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YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

• Renatewelgemoed 8y ago
  Have never been this hated by my husband who nearly killed me just because i wanted to lay my hand on his Samsung phone and i was treated like i was a small kid i endured for too long but i could not take it any longer then i was informed of a hacker who saves relations by hacking into cell phones without physical access to there phones and after contacting him mehn i got results of what my husband has been hiding on his phone i got to read all his whats-app messages, text messages and most especially his deleted text messages then i knew what had been going on with him lately i found out my husband is a BIG CHEAT but am happy that i found a helper please you all should feel free to contact this hacker (BLACKHATTHACKER@TUTA.IO) he was the hacker that helped me hack into my spouse phone and i must confess this hacker is fast and easy going you all would love his hacking skills. Renate Welgemoed
• roseadams 8y ago
  Hey guys i don't really do this but i promised Mr Supreme i was going to let people know about his hacking skills once he gets me a proof that he is really genuine and i really wanted to know what my husband has been up to lately as I seem not to be getting his attention, but supremehacker440@gmailcom was able to hack into my husband’s Fb, Snapchat, WhatsAp, Instagram and full phone text, call logs and all the pictures datas on the phone successfully; and he also help fixing hacked applications as long its Electronics.
• baldfat 8y ago
  As a former University Librarian and Residents Director A) Cheating happens more then it doesn't. In a Philosophy Class which had a dozen seniors all cheated in Spring Semester. Professor flunked them all by giving them an F and told them they were lucky they weren't expelled. President Graduated the students and fired the professor. Then on appeal the President was fired and the Professor rehired with a raise. B) Shocked that YouTube or any stock traded company would allow these videos to stay up. Morally this is wrong since cheating hurts everyone in education. EDIT: C) No one was ever expelled for cheating, ever at my school.
  • sithadmin 8y ago
    As someone that used to write papers for cheaters: it doesn't bother me much, because higher education is already eating itself alive in the US. The impact of a few students paying others to author papers on their behalf is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US.
    • baldfat 8y ago
      A) Cheating hurts everyone. > is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US B) Because student at top universities (For the most part) have higher GPA in high school and a higher SAT scores already. Unless your morals require a strict bell curve of 10% F, 10% A, 40% C and 40% B?
      • majormajor 8y ago
        Do you want to be able to identify the best of the best? That's the fundamental question here - if that's a useful thing for society, to have credentials that distinguish beyond "did well in high school," then you don't want grade inflation. And if you don't - you could make a solid case that the extreme ends of those skills may not be that useful in general outside of academia - than do Harvard et al need nearly as much money as we throw at them today?
        • eanzenberg 8y ago
          Peer group matters. Being bottom 10% at Harvard is quite different than being bottom 10% at Boston University (no offense).
          • majormajor 8y ago
            The people who seem to not believe this are the people pushing for grade inflation, no? Grade inflation is all about making everyone who isn't top 10% have a prettier resume.
          • 8y ago
• sithadmin 8y ago
  I paid my rent and living expenses when pursuing my Masters degree by writing papers for services that helped undergrads cheat on class/term papers. I don't regret it at all. It helped me become a faster, more efficient author, and in my experience, the sort of student that would pay someone else to buy a paper will end up failing out one way or another regardless. I knew people that paid for papers in undergrand, and most either flunked out, or barely graduated and ended up worse off than our other classmates in terms of job/grad school prospects.
  • shifter 8y ago
    That shifts the "cost" to employers... and you profited from it. Does that make it theft? :-)
    • sithadmin 8y ago
      I don't really feel sympathy for employers that don't adequately screen candidates. And who knows: maybe the cheaters are completely capable of meeting the requirements of whatever job they end up in.
      • ambicapter 8y ago
        inb4 the next HN article decrying hilarious overwrought interviewing practices...
    • soperj 8y ago
      This is a cost they should be bearing.
  • badlucklottery 8y ago
    >or barely graduated and ended up worse off than our other classmates in terms of job/grad school prospects. And also devalues the degree their peers actually worked for, even if only a little. I've been in a lot of interviews where I'm wondering, "How the hell did this person graduate from ${school}?" and the obvious answer is "a non-zero amount of cheating". I don't think you should beat yourself up over it but I also think but it's also important not to rationalize it away either.
• chrisseaton 8y ago
  I don't understand how this works. Surely you lecturers are going to know your unique voice, your skill level and your opinions and a random essay by someone else is not going to be passable as your own. Plus don't you have to discuss in seminars essays that you submit? Won't it become apparent that it's not your work when you can't defend it? Plus where do they find people skilled in the particular curriculums of every school?
  • ISL 8y ago
    Many classes have a student/teacher ratio that makes such individual attention impractical. Furthermore, if someone is ghostwriting for you all semester, the ghostwriter's voice is the voice that the teacher knows.
    • sithadmin 8y ago
      >if someone is ghostwriting for you all semester, the ghostwriter's voice is the voice that the teacher knows. This is also true. My agencies took care to assign repeat clients back to the same writers.
  • sithadmin 8y ago
    >Surely you lecturers are going to know your unique voice, your skill level and your opinions and a random essay by someone else is not going to be passable as your own. In the US, the bulk of cheaters buying academic papers are in huge class sections where a majority of grading is divvied up between graduate assistants. Even if the professor strongly suspects that a student turns in a paper that isn't their own work, it's rarely worth the effort of escalating unless the paper is an obvious and provable case of plagiarism. Plagiarism is a very hard claim to prove when the paper one submits is bespoke.
    • Fomite 8y ago
      Indeed, on occasion TAs are deliberately rotated, which has benefits, but does mean it will take them a long time to learn your "voice".
  • 8y ago
• xenihn 8y ago
  I know two people who are currently doing a CS MS who barely do any of their own assignments. They have friends help them, either by doing most of it or all of it. They can pass programming classes because tests are leniently graded, and at least half of the score comes from multiple choice questions that can be answered without actually understanding the material.
• rb808 8y ago
  On a related theme - does anyone know how many people cheat on the initial round hiring tests? Seems pretty easy to outsource, but I'm not sure how common it is. I've always assumed our applicants did the work themselves but maybe I'm naieve. TBH if I was applying myself I'd be pretty tempted as usually its just a time suck.
  • wpietri 8y ago
    The downside would be that you'd be more likely to work at a place that either isn't sharp enough to detect cheaters or can't get it together to care. Personally, if I suspect somebody is a liar or a cheater, I won't hire them. I build teams that are low on micromanagement and high on independence and trust. Somebody inclined toward fraud can be a big problem in a context like that, both because of the direct damage they do and because they lower ambient level of trust. I recently had somebody apply for an internship claiming extensive iOS experience with a nice iOS project on GitHub. But the commit history was shallow, so I did some digging. Turns out it was a group project, and one of the other people did almost all the work. That person was instantly dead to me. They surely got a job somewhere, but I feel sorry for their coworkers, who at best had to pick up a lot of slack, and at worst had to put up with a bunch of new rules and micromanagement because one employee couldn't be trusted.
    • 8_hours_ago 8y ago
      Maybe it was pair programming on the partner’s computer, with most of the work being done by the candidate? I feed bad that they got immediately rejected for something that could have easily been fact checked by a few interview questions.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • greedo 8y ago
    We had an applicant interview for an Oracle position. He did really well in the phone interviews and video interviews. Hired him, and wouldntyouknow, he looked very different in person. After a week of on boarding, it was pretty obvious that he had paid someone to do his interviews...
• majormajor 8y ago
  A bit of chatter here about "it eventually catches up to people anyway" that I think misses the point. You want people to learn when the stakes are low. This is better for them, and it's better for all of us. School should gradually go from low stakes to higher stakes, not be a low-stakes zone the whole time that then tosses people into the real world. Otherwise you're presented with terrible choices like expelling a 20 year old for a habit they learned when they were 8 and never got called on, vs letting them get away with continuing to cheat. Making it easy to cheat and lie when the stakes are low helps create situations like "we can't trust anyone who says they know how to program so we have to waste a lot of interview time on tedious crap." The first solution that occurs to me seems to be smaller class sizes and differently structured assignments with more of a "tell me about why you wrote this" type interactive stuff. The same way you'd do when looking at someone's github, to see how deep their understanding of the code there goes.
  • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    One community particularly harmed by academic cheating is foreign students, particularly those from China and India. Cheating amongst foreign students, particularly those from India and China, occurs at elevated frequencies [1]. But there is money to be made. Universities earn fat tuitions. And parades of scumbags take exams, write papers and falsify figures for a fee. The result is limited enforcement in the specific, i.e. against offenders and facilitators, in favor of a presumption of guilt in the general, i.e. against all foreign students from China and India. I personally know honest individuals who had to overcome a presumption of cheating at school, at interviews and in the workplace. And it isn't just the cheaters who are complicit. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-more-than-domestic-ones-1465140141 https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...
    • basementcat 8y ago
      When visiting a university in China, I saw a prominently displayed list of students who were caught cheating in the most recent term. I haven't yet seen such lists in American universities.
• misterbowfinger 8y ago
  This reminds me of a story from my AI professor in college. Not exactly his words, but it was something like... "You have to do all of your work on your own. But let's say you decided to copy someone else's homework. Well, to make sure you don't just plagiarize it, you're going to start changing variables and function names, and maybe alter the structure of the code altogether. As it turns out, the more you alter the copy, the more it actually becomes your own work and eventually you would have, in a sense, done the work yourself."
  • bad_good_guy 8y ago
    I may not have grasped the intended point to be made from your quote, but I don't see how changed variables names or functions or whatever results in the understanding of the logic.
    • fjsolwmv 8y ago
      They mean that if you can change it enough to not be detected as plagiarism, you must be rewriting it in your own ideas, aka learning.
• estsauver 8y ago
  I did a little poking on some of the profiles that are listed as top essay writers. A lot of them that claim to be "Professors" are actually photos of professors, but are usually from radically different fields. This one is clearly just a stock photo: https://edubirdie.com/writer/public/750289 https://edubirdie.com/writer/public/750289 http://www.humanresourcestoday.com/diversity/?open-article-id=7197807&article-title=5-incredibly-easy-ways-to-increase-workplace-diversity-this-year&blog-domain=brazen.com&blog-title=brazen-hr http://www.humanresourcestoday.com/diversity/?open-article-i...
  • maddyboo 8y ago
    I tried going through their onboarding process up to the point where you get bids and messages from the "professors". They send you messages in broken English like this: "hello esteemed customer. kindly assign me the order. i have read the instructions and understood them clearly as the assignment falls under my field of study.Thus i can guarantee high quality work, free from plagiarism and grammatical errors. Timely delivery is also my priority." This seems like an essay mill out of India, which isn't surprising. [1] https://i.imgur.com/MlTdNDq.png https://i.imgur.com/MlTdNDq.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/DqLO4Pj.png https://i.imgur.com/DqLO4Pj.png
• snambi 8y ago
  Ha... people find another way to do the same thing. Fundamentally the education industry is failing to inspire students to study.
  • warent 8y ago
    Agreed with this. There's a disproportionate number of students that are doing the work because they feel forced to. If the education system isn't willing to somehow alter itself to engage its students rather than force pointless crap on them that they'll try hard to forget after finals, then the education system can continue to expect a large number of people attempting to game the system. Should it be condoned? Obviously not, but the point is this cheating thing is only a symptom of a much bigger issue
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I get the outrage over cheating, and it really bothered me in classes that graded on a curve that the cheaters would really adversely impact the people who didn't. But there is a meta question here, why does a youtube "star" even succumb to the idea of advertising/promoting a cheating product, when doing so might put all of their Youtube revenue at risk? Maybe it is because they get crap Youtube revenue and 'several hundred dollars' is enough to push past their moral compass. People put a lot of heart and sweat into their Youtube channels. Perhaps it is that Google is increasingly sucking more and more of the money that used to go to the channel in order to prop up their service which can't get advertising revenues to support it. I wonder when the Screen Actors Guild is going to figure out they have another battlefront to engage on.
  • forgotmysn 8y ago
    When Hollywood stops seeing the Internet as the enemy.
  • KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
    "Several hundred dollars" heh. These deals are worth at least 5 digits, sometimes 6.
    • ChuckMcM 8y ago
      From the article: *"Channels with tens of thousands of subscribers can be offered hundreds of dollars for each advert." Where do you get the 10's of thousands of dollars figure from?
      • magissima 8y ago
        Tens of thousands of subscribers isn't very many.
        • ChuckMcM 8y ago
          "According to The Economist, influencers with at least 100,000 subscribers on YouTube can get an average of $12,500 for a sponsored post, with payments going up rapidly if you have one million subscribers or more. But those figures refer to endorsements by people who are celebrities in their own right. Someone who's only well known on YouTube might not command that kind of pay." https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-million-monthly-viewers-earn-less-than-17000-a-year-research-shows.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-... Suggests you can get low five figures for an endorsement with 100,000 viewers.
• at-fates-hands 8y ago
  As someone who worked as a grad student in a large Midwestern university, these "paper writing" services have been around since the dawn of time. As a grad student, it was hilariously easy to spot these for several reasons. One, the writing style is usually inconsistent. You'll have a student writing at about a high school level suddenly start using huge $5 words? Highly unlikely. Or a student who writes almost exclusively on one topic (our school had a ton of ag engineers so anything farm related was a favorite) and then suddenly is interested in the micro-economics of island based economies? Yeah, that's a big rad flag too. As a University, our golden rule to clamp down on these was to require all local sources, no internet sources, and have the ability to go back and look at other papers the student has turned in for comparison. We'd normally bust students, then give them two or three days to turn in a paper they actually wrote with no penalties. Most of these situations were just due to being lazy and not caring (I was in the Sociology department) so it wasn't so much about cheating as it was just getting the students to think critically and write better.
• djangowithme 8y ago
  "What do you have to lose? Stop being a bitch. Be a boss" - im sold
• djhworld 8y ago
  Discussions about cheating aside, I find it hilarious watching these YouTube influencers dropping these ads right in the middle of their videos without even a hint of remorse. I mean, I get it, they want to make money, but still. It reminds me of the days when some YouTubers would promote/endorse products without specifically saying they were paid to do so. Or worse, promoting products for gambling sites that they had business interests in. It's interesting to see all this play out, it almost feels like it's the wild west on YT right now. Every time the regulators try to come in and enforce some policy, people still find the loopholes to create a quick buck.
• 2close4comfort 8y ago
  Too bad they do not possess the moral standing to do better with the audience they have. But hey, Capitalism is great right as long as you have zero character and are vapid enough to believe that any of this fake crap matters. I say it is fine because they are the crabs at the bottom of the bucket...
• eecsninja 8y ago
  I'm really disappointed by the downvotes that sithadmin, misterbowfinger, and I have been receiving in this thread. Let me restate the argument, not in favor of cheating but why it's not the moral issue that everyone makes it out to be: 1. Cheating is only an issue in the artificial world of academia, where it goes against how the system is supposed to work. 2. We only think it is a moral issue because it's been drilled into us since we were kids, and that we think it is not fair to those who don't cheat and devalues the value of their degree. 3. The current system is stupid. Academic grades and degrees, to the extent that they affect your life after academia, should be based on what you can accomplish or explain, not how well you can write answers. 4. Employers should be using other methods to screen prospective employees -- looking at past projects, word of mouth, etc. The sooner we can put to rest the notion that we should spend ages 6 through 22 in an artificial system that has no relation to the real world before we can enter the real world as functioning adults, the better.
  • eecsninja 8y ago
    The haters are out in full force today. Why don't you post point-by-point refutals here instead of hiding behind your downvotes? Way to demonstrate that you're incapable of thinking outside the box that I mentioned in point #2.
  • trendia 8y ago
    I disagree. Homework and exams have two purposes: 1. Help the student learn (by applying theory in homework and encouraging internalization for exams), and 2. Verifying that students have learned the material Cheating destroys both of those. A student can copy a solution to a general relativity problem, but that doesn't mean they understand it, and likewise they can obtain the exam before they take it and memorize the solutions, but then the exam only measures whether they've memorized the solution. That is, cheating completely eliminates the purpose of obtaining an education.
    • eecsninja 8y ago
      And why do we care in a real-world sense whether this student has cheated in general relativity? If that person goes to a physics lab, he would be found out eventually. In a real-world sense, cheating hurts nobody except the person doing it, if even that.
• mgleason_3 8y ago
  Interesting. Maybe it’s cause teachers will rely less on homeworkers and more on in-class work?
• RIMR 8y ago
  I would love to see universities set a precedent and just catalog these YoutTbers by name, and then let them know that they are permanently barred from ever being admitted to their schools. That would send a very strong message about how dishonorable academic cheating is. Anyone promoting it is unfit for higher education, for obvious reasons.
  • warent 8y ago
    Disagree. I argue that a poorly educated person would be more likely to cheat. In a sense, that punishment would be refusing education for the crime of lacking education.
    • RIMR 8y ago
      A poorly educated person is the most likely to benefit from an education. Cheating just means they intend to get credit for an education without actually becoming more educated. Cheaters have no place in academia.
• a-dub 8y ago
  I suspect that if training and social sorting weren't conflated in academia the way that they are today, the training would be much more effective.
• YellowCode 8y ago
  Here is an interesting read http://www.culturewars.com/2008/BrooklynExistentialism.html http://www.culturewars.com/2008/BrooklynExistentialism.html
• fma 8y ago
  I think the solution to this is...classes have homework assignments throughout the semesters, but your final paper is one that you write in class. And it's like 50% of your grade. The purpose of the homework assignments throughout the semester is to prepare for the final. If you ace the final, even having paid for essays - then congrats you were able to learn. Cheating is too easy now. There's a website where you can get solutions manual for free. I've even seen websites that give solutions to Kumon homeowork. For those who don't know Kumon - it's an after school curriculum to help kids develop academically, to get to grade level if they are behind, of to accelerate ahead even further if they are already ahead. What's the point of cheating on those... When I was in high school in the late 90's, babelfish had come out and kids were cheating on their Spanish homework because it would spit out poor Spanish. Now with the gig economy I'm sure you can scan your homework, upload it and a native Spanish speaker would give you the perfect translation. I remember reading that adjunct professors writing essays to supplement their dirt poor income. As far as YouTube Stars getting paid to advertise...meh.
  • Splines 8y ago
    > I've even seen websites that give solutions to Kumon homeowork. For those who don't know Kumon - it's an after school curriculum to help kids develop academically, to get to grade level if they are behind, of to accelerate ahead even further if they are already ahead. What's the point of cheating on those... Smh. Cheating at Kumon is pointless. It's the process that matters, the end result is meaningless.
    • fjsolwmv 8y ago
      If your parents force you to do Kumon, you might cheat to complete worksheets
  • Kalium 8y ago
    > I think the solution to this is...classes have homework assignments throughout the semesters, but your final paper is one that you write in class. And it's like 50% of your grade. The purpose of the homework assignments throughout the semester is to prepare for the final. If you ace the final, even having paid for essays - then congrats you were able to learn. Isn't this a blue book exam?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• mirimir 8y ago
  It's more than a little ironic that drug companies typically pay respected medical-school professors to publish articles by ghostwriters. And yes, I know, whataboutism. But aren't faculty supposed to set examples for students?
• foobaw 8y ago
  How is the quality of writing for this? I know essays are extremely important for college admissions so I'm wondering if this site's work is actually contributing to changing people's future.
• eecsninja 8y ago
  Anecdote: I remember in a scientific writing class in college, the professor told us that we should always give credit when citing someone. I asked her if that was just a good practice and courtesy, or an actual moral obligation. She just repeated herself "you should always give credit" and didn't seem to understand my question.
  • ThoAppelsin 8y ago
    It seems like she meant to say that it is wrong not to give that credit, i.e. it is not just a good practice, not only a moral obligation that you become only immoral for not complying, but a requirement, a must that if you do not do it, then you are in the wrong.
• bambax 8y ago
  Why do students have to write essays at home? Get them all in a classroom or big hall for 4-6 hours and let them write something on an imposed topic, the same for everyone. Cheating would be much harder this way.
  • jamesb93 8y ago
    This is what I did to get my BA only 2 years ago. We had exam essays and prepared essays. It very quickly weeds out the people who don't know what they're talking about.
• ada1981 8y ago
  Academic Outsourcing or Cheating? Isn’t learning how to arbitrage time / money / skills a critical understanding for the Gig economy? Also, don’t we praise ignoring rules that don’t serve you and force your resources into lower yield activities? (Uber, AirBnb, etc) Where else in the real world do you get penalized for paying someone else to develop IP for you? You can have books ghost written, copy for articles, pretty much anything. Have there been any studies that show people who outsource papers fair worse later in life? Aren’t Universites largely a scam to extract money for credentialing leaving students with gross amounts of unbankruptable debt? - Devils Advocate
  • sakuronto 8y ago
    Sorry, but can you please argue against your own devil's advocate, because I'm having a hard time coming up with counterpoints, and as a student currently in university, it's left me pretty depressed about my future. Cheating really does seem to pay off both in university and in the real world, regardless of how immoral it is.
    • ada1981 8y ago
      Sure. The biggest argument is that integrity trumps being clever. If you don’t like school, just quit. Trust yourself and endure the pain of going against the mainstream. Following your bliss and intuition will be the hardest and most rewarding experience of your life. Find mentors, ignore people who are still contracted in their own trauma / nightmare who will try to hold you back. If you like, come join us on Majagual.org, I will gift you a journey with us.
• ryanx435 8y ago
  All the people in this thread that think most people get a degree for knowledge, instead of the truth that a degree is just a piece of paper that tells employers "I am a normal member of the middle class and I can do basic stuff so please hire me". I honestly don't care if people cheat.
  • sakuronto 8y ago
    As a person who just started university, I have to ask: how else do I get employers to not entirely ignore my application on account of "insufficient qualifications"?