the best of their abilities?
> You can't assess that by talking to someone during an interview?
It is not possible to assess someone's ability to do a long form research report doing a 1 hour in person interview. I have actually seen some companies that do have candidate screening processes that involve independent research work, but that is aside the point[1]. The real point here is that there is a centralized system that is designed to teach, and validate, academic credentials. They are called colleges!
> Agreed. That's a matter for when the person is applying to jobs.
It is a matter for colleges to worry about because they are in the business of bestowing credentials backed up by the colleges reputation for doing a good job educating their students. If too many students have a degree from a college but they do not actually know anything, then degrees in general from that college become devalued and it cheats the students who put in all the work legitimately!
> If he just gets the degree and becomes a trust fund kid for the rest of his life, who is being harmed?
Reputable colleges and universities are not day cares for trust fund kids. There are plenty of less reputable colleges that serve that purpose.
[1] Such longer interview processes put more burden, which can be measured economically, on both the applicant and the hiring company. The applicant has already paid a fee to go through a skill assessment process, their college tuition. It is possible to model cheaters as an economic drain on both employers and job applicants. Cheating is not free, it has a real cost to it as companies have to implement additional testing and applicants have to spend their time (which always has a monetary trade off) going through screening that is redundant to the credentials they already have.
Why should colleges penalize against possible future job interview fraud? Pre-crime, anyone?
> It is a matter for colleges to worry about because they are in the business of bestowing credentials backed up by the colleges reputation for doing a good job educating their students. If too many students have a degree from a college but they do not actually know anything, then degrees in general from that college become devalued and it cheats the students who put in all the work legitimately!
Good, the sooner we bury the whole rotten, overpriced system, the sooner we can come up with a better alternative.
> Cheating is not free, it has a real cost to it as companies have to implement additional testing and applicants have to spend their time (which always has a monetary trade off) going through screening that is redundant to the credentials they already have.
Neither is spending $200k on tuition!
It's not that he didn't do anything wrong. It's that "cheating" is an artificial construct that should be done away with in our way of thinking, and instead we should learn to apply other ethical standards to these things. For example, he's still guilty of breach of security and leaking of confidential information.
You might be wondering, what's the big difference? In the end, we still have this action being judged as unethical.
The point I'd like you to take away is that you should critically analyze things, especially those taught to you at a early age and for a long time. Hopefully we can see how artificial the system is, and find ways to build a better system. I am not anywhere close to having kids, but I do intend to absorb as much real-world experience as I can over the next few years, so that I can be a better teacher to them than the school system can be.
and really? cheating is only an issue in artificial constructs like academia? so if i design a building and crib the stress analysis from another building, it's ok because that's not an artifical situation?
it seems academia really did fail you, as your argument just falls apart prima facie. the learned person would reflect on the wealth of the feedback that you're getting here rather than assuming that you've unsheathed some gloden nugget of truth that the rest of us silly fools can't glean.
aversion to cheating is embedded in the social systems of all sorts of living creatures. might you want to read up on that and update your arguments, or is that too academic and artificial (as compared to typing into an emphemeral textbox)?
Every example that has been provided could be counted as wrong by some other existing real world standard. In the case of copying the stress analysis, that is called FRAUD in the real world.
I sound like I'm being pedantic here, but I hope some people out there can understand.
As far as social systems go, the object of aversion is deception and the associated harm. That's bad. I think we mentally conflate that with academic cheating (plagiarism), when it is something different.
source: https://mises.org/wire/problem-fraud-fraud-threat-and-contra...
There is no equivalent of harm done to property or person with plagiarism in an academic setting.
> Finally, it is curious that the first thing that occurs to people on first hearing the anti-IP case is plagiarism: “You mean it would be okay for someone to take an author’s work, put his own name on it, and sell it?”
> Two issues are conflated here. One can plagiarize without violating a copyright, and one can violate a copyright without plagiarizing. Under copyright law you may use brief verbatim excerpts of another’s written work without permission as long as you use quotation marks and attribute the text to the author. It’s called “fair use.” (Question for copyright fans: Isn’t even fair use a violation of an author’s rights?) If you were to use an excerpt that otherwise would qualify under the fair-use principle but without attribution, you would be guilty of plagiarism but not copyright violation. The same would be true if you quote Shakespeare without attribution. (Shakespeare wrote without benefit of copyright.)
> On the other hand, if you publish Atlas Shrugged with Ayn Rand’s name on it, you would be guilty of copyright violation but not plagiarism.
> For the sake of clear thinking, let’s keep these issues separate.
> Well, is plagiarism okay? No, it’s not! Obviously it is dishonest and dishonorable to represent someone else’s work as one’s own. But note, according to LegalZoom, “plagiarism is not a criminal or civil offense.” Nor should it be. It’s a breach of good conduct, and there is a plentitude of nonviolent, non-State ways to deal with it, especially in the Internet age.
Source: https://mises.org/wire/slave-labor-and-intellectual-property...
Look, I get it's a bad in a practical sense if someone cheats or plagiarizes, especially to the cheater. It could even be a breach of contract between the student and the school. But it's not a crime against another person. It's a "victimless crime" essentially.
If someone falsifies licensing or safety requirements, like with an airplane or a building, that's a legal matter. Call that "professional fraud" -- it's illegal. But there is no law against cheating in school.
It's not a victimless crime.
1. Every CS class I took had some form of curve. People cheating directly lowered the grade of people who didn't.
2. Cheating devalues the credentials that other students paid for. You can argue about the benefits of the credentialing system, but that doesn't change that fact that students cheating directly financially harms students who don't cheat.
3. It harms job seekers who now have to spend time going through additional screening steps because their credentials are no longer trusted.
It really seems like your trying very hard to justify some past behavior here.
Damn right it did. I remember in a scientific writing class in college, the professor told us that we should always give credit when citing someone. I asked her if that was just a good practice and courtesy, or a moral obligation. The dumb prof just repeated herself "you should always give credit" and didn't seem to understand my question.
What about other artificial systems with defined rules, like sports? Is doping or other cheating permissible? If so, at all levels, or only professional levels?
> * Academic grades and degrees, to the extent that they affect your life after academia, should be based on what you can accomplish or explain, not how well you can write answers.*
In large part, the current forms of evaluation (closed book, silent, proctored exams) are a result of people cheating in honour-based systems. As cheating continues to be a problem, pressure is increased on institutions and staff to prevent it, which ultimately leads to a worse learning environment for everyone.
Edit: I should point out this isn't a theoretical concern. I personally resent the people who have attempted to 'beat the system' with simple dishonesty and caused me to have to endure uncomfortable and tedious attempts to minimise cheating during my education.
In a similar vein, I feel it was a lot better for just about everyone back when you could take more than a thimbleful of liquid onto an aeroplane.
> Employers should be using other methods to screen prospective employees -- looking at past projects [...]
So having cheated my way through schooling, I should probably drop a few more bucks into getting some jobs-board contractors to knock out a couple of 'passion projects' to throw onto github?
Actually you raise a good point. The sports system is like that too, it's just an artificial system. I don't watch sports so I don't care what goes on inside that system.
> Edit: I should point out this isn't a theoretical concern. I personally resent the people who have attempted to 'beat the system' with simple dishonesty and caused me to have to endure uncomfortable and tedious attempts to minimise cheating during my education.
I resent the fact that I had to spend so much time in world renowned educational centers learning so much theory that I never use in the real world.
I resent the fact that we put the college-as-job-credential system on a pedestal instead of coming up with something more efficient and doesn't let professors hang the fucking sword of Damocles over your head.
> So having cheated my way through schooling, I should probably drop a few more bucks into getting some jobs-board contractors to knock out a couple of 'passion projects' to throw onto github?
Nice straw man bro.
Also, dismissing a system with a simple "Well, I don't watch it / it doesn't affect me" is a pretty weak argument compared actually addressing how dishonesty & cheating affects those who do participate. (And whether you personally engage or not, I'm sure sport, like education, does somehow impact your life in some way.)
> I resent the fact that I had to spend so much time [...] learning so much theory that I never use in the real world.
Like what? Are you certain you have never and will never use it? Is it equally worthless to everyone, or is there some benefit to some of the people that happen to not be you?
Was it completely unavoidable? Did you investigate your curricula before enrolling, and choose only things directly related to your present career?
I agree that the current qualifications system is broken, IMO having a lot to do with (especially in the UK) pitching university as an essential part of education, and destroying/replacing the whole technical college system in its favour.
I can't accept that the best way to fix it is to make everything worse for everyone until it finally collapses though.
> Nice straw man bro
If we accept that I'm a dishonest person attempting to bypass the 'has good university credentials' check, why wouldn't you expect me to also cheat at building a portfolio, and maybe practising my interview-bullshit techniques in order to best land a job?
I can't imagine any system that has to assume maximum dishonesty could ever be more efficient than one where you can actually trust the information given to you.
Granted, it's a spectrum, but you're seemingly arguing in favour of some sort of 'distrust, then verify, then verify some more' approach, which seems weird.
[1] There are plenty of good arguments for and against, this isn't just a trick question.
Having worked on everything from OS components to embedded systems, I use that theory constantly and wish I'd had the opportunity to learn more.
Where you took your career rests solely on you; don't blame those who educated you for it.
Is it your belief that if we fail to punish academic cheating, people will learn to not cheat in other aspects of life?
I disagree with your opinion that Academia doesn't matter.
Ignoring Allen Iverson; not taking practice seriously will have consequences during an actual game. At the very least, Academia is practice for adulthood.
Dishonesty has long been considered a moral issue, e.g., Kant.
It does devalue the degree, and it does impose costs on those who don't cheat, by making it harder for them to establish their own credentials.
I don't know a clear distinction between "accomplish and explain" and "write answers" for academic study.
Employers are using other methods, such as personality tests, coding interviews, work-for-free exercises, requiring "experience" for entry level jobs, and so forth.
Employers could abolish that system overnight by simply eliminating the degree requirement. They could reduce their labor costs, because a person with no college debt might be willing to start out at a lower salary and be more loyal to their initial employer.
In my undergraduate education, the most valuable class I had was a set of embedded systems classes. No tests, no homework, just have to build a project incrementally over the course of the quarter, and then provide schematics and documention at the end.
> Employers are using other methods, such as personality tests, coding interviews, work-for-free exercises, requiring "experience" for entry level jobs, and so forth.
> Employers could abolish that system overnight by simply eliminating the degree requirement. They could reduce their labor costs, because a person with no college debt might be willing to start out at a lower salary and be more loyal to their initial employer.
Exactly! Thank you for pointing this out, especially in a world of skyrocketing tuition costs.
That doesn't even make sense. Besides, what's to stop them from cheating on that too?