I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat an eye.
Cheating is way more common than people think.
It isn't. In the mid-1970s I worked in the office of a company that sold term papers to students. We had a huge catalog of them, on about every conceivable topic. And we weren't the only company in that particular business.
It wasn't a particularly lucractive business, and the guy who owned the company closed it fairly quickly. He was an interesting guy - after that company, he spent a year or so developing a solution that would fade denim in your washing machine (I worked for him in that company as well), which he sold for a bundle (at the time) to a major detergent company. Later he became a mover and shaker in the autograph/original document field.
How does this play out after school? These students obviously have no passion for programming and are probably just there for the money after school. But once they get that job--and I'm not even sure they can land that FAANG job they want; you're not going to cram your way to being a competent whiteboard coder--do they just hope they'll just stumble into a job where they don't do much work, and the work isn't very difficult, and are ok with getting fired from every other job?
Usually these folks are savvy, come in and latch on to someone’s work and pivot quickly into a more abstract role or management role. Sometimes they are even good at those roles.
I mean, it is pretty unfair to the kids who actually do honest work. if enough people cheat and get near perfect scores, it makes it hard for the instructor to understand what a reasonable two week project is. grades are also (unfortunately) pretty important for internships.
on the other hand, sometimes people who cheat are really bad at it. in one of the courses I TA'd, there were two groups of 3-4 students who would always sit together in labs. they would always turn in nearly identical labs and homeworks, including all the same mistakes! it looked like the only differences came from transcription errors. I never bothered to report them because they failed all the assignments anyway.
There's no unfairness to an honest student who gets just as much out of a course with or without cheaters. Perhaps more if I'm not trying to put together complicated "gotcha" assignments and tests to catch potential cheaters.
Besides, I didn't say I ignored cheating. My fault if I gave that impression. I put in reasonable effort to look out for it, but don't obsess over it. if it went on without me finding out then by definition it wasn't something I could act on, and neither I nor the honest students were the ones losing time and money.
first of all, I don't mean to criticize you personally.
I'm not talking about adding or removing topics/depth to or from a course semester to semester based on the group of kids. in aggregate though, I think you'll definitely notice that the topics covered in a particular class vary a lot from school to school based on the expectations they have for the students. there's a lot more depth in a data structures course at a tech school than in the same class at some liberal arts school's vestigial cs department. if, instead of having brighter students, a school actually just has a much larger proportion of effective cheaters, the professors might unknowingly assign too much work to complete honestly. you personally might not change your assignments much, but I'm not sure how you could prevent this drift from occurring across an entire department over the span of a decade.
> There's no unfairness to an honest student who gets just as much out of a course with or without cheaters.
this depends on what you think the point of college is. if it's strictly about mastery of material for its own sake, sure, cheating only hurts the cheater. unfortunately, most students don't just go to college for the pleasure of learning. they go because they believe it will help them get a job. when you apply to your first internship, your GPA likely one of most important things on your resume. it is very much unfair to be competing against people who didn't earn theirs honestly. if a cheater takes your spot in the recruiting pipeline, you're out for this round. the company isn't going to call you up out of the blue because they realized the other person is an incompetent clown halfway through the summer.
I have a niece who has two masters degrees(literature and screenplay writing) and she has never hit it big with her own writing but she works helping exchange students polish their application essays and the money from that pays her bills and lets her write creatively and she gets by with relatively small income from her creative works.
Do those assessing the applications care if the applicants have had this type and extent of help?
I never used such a service, but I do see the appeal. I did kind of similar things, in my own way, to reduce time spent on courses I didn't like (skipping class, skipping or skimming material, exam cramming). Not saying it's a good thing, and it probably hurts one's already poor work ethic, but life is short and I don't really blame them that much.
probably this.
the most time-efficient strategy for studying that I found in college was simply retyping all the bullets from the powerpoints 2-3 times. I didn't understand what I was writing, but I basically trained myself to be a "chinese room" for test questions. I got As on all the tests for classes I didn't care about this way.