Contract Cheating: Colleges Crack Down on Ghostwritten Essays | Hacker News Reader

Contract Cheating: Colleges Crack Down on Ghostwritten Essays

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23 pointsHillaryBriss16 comments

The whole sending all kids off to college model is a joke. Most people are average, they don't enjoy studying or have strong sense of direction in life. Send these kids at the ripe age of 18 to college, where they pay incredible amounts of money and are more or less pressured to succeed lest they waste alot of money and you get a recipe for gaming the system. The older i get, i believe that for most people going to college slightly later when you have more maturity and life experience is a lot better. Maybe apprentice type programs at 18, work at them for a few years and then decide if college is right for you.

College is great: Community colleges to teach trades and remedial skills. Liberal arts colleges to teach ways of thinking to help people catalyze and deploy their creativity. Polytechnic colleges to teach science and engineering.

Diploma mills masquerading as colleges, granting degrees contingent upon work products unrelated to to future work obligations, are terrible.

The main thing wrong with colleges is that they grant degrees, instead of leaving that to professional certification authorities.

I like the national service requirement in Norway. You must either join the armed forces or some other type of national service for 18 months. I think it was hugely beneficial for the people I know who did this. Just kind of helps you grow up, and become more sure of who you are and how capable you are.

I’ve never been in the military so maybe this is overblown in popular culture. But as I understand it, service in the US is designed to destroy who you are and replace it with what your branch needs you to be. Right down things like banning the word “I” in favor of “this recruit.”

Erasure of self and conditioning for obedience might be a good fit for certain people and certain tasks, like troubled kids and war-fighting, but I hope it’s never required for the whole population.

From what I've heard from other people's experiences, it's less erasure of self and more of a program tuned to deal with the lowest common denominator, where the LCD is pretty damn low.

The military needs a one size fits all program to deal with dropouts, people joining to get their shit together, and other societal misfits.

It's overblown. Boot camp needs to produce people who can fall in line and follow orders, but that's far and away from brainwashing or other attempts to rewrite your identity or beliefs. People who serve are individuals who have learned to operate within a hierarchy.

Also, there are different boot camps for people in combat and non-combat roles. Even in conscription militaries, most people are recruited into non-combat roles.

There are many courses in humanities (social sciences) that need to be revamped. What these professors do all the time is this: assign some publications and write a paper on it. That is not the right way to go about teaching.

The best literature or topical courses I had were seminars.

Each class was about an hour of lecture followed by an hour of discourse and prompted discussion.

Assignments were reading and often papers, but with an open format. The essays would be coupled with a brief presentation that may or may not prompt discussions.

This was in first and second year undergrad as well (U of Toronto).

I disagree, mostly on the basis of how many people I know write like shit, and analyze/synthesize arguments like toddlers.

To put it another way, it’s not about the publication. Or even the material. It’s about improving and setting standards for how you communicate and interpret the world.

In that case, these students should be sent to different classes like Writing 101 or Analyze Arguments 101, or Evaluate hypotheses 101.

Many of those classes do exactly those things.

The scholarly criticism exercise uses the subject matter to create "play" exercises to teach students to organize thoughts, construct and analyze arguments, etc.

College math classes often do the same thing. For most people, the math is just a medium for the intellectual "play" that teaches critical thinking skills.

You probably won't need literary criticism in your day to day life, but then again you probably don't need much of the math either.

In this case, it's obviously cheating.

Ironically, in the real world, upper management is largely delegation and quality control for an effective price/ROI, rather than individual contribution.

The essay writers may be able to earn an extra buck, but they could never scale their performance the way the buyer could.

Delegation and quality control are entirely different skills relative to those being tested for, though — you wouldn’t be able to pass an English literature exam by using your amazing calculus skills either!

I'm actually making a good living from writing other people's works, btw.

Idea: When you pay tuition you agree to pay a fee of $X,000 if the college catches you red handed cheating.

The college can then offer contract essay writers $X,000 if they provide communications proving a student is buying an essay, including the essay itself before the student turns it in. This fee can be as high as it needs to be to cover the cost of lost revenue (including lost word-of-mouth referrals) so that it's worth it.

The only pitfall is you would have to carefully design the requirements for the trap since framing someone is now lucrative.

> The only pitfall is you would have to carefully design the requirements for the trap since framing someone is now lucrative.

Another problem is that you turn university life into a witch hunt, with everyone constantly under suspicion of cheating.

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