Confessions of a custom-essay writer (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Confessions of a custom-essay writer (2010)

chronicle.com

81 pointsredcap30 comments

During my life as a ghost writer for bloggers and authors, I had very similar interactions. It got to a point where I was writing comments/replies on behalf of some people because they didn't know how to defend work. Knowing what I know about online content, it gets me wondering how much of what we read is really written by the name attached to it.

As for the topic of schools, I'm not bothered by it. Part of the learning in college comes from learning how to meet deadlines and get results. It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user. That type of skill will serve people well later in life.

>As for the topic of schools, I'm not bothered by it. Part of the learning in college comes from learning how to meet deadlines and get results.It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user. That type of skill will serve people well later in life.

I love when people are honest about their cynicism! Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think the other "part of the learning" is about learning skills and internalizing habits. On the one hand, becoming a good cheat may very well enrich you, but you won't actually learn how to write a freaking paragraph via that route.

Yet again, I am amazed by the decadence and worthlessness of so much of humanity... perhaps that is what happens when you turn 40 ....

EDIT: I don't find the poster I replied to worthless and decadent, just the customers of the ghost writer.

If it makes you feel any better, I outsourced my java homework in college because I didn't think I'd need to learn programming.

Come to find out, I did need to learn it, but I also needed to learn how to manage freelancers, which I do now on a daily basis. So maybe cheating/taking shortcuts paid off a bit, just not how you would expect it to.

I hope it goes without saying that if a prospective student wants to learn how to "meet deadlines and get results", he should go get a job, not go to college. Going to college and cheating is both a destructive (it takes away time, resources, and credibility from the students who are actually there to learn the topic) and inefficient way to learn those skills.

Sure, but they want the paper, so students figure out the most efficient way to get the paper. The fix isn't to catch cheaters, but to stop valuing the damn paper so much.

Well, if it were that easy to come up with good assignments year-after-year that did a great job of aiding and testing the students' progress but weren't amenable to cheating, then we wouldn't have this problem.

I'm not talking about the written paper, I'm talking about the degree itself. Sorry for the poor wording.

Oh, OK. I guess I agree with you then.

I don't think people cheat to learn skills. They cheat to get a credential that can be used to get them into a job. The credential differentiates them from the non-cheating or non-intelligent population. With it they can manipulate others into thinking they are worth more than they are.

Of course, at that point you might think they'd be out of their league but in many cases this won't be the case. There are a lot of jobs which require great degrees but only to get in...

> It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user.

You can't outsource everything. One day, you'll fail to deliver the end product precisely because you never learned how.

I disagree completely. Businesses do this every day, and many hackers here, especially those learning to code, fake it until they make it, learning on the fly.

I'm not saying education is useless, but it's amazing how quickly you can learn when forced to.

I never had the money to invest in one of these writers. I don't know if I ever would but I knew as a University student they were around and that there were people in the classes I took that used them.

I find it incredibly interesting that this no-name writer basically did the same thing I did to courses I never attended (essentially his main demographic); Google books and Wikipedia were my bread and better and it always lit a huge smile on my face when I'd "beat the system" as it were and put a few hours into a paper and pass a course I knew nothing about just to get my degree.

I don't know what it says about the education system, but hacking it in this particular way did a lot for me in terms of personal growth. I probably learned less about the subject at hand then I could have, but at the same time I learned a lot of useful skills that are transferable to my future compared to something like Women's lit (not that there's anything bad with that--oh how I remember the cold stares).

I'm sure you could argue for or against these methods, I just wanted to put my personal perspective out there.

hahahahahaha I just realized I wrote "bread and better"

School ideally provides two things: domain expertise (by way of education) and the perception of domain expertise (by way of a credential). The problem is that these two functions are significantly disjoint. Studying for exams, doing research, and doing projects can provide education, but it is not necessarily so. Likewise, one can be educated effectively without actually completing such assignments.

As such, someone who is more interested in one half of the result can optimize to obtain that half with less effort than would be required for the whole. These are not likely to be brought into alignment any time soon. Session exams, if re-created from scratch and kept confidential, are difficult (though not impossible) to cheat. Unfortunately, they are typically possible to cram, still possible to cheat, and they reward test-taking skills as much if not more than subject mastery.

The practical exam is probably the most effective, where one purporting to have a skill is simply asked to demonstrate it on the spot. Unfortunately, not everything is amenable to this, and they are still possible to cheat, though there are really only two ways[1].

Practical exams are unfortunately not so good for research-heavy subjects (like, say, all of graduate studies). You can do it (research this topic, take all the notes you like, bring them into class, answer some questions (possibly in long-form), but it is a less effective exam than the normal research paper if the latter is done honestly. Still, I think they are the only way to go if you really want to put an end to cheating.

[1]-Impersonation and outright bribery. There was a big scandal about the former in one of my classes back at Uni, in which six students were expelled. I've never heard of the latter, but I find it implausible that it never occurs.

You can do it (research this topic, take all the notes you like, bring them into class, answer some questions (possibly in long-form), ...

At least some university do exactly this for the Comprehensive Exam required as one part of a master's degree. My wife is preparing for something very much like you described for her master's in history right now.

Previously submitted and discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901152

This link's been plagiarised?

As someone who (sometime in the far future) aspires to be a professor, this is an important thing to hear. As a student I guess I was ignorant about how available services like this are, and as a professor I'll definitely be wary about it (and possibly design assignments around making this sort of thing difficult or less rewarding grade-wise)

Just because it seems so difficult to circumvent, any strategies in mind to avoid this?

I can propose a few:

Have a one-on-one conference with each student where you ask them about their paper without letting them look at it.

Skip papers altogether and simply do a one-on-one interview about the topic to evaluate their knowledge of it.

Make students write papers in class.

Don't assign homework. Grade entirely based on class participation.

While these are good ideas, I don't think someone would put them in practice. It'd make that person a very unpopular professor indeed, which will reflect in the student evaluations, and he can say goodbye to his yearly salary increase, and expect criticism from the dean about student and parent complaints about below average grades.

> Skip papers altogether and simply do a one-on-one interview about the topic to evaluate their knowledge of it.

OK, so you have to deal with the fact some people are intensely nervous around authority figures and a one-on-one is not going to reflect their knowledge: They'll be so nervous they won't be able to answer intelligently, or at their full capacity.

> Make students write papers in class.

Then for God's sake scale the paper sizes and complexity to class length. (You don't know how to do that. You think you do but you don't.)

> Don't assign homework. Grade entirely based on class participation.

This has all the downsides of the one-on-one coupled with all the downsides of large group dynamics: Some people are going to dominate the discussion, some people are not going to be able to get a word in edgewise, and there's nothing you can do to change that. The ones who dominate the discussion are not always the ones who are getting the material, and being a wallflower does not correlate with much of anything relevant to most college courses. (There are exceptions.)

I realize there are weaknesses in all those suggestions. There are pros and cons to every grading method.

I think some of these can be mitigated though (whereas cheating probably can't, especially in my mind since I intensely disapprove of Turnitin).

A few ideas:

For the interviews, start by requiring office visits for more trivial things and build up to the main interview.

I had one professor that regularly started class by having every write for a few minutes (like 5-10) about something they found interesting in the assigned reading. Aside from making sure students actually read, assigning an amount of time rather than a topic allows students to select a complexity level they feel is appropriate for the time allowed.

For class participation, this obviously requires some re-thinking of what class participation means. It also probably requires smaller classes. In a class of 10 students, I find it unimaginable that the professor wouldn't know before grading anything approximately what grade each student will receive.

The last one will be extremely effective in deterring cheaters. It will also be extremely effective in deterring people who learn in different ways; every class I've ever had with heavy participation components was dominated by grade-obsessed people who spoke as quickly as they could. The end result is that reflecting on your response to a discussion means you won't be able to share it.

Presentations are a fantastic way to make sure students know what's what. Shame is a great motivator. Put a student in front of his classmates and he'll put a lot more effort into actually mastering the subject matter.

In-class discussion is also powerful. You can see who understands the material and who doesn't. Having an active class also promotes questions during student presentations, which again helps motivate the presenter.

Amazing read. It's kind of disturbing that the quoted text is almost identical to the writing of one friend. Here's a blurb for confirmation:

Actually i mnot to sure eiter iguess the very basic is someone smart funny and feedm food. haha like someonei canlearns uff from idk but wat i no is that he isnot y typ

One thing I can't make sense of, with the ESL students (and maybe someone will be kind enough to inform me): I understand that they may not be great in English, but they should at least know that ican (I can) is wrong right, especially when it's underlined in red, right?

I laughed at your last sentence which has a strange verve, and slightly ambiguous meaning. I cannot tell if you were being ironic, but it is definitely entertaining in the context of your post.

[quote]but they should at least know that ican (I can) is wrong right, especially when it's underlined in red, right? [/quote]

That wasn't intentional, but it definitely is entertaining. I'm actually multitasking, and I often end up alt tabbing a lot for every comment I make. Sometimes, unfortunately, this happens!

Should we be concerned that this is so pervasive, or that educators fail to realize deep essays written by one with a professed lack of domain knowledge?

There was excellent analysis of this article the last time it came up (someone's linked to it now). In other news, if anyone needs an blog/essay writer, I know a quite good one who's done some work for me.

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