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Comment by matz1 | Hacker News Reader

>cheating hurts everyone.

Not the paper writers and some of the students who can benefit from it.

I think it hurts them too.

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.

Its not a shitty job for some of the right people. I can easily think few possible advantage of this job:

- flexible time

- potential to earn lot of money

- sheer enjoyment of writing

- improve one writing skills

I think it all depends on incentives. If one goes to school with a sole purpose of learning something(employment, career track being non-issues), I'd imagine, they wouldn't care about the cheaters as they wouldn't be competing with the cheaters for jobs, promotions etc. This reminded me of a Russian pop star from the early 2000s who became a philosophy major at a major Russian university. Presumably, she didn't mind the cheaters as I doubt she was aiming at tenure track or something to that effect at the school. Although, I can't be sure :)

I went to school just to learn and I despised the cheaters. They were debasing something I valued, taking up time and attention that could have been given to somebody who gave a shit.

All of those points are also true of making a living by (e-)mail fraud, and the first two are true of almost any criminal enterprise.

The difference is essay writing service is not criminal.

Not everything legal is moral, and not everything moral is legal.

And not everyone morality is the same. Morality is relative.

This is either banal and irrelevant or meaningful and wrong. Obviously, not everybody has the same morality; criminals almost always think they're justified. But if you're saying that because of that morality is somehow meaningless or not worth pursuing, that's ridiculous. Nobody ever says that when they're on the receiving end of something shitty, just when they're doing it.

it absolutely is. it's called "conspiracy to commit fraud".

Just like plenty of ICO scams aren't criminal - but the people behind them lack basic integrity and should be condemned for their sleazy enterprises.

It easily could be. There are all sorts of things we criminalize because they correlate with other illegal or harmful things. Conspiracy to commit is an obvious one. Or receiving stolen goods: it's not illegal to buy and sell things, but if you know that you're enabling thieves, you could go to jail too.

It is not criminal yet, but it is wrong enough that it could be. Cheating is in violation of university academic integrity policies and those aiding and abetting that cheating share responsibility.

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?

Exactly. Legality is a trailing indicator of morality. Criminals always find new ways to be parasites; when the problem gets big enough, we outlaw it.

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.

One of the basic foundations of economics is competitive advantage. No one makes everything themselves, they defer to specialists. I don't see why writing papers should be any different, considering most of the work is not about technical competence, it's about proper formatting and writing skills.

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.

"Specialization is for insects.” ~ Robert Anson Heinlein

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.

Technical writers should write scientific experimentation papers because the purpose of the papers is to explain the experiment to people.

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.

If you're cheating in a 101 class, you have much bigger problems than worrying about being expelled for committing fraud in a 101 class. The thing is, that isn't where people are cheating(probably), and finishing a BS in computer science is relatively easy. I'm going to stand by the fact that the hiring process is flawed, the college system is flawed, and our public school system is flawed. There's nothing motivating anyone to learn but themselves.

All of my "101" courses in uni were notoriously hard weed-out courses due to their large volume of assignments and reading material.

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.

Proper formatting and basic writing skills take virtually zero time once you know what you're doing.

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