UPSB v4
Serious Discussion / Cheating in the American education system
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 01:54:28
just read this article: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/ Thoughts? As a stressed out student, I can clearly understand where these kids are coming from, but still...$2000 for a paper? come on people.
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 02:05:23
too much to read, sum it up
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 02:19:28
tl;dr money makes life easy what's new
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 02:19:32
the style really reminds me of this for some reason http://newschoolers.com/web/forums/readthread/thread_id/539252/ both of them are good reads anyway
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 02:25:21
I read the whole thing. It's depressing since it demeans the whole education system. However, lazy students are just lazy students, there's nothing you can really do about it. It's almost impossible these days to make sure that students write their own papers, and as long as students are willing to pay for work, cheating will always happen.
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 02:42:37
(possibly slightly OT, but none the less) i attended a TEDx talks session held at my school yesterday (filming it for the website), and one of the things mentioned was the idea of the status quo the article (only going by the summary by nexus) shows that as well as a capitalist mind state (anything can be done with enough money), it demonstrates the problem with education, in that its not acceptable to be brilliant at one thing, you have to achieve A+ in every subject to achieve success i'm finishing high school now, and this seems kind of apparent to me i already have been told that i can get into the university i want to study film and tv, hence making success in my final exams highly redundant. my point with this is two sided, for one, it means that if i am good at media studies, maths (which i'm taking) doesn't really matter. but the flip side, i still have (some) motivation to do well in my exams, partially because of the mindstate that the education system has built up in my 12 years of schooling having the pressure to achieve well at everything, plus the thought engraved into western society that money rules everything, would have inevitably created the problem of buying papers to cheat in school
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 03:00:13
Wooooooooooooow, I believe the guy when he says he churns out 20-40 pages per day...
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 03:34:26
WTF is this i do papers for people 5-10 bucks a page admittedly not A+ material all the time but i put effort into them and it's at LEAST a B- for those lazy fucks
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 04:01:33
Paype121 wrote: WTF is this i do papers for people 5-10 bucks a page admittedly not A+ material all the time but i put effort into them and it's at LEAST a B- for those lazy fucks
are they college papers that you're writing? -
Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 05:04:35
I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.
My opinion? There's nothing wrong with it, for now. Of all the majors he's claimed to have written for, he never once wrote for a useful one. Even if those people get their degree, their horrid work ethic won't come back to bite them later in life because they really won't be doing anything. It's not like he wrote a mechanical engineer's thesis. EDIT: I'd say the bigger problem is that we have people majoring in stupid shit like sociology. -
Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 05:24:10
Rich,Spoiled and Lazy.End of story.
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 06:17:13
J A Z Z wrote: Rich,Spoiled and Lazy.End of story.
Maybe if you read some of the article you would know that a majority of his clients are ESL students. -
Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 07:07:35
they should just stay home and wait to die if you have to cheat.Whats the whole point?
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 07:08:05
This doesn't really apply to our school, since the only pass/fail classes are math and science. It doesn't matter for lit, 'cuz if your lit teacher is hard, then she doesn't like you and you're doomed to get < A anyways. But I can see why people would wanna do this. Pulling all nighters to finish essays assigned 3 days before and writing lab reports really just sucks. It's a lot easier just to pay someone to do it for you.
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Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 13:12:16
XYZaki wrote: I'd say the bigger problem is that we have people majoring in stupid shit like sociology.
:rofl: Win. -
Date: Sun, Nov 21 2010 15:58:52
ahahah notice he can't do any scientific papers or math. not that he doesn't want to, but he CAN'T. these take too much skills, too much specific knowledge to be able to write it up quickly all the human science papers can be bullshitted in the same way :)
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Date: Sun, Dec 19 2010 12:54:05
Intriguing article, thanks for sharing. As others have touched upon, our capitalistic society allows us to use money as a panacea. But, as you know, while throwing money at problems might seem to fix them temporarily, it's far from a permanent solution. The shadow scholar's justification for ghostwriting papers is that he's merely making a living by capitalizing on opportunity. Nobody can deny that you need money to sustain your lifestyle - or even your life, in some cases - but while the "scholar" squarely blames a broken education system for driving students to 'despirashun', he should acknowledge that he's part of the problem by providing students with the option to cheat. If he truly cared about their intellectual welfare, he would become a tutor or mentor, but I guess these options aren't lucrative or attractive enough to him. I agree that colleges are flawed, even to a comical extent, if the system allows students who cheat to pass. Colleges already force prospective students to be financially privileged in order to attend them, but if you can fork out even more dough for a guaranteed pass, it undermines the reason such institutions exist. One cure for this could be to make the final exam worth 100% of the grade in individual courses, and raising the passing mark to 60-70%, actually forcing students to learn the material in order to pass, but many would see this as unfair. Even then, this still leaves the problem of ghostwritten theses in Master's and phD programs. Either way, I don't think the issue is worth fretting about, because people who buy an education don't truly receive one. These people are ultimately committing self-sabotage in the long run. It is true that education is generally correlated with income, but the latter is more a result of success rather than education. One of the most important things you learn in college is not actually specialized knowledge but how to cultivate qualities like hard work, commitment, perseverance, goal-setting and follow-through, creative thought and expression, etc. These transferable skills pave the way for success and fulfillment later in life. Those who pay their way out of adversity or university will suffer in this regard.
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Date: Fri, Dec 24 2010 20:24:37
[video=youtube;zDZFcDGpL4U]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U[/video] This is a good illustration on how public education around the world sucks.
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Date: Sun, Dec 26 2010 01:46:59
XYZaki wrote: EDIT: I'd say the bigger problem is that we have people majoring in stupid shit like sociology.
loooooool tis truth. having taken sociology for the first time recently...man, its so...meh