11 ms·

The Shadow Scholar

233 points by harscoat 16y ago

hko 16y ago
"it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst."
- Alex3917 16y ago
  This isn't especially surprising considering that education students have the second lowest GRE scores of any academic field. (The lowest being public administrators.)
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    I'm not really sure how that follows. Was there some established link between GRE scores and ethics? I suspect it has as much to do with the following requirements: 1) A degree that is take-home essay heavy. 2) Very vocational -- the goal being the degree, not the learning. I'd expect business and law schools to be high on the list too, although maybe the dynamic is somewhat different for professional schools.
    - gwern 16y ago
      Suggested link is lack of brains, not lack of scruples - remember the shadow scholar's list of reasons includes 1 group that is simply too stupid to handle the work.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        This would imply a large variance of ability in the group, not a lower average GRE score. Although it could be speculated that as the GRE score regresses to the mean (of the general population), the variance likely increases.
dcbell 16y ago
This is why I like HN so much---the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process. It's extremely focused on what can you do? An hour spent hacking to make something useful or cool is never a wasted hour. But wouldn't it suck to realize that you spent years in grad school without even learning anything? In any case, this sort of news---the rise of cheating---is both good news and bad news for founders. The good is that your competitors are probably hiring these people. Especially so for folks like AirBnB who are competing with hotel chains, etc. The bad, of course, is that when hiring, you might run into people like this. But if your hiring process>your competitor's process, then this is very much a net gain for you.
- azanar 16y ago
  ...the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process. I think the entire culture is aimed at a much broader motivation than that. It is aimed at a culture of intense intellectual curiosity, which makes the community self-selecting in meritocratic way. This carries into startups as well, because they are as much about what you can learn as what you can do. Presumably, most startups are exploring at least some uncharted territory. How curious you are about that territory will suggest how much you can learn from it, and what you can learn from it will certainly have an effect on how well you execute. As a result, startups end up as one of the primary focusses of the culture, but I think this as much a byproduct as it is an end to itself.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
thefool 16y ago
I am involved with a startup working on this problem (http://GuruFi.com http://GuruFi.com). Fundamentally this problem is derives from the fact that it is difficult for people to learn how to write and structure their ideas. Hell thats basically the whole point of PhD programs, and people spend years finishing them. With the internet, it becomes really easy to just pay someone else who already knows how to write to do the work for you. The only real solution to this that I see is to make these services legitimate as a teaching outlet rather than as a cheating outlet. Force people to write a draft. In editing, don't rewrite, just comment and give people feedback as to how they can improve the structure of their document. In general have the people feel that they are getting taught rather than just getting a product. My hope is that creating a legitimate service will encroach the market people like this target, and will actually force students to learn something through their writing assignments.
- rick_2047 16y ago
  I don't think getting writers only from the top 20 uni will work. I wouldn't like my high school paper to be edited by a grad student at an Ivey League college
  - thefool 16y ago
    This is something we are doing just in the beginning to build credibility. Once we are a little more established we plan on being less selective with our editors and letting the market decide who the great people are.
    - rick_2047 16y ago
      The best people to do this work will be someone who has just passed (or is working on) a level high than that. A high school lab report can be much better drafted by a undergrad freshmen than a grad student as he has done this recently and is much more connected with it while the grad student has elevated in terms of language and lowest common denominator of knowledge in any subject. They also tend to forget the basics somehow.
Eliezer 16y ago
Most telling quote: As long as it doesn't require me to do any math, I will write anything.
- groaner 16y ago
  Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even better-paid assignments (supply vs. demand, after all) to interview with the Chronicle.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even better-paid assignments I think that opportunists with those abilities went to work for Wall Street. Some people call them quants. I suspect it's much more lucrative than any crumb gathering around academia.
- thebooktocome 16y ago
  You know, maybe after I finish my Ph. D. in maths, I can go on to become the "Shadow Scholar" for online math courses. ... That actually kind of sounds like fun.
  - hyperbovine 16y ago
    Something tells me you'd manage to sell about one problem set per assignment. Live by the sword, die by the sword :-)
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Math shadow scholars probably don't pay well. Most of my math courses had a large fraction of the grade based on an in class test, not homework.
Detrus 16y ago
This is good news for the education system. Now they have competition that magnifies the flaws in their practice.
- DanielN 16y ago
  I don't know. Isn't this a subsystem that hides the flaws. Writing the article exposes some flaws but even then, most professors who read this aren't going to be able to pick out of a line up which of their students have used such services.
  - Detrus 16y ago
    Widespread cheating means people don't take education seriously for whatever reason. Cheating frequency is an indicator that the education system is doing something wrong. "The customer is always right" is applicable here. A similar attitude existed in the USSR. Students cheated cooperatively to stick it to the man. When education is "the man" it's a sign that something must change. People see it as another obstacle, not a stepping stone. Cheating became socially acceptable. You could detect it with software, make students use an app that records the time of every keystroke and save. If a paper is written too quickly, while shorter papers from the student were not, it's a red flag. But that would make the problem worse, cheaters will get smarter, detecting them will get harder. Educators must try new things so that people won't want to cheat in the first place. Then after detecting cheating they should use it as a metric of their own performance. Otherwise we're well on our way to social acceptance of cheating.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
"Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal." Lol.
CoreDumpling 16y ago
While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top. What's scary is how far the lazy rich kid will be able to go with this, with a promising career in management. I wouldn't want to work for someone like this, but it is easy to imagine him being very effective. (For all I know I could have worked under one of these before, and not even hated it.)
- yters 16y ago
  Managing effectively is more about people skills than education.
  - mak120 16y ago
    So, I guess you could just pick up an illiterate guy with good people skills to run a large corporation or be the president?
    - yters 16y ago
      Yep, pretty much. As long as he can talk with experts and understand their position he can lead.
      - GFischer 16y ago
        Yep, I can personally attest that a director at one large corporation has a BOUGHT undergraduate degree, and no other education. He inherited the position from the hardworking founder through being extremely good at people skills and corporate backstabbing (he should have a degree in that :) ). It saddens me and makes me a bit more cynical every time I see him. The corporation survives because these monsters are mostly self-sustaining, and those at lower levels do the actual work (I wouldn't give it a chance if some disruption came along, though).
yinmoneyhuang 16y ago
To a very limited extent, schools have tried to protect themselves from such cheating by requiring students (or prospective students) to compose writing samples under controlled conditions. The Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for instance, requires students to write an essay. The essay is not scored; rather, it is forwarded to the schools to which the student has applied. The schools then compare the LSAT essay to the personal statement submitted with the student's application. A gross disparity between the quality of writing seen on the LSAT essay and that on the personal statement presumably raises suspicions that the personal statement was ghostwritten. Perhaps such measures should be implemented more widely.
- mdwrigh2 16y ago
  While this is an interesting way of comparing, I'd be slightly worried if I were applying to law school. Given that you have a limited amount of time to write your LSAT essay, and an essentially unlimited amount of time to write and polish your personal statement (plus have professors, friends and family look over it), I could see there being a large but legitimate gap between the two. Perhaps it's not as great as I think though.
  - yardie 16y ago
    There are style markers (the writer's voice) that are in the paper no matter how it is edited. This is how critics and editors can tell when a book is written by the real author and when it is ghostwritten. The only way it's possible to avoid this is to digest a lot of material by the original author so you learn to become that voice. This is also prevalent in song lyrics. You can hear when a rapper, for example, is using their own material rather than a ghostwriters. The flow and definition will be really different.
BoppreH 16y ago
I envy the knowledge that this guy has amassed.
- light3 16y ago
  Sure he probably goes through more material per day than 99.99999% of the population, but whether he remembers or understands is another matter.
  - BoppreH 16y ago
    And there is also the sad fact that he has to hide all that under heavy layers of academic wording. But even in the worst case scenario, he has some degree of familiarity with almost everything. Except math.
    - Natsu 16y ago
      You might not believe me, but I've seen essays in place of equations on math tests before. I think one was even relevant enough to get partial credit...
- obiterdictum 16y ago
  There is probably a lot of redundancy. It's like learning a new technology. Your first project will take a long time, then, once you've solved the meta-problem, it gets incrementally faster each iteration until it reaches some lower bound. But the knowledge you gain each iteration gets lower too, until it's marginal.
jorleif 16y ago
I can churn out four or five pages an hour. I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging. On a more serious note, I think a key benefit for computer science as an academic discipline is that much work is published in conference articles, rather than journals as in most other fields. This means that computer scientists must be able to communicate complicated ideas on 8 pages, rather than 30-40. It really forces the communication to be terse and efficient. I've done course assignments together with people who only publish in journals and it's amazing how these people can blabber on for ages. We had a maximum page length of 20 pages, which left about 3 pages per author. I was very puzzled when some people wrote 6 pages of stuff which I could have easily expressed in 1.5 pages without any loss of clarity, but I'm blaming the culture of their fields, where many words are better than few, and no hard limits are imposed.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  "Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph." I almost find this more depressing than the rampant cheating in which this author engages.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    "Politician's Patter" http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politicians-patter-20091129.mp3 http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politici...
- rick_2047 16y ago
  I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.
twrensch 16y ago
I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for an e-mail. I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonesty policy, which would lead to--at least--failure of the course. It didn't happen. The student came up with a lame excuse, I was chided for harassing the student, and it was all swept under the rug. I was tempted to resign in protest, but kept with it for two more years before quietly leaving academics. I enjoy teaching, I think I'm good at it and my students tended to agree. Unfortunately, I can't make myself teach in the current educational system here in the US.
- Female 16y ago
  A resounding upvote. I only taught for 2 years as a graduate teaching assistant, but we were told in training to never accuse anyone of cheating ever. It opened the university up to being sued, and made everyone's life more complicated.
- oz 16y ago
  Sounds similar the story about a week ago where are professor is being disciplined for recommending that a grad student's degree be revoked, because the student did not meet the requirements. Robin Hanson from OvercomingBias says it best: School isn't about learning: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html
- _delirium 16y ago
  I guess this particular part has never greatly bothered me about academia, though plenty of things are quite broken and bother me. I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring myself to care that much about that, though. To me the important question is whether people who want to learn are able to; not whether people who don't want to learn slip through or don't slip through. The much bigger failing in my mind isn't that cheaters aren't sufficiently punished, but that motivated students who want to learn things other than exactly what they're assigned are given virtually no assistance, and often actively discouraged (the side-projects-are-bad, keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you're-told mentality).
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
grellas 16y ago
Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is? I vividly remember the slackers of my generation (college/law school in the 1970s). They took the basket-weaving classes on the cynical assumption that it was a short-cut to getting an "easy A." They padded their papers with junk - that is, whenever they couldn't avoid having to do a paper. They feared the demanding teachers and ran from them. They continually looked for outline-level materials (Cliff notes, Gilberts law summaries) by which they could try to cram for a test without really having to master any of the materials. In short, they did everything possible to avoid having to think or work at the process of learning and, hence, they graduated, if at all, miles behind the hard-working students in their ability to think or to work as they turned to face real-world challenges. I have never understood this mind-set. For me, the challenge was always to take on the harder challenges if that meant developing either your substantive knowledge or your skills in writing, analyzing, communicating, or whatever. Wasn't that the point of being there, after all? The one precious commodity you have as a student that you will likely never have again is the privilege of being able to devote large blocks of uninterrupted time to diving into any given area and mastering it. Once you get into the real world, it is very difficult, if not impossible, ever to have that resource available to you again. Whatever you do, don't squander this resource but, instead, use it to advantage. You will sacrifice in the short term as you watch your friends party away while you slave away, but you will develop depth of knowledge and habits of discipline that will endure for a lifetime while those who choose to cut corners, sadly, will not. Cheating does have its victims. Those who cheat, however, will one day realize that the primary victim of that cheating is none other than they themselves. Caveat discipulus!
- oz 16y ago
  "Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?" In a word, yes. You see, education, for most people, is NOT about learning. It's about getting a job. We HN types value learning for its own sake, and would happily curl up with a copy of SICP or TAOCP and feel content. The average person wants the whole thing to be over as quickly and painlessly as possible. In the words of some of my classmates, concerning cheating: "Better to cheat than to repeat." or perhaps more poignantly: "Don't be a hero and get zero." We, my dear grellas, are not normal.
oz 16y ago
I, who dropped out of CompSci after my first year, was a small-time shadow scholar. It started innocently enough: I wasn't working, and a friend of a friend who was doing her Master's (in Education, wouldn't you know) needed help typing and formatting a document according to APA Style. I needed the money, so I visited her at the school where she worked. I took the draft she had penned and started reading. I nearly vomited. The quality of writing was atrocious. It wasn't just 'bad', or 'needing improvement'. It was shockingly, horrifyingly terrible. Poor structure. Poor grammar. Not answering the question. excessive circumlocution. Hackneyed phrases every other sentence. I diplomatically told her that I would 'change some of the words'. As she dictated and I typed, I changed sentence order and modified her word choices. When it was finished, there was a semblance of respectability. A few days later, I heard that the lecturer loved it. That, dear friend, was the beginning. I completed quite a few assignments for her, but stopped after she started quibbling over the already small fee I charged. (Note to self: Always charge what you're worth.) Sometime later, a neighbour in my building called me upstairs to help a friend of his. She was typing a paper for her degree to submit that evening, and he, knowing my language skills and typing speed wanted me to help. I went, sat down, and read. Oh, dear. I told her that in all honesty, it sucked. I made a few changes, typed up the rest. 'Twas enough for her to get hooked. Over the next two years, I did several assignments for her. It got to where she would simply email me the research question, and I'd 'learn' the subject (yes, in 2 hours), get references, and like 'Ed Dante' divide the paper into sections, and prepare material. I could do a 10 page paper in one day, which would probably net a 90% grade or better. This was after never having heard of the topic before. She would get wonderful comments from lecturers about her 'wonderful exposition' and 'excellent analysis'. This from a girl who, although not dunce, could never verbally put sentences together half that well. I often wondered about the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of her teachers. It's a smug feeling, walking around as a college dropout while knowing that you can run intellectual circles around people with graduate degrees. I should note, though, that these were all humanities subjects: Use 10 words where 1 would suffice and make up some bullshit, and you're good to go. It doesn't have to make sense because Most teachers aren't going to read it anyway! For those of us here on HN, who are in all probability above the average, it might be difficult to understand how stupid most people are; but take it from me: they are. Very. I'm done with it now, though. I hated researching stuff that bored me, although I sometimes learned a lot. The most important lesson? The world is bullshit. http://www.designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=3347 http://www.designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=3...
djm 16y ago
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Parents, government, and everybody in between seem focused on pushing as many young people into university education as possible. But it seems to me that we have pushed them too hard if they are cheating on this scale. Lots of them just don’t belong there. I imagine a fantasy future world in which ageing professors tell stories of the dark ages of their early careers; a time in which most of their students were not really interested in the subject of their degrees. A brave new world in which young people who might like to get a job, start a business, write a book, or just study independently of any official course, can go ahead and do so without putting themselves through three years of painful essay faking and pretense because “that’s what everyone else does”.
henrikschroder 16y ago
Why is there such a large focus on writing long essays in US education? When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing them was always done in school, as an exam, i.e. sit down for three hours and write. And the grading of our essays were never on length, it was always on grammar, spelling, style, form and coherency. University was largely the same. Granted, being a CS major you're expected to write a lot more code than essays. I took a few courses that had essays as part of the requirements such as technical writing and history of technology, but those were outliers, and not the norm. I mean, my Master's thesis was "only" 45 pages, and again, the professor was a lot more interested in it being coherent, correct, and actually saying something, rather than being long. So what's the point of long essays in every subject? To me, it seems like that will just make students write a lot of voluminous bullshit without ensuring that they actually learn what they write about?
- zecho 16y ago
  I was a double major in Communications and American Studies in my first go-around at an undergrad degree. It's not so much the fact that essays are necessarily the problem, but the expectation of length as the ultimate point of the exercise--from professors and students--that causes confusion. As a writer, I hate filling prose with word soup just to fill space, but early in college I often ended up writing in 15 words what could be said in 5. By my junior year, I stopped caring about meeting the length requirements and focused on solid research and arguments in my papers. Most profs didn't seem to dock me for it when I showed competence in the subject matter. Those that did were reasonable after speaking with them about it. But, that's the difference between me and the people that hire ghostwriters. I made it clear to my teachers I was there to learn and grow, regardless of many of the arbitrary milestones and requirements. I was there for the journey. People who enter university simply to pass through a series of checkpoints on their way to an end goal focus entirely on the end goal of getting a degree (and presumably shortly thereafter, a job) rather than getting an education.
skybrian 16y ago
Hmm, I suppose one way to go would be to require students to use a version-controlled word processor for their writing, and submit the version history. It could still be faked, but the difficulty of creating a good fake would make the economics less favorable. If it's badly faked, then the version history would provide evidence that's more likely to hold up than a teacher's suspicion about the student's writing.
- forensic 16y ago
  So the shadow scholar submits his version history. And then?
  - hardy263 16y ago
    A 75 page paper usually takes longer than 48 hours for normal students to write. If the version history for the paper is submitted, but all the commits are within a very short time frame, then either the student stayed up all night to write it, or they paid someone else to stay up all night to write it. And if you ask them about what the wrote on on something they took all night to write, they should know it fairly well. But if they paid someone else to do it, they wouldn't know anything that's on the paper.
    - gwern 16y ago
      So then this big company hires a programmer to write a tool to randomize entries over a week or a month or whatever, and our shadow scholar has 1 additional step when he finishes up. Basically, this idea is DRM in another guise, and terrible for all the same reasons. If you don't trust the student that much, then simply abandon take-home work in general.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - skybrian 16y ago
        Randomized entries would be obviously fake. To be a convincing fake, they have to make sure it doesn't conflict with the student's work schedule, class schedule, and so on. That means deciding when the student was supposed to have been writing the paper, which requires quite a bit more coordination and drives up the cost.
NHQ 16y ago
That guy is a good writer!
jimbokun 16y ago
"It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal." It's quite funny that such utterly dishonest people are so willing to accept someone else's word at face value. Also, that they place such stock in the institutional accreditations that they are proving to be worthless through their actions.
partition 16y ago
It's worse than the actions of individual students being dishonest. The fact that someone can do this, for so many students, in so little time, along with the fact that the students themselves have not been called out for the obvious mismatch between what they write and the signals they send out in real life with other students shows that things are fucked in a strong way; if a particular school and student is named as being part of this, it's not just that the student is called out for not doing the work that represents the degree, but that it serves as strong evidence that the particular degree or school is worthless, and the school's accreditation should be called into question. Higher education has truly gone down the toilet.
mak120 16y ago
I live in a country where cheating is rampant (although it has gotten a little better in recent years). Most of the best students (in terms of grades) at my university were outright cheaters, or employed other indirect means of academic dishonesty. Most blamed the teachers for making the courses "unpassable". You know what, no course is "unpassable". Its just something people make up to justify their incompetence and laziness. Yes, some educators are pretty bad, while others just don't care enough to stop this. But no matter what the teachers and authorities try, you cannot stop a reasonably adept cheater from using some way of gaming the system. People who are not interested in learning will cheat no matter what. Trying to lay the blame on the education system and the students is like a drug dealer saying he is not to blame but the addicts are. By providing this service, people like him are making the cheating option easier for students. I just seem to get the vibe that he is just frustrated that his novel got rejected by his university. This, compounded by financial (and perhaps academic and social?) problems, possibly results in him being bitter about university and the education system as a whole. He has every right to have whatever opinions he has. But IMHO he is no rebel working to dismantle a corrupt system. He's just a bitter writer exploiting and fueling the immorality of some people to make a buck. (Disclaimer: I am not an educator (I work as a software engineer) and I don't even have any post-graduate degree. I just don't like people who go about buying and cheating their way through life while the rest of do it the hard way.)
grovulent 16y ago
Student cheating is a systemic part of the culture and there is nothing that can be done about it. I mark logic papers. There might be a question where you have to provide a model that makes the logical formula come out as true or false - the sort of question which has an infinity of possible answers. They never follow the particular method I suggest for working through these which would lead them to the simplest answer in each case (usually a model with only one object in the domain). Yet, somehow, one paper after another, they all come up with the exact same model, with the same number of objects in the domain, the same extensions... everything. So they all just copy from one another. One student complained to me this year that a large group of them were copying answers from one another right in front of the office where they have to submit papers. Largely the university can't do much more than turn a blind eye - for without absolutely concrete evidence the students can (and often do) sue, and win.
3dFlatLander 16y ago
> Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph. I did this a lot while in college--I'm sure many did. The quality of the work was terrible in hindsight, and I did cheat myself out of some good learning opportunities. But, the thing that bothers me to this day is that no teacher ever called me out. My writing tends to be technically correct, which wasn't very common in most of my classes. I think the fluff was acceptable in comparison to sloppy spelling and grammar.
gyardley 16y ago
It's a shame the author didn't discuss where he worked, and how this industry is connected to other aspects of for-profit online education. I 'edited' college admissions essays for a couple of years, back when I was a hungry grad student. The company I worked for, CyberEdit, was acquired by Peterson's, a subsidiary of the Thompson Corporation. When Thompson started divesting its education-based businesses, Peterson's (and CyberEdit) were acquired by Nelnet, which holds and services a large portion of federally subsidized student loans. CyberEdit helps you get into a school you couldn't otherwise attend and Nelnet helps you pay for a school you couldn't otherwise afford - with all parties financially underwritten by your tax dollars. Great business.
simonjoe 16y ago
The one thing I've learned from one of the most prestigious technical universities in the world is that results are more important than integrity.
xmv 16y ago
This person's work completely lacks the kind of civic virtue that traditional liberal education was meant to inculcate. The responsibility lies with us, that we do not support the classical Western liberal tradition of virtue.

The Shadow Scholar

233 points by harscoat 16y ago

hko 16y ago

"it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst."

Alex3917 16y ago
This isn't especially surprising considering that education students have the second lowest GRE scores of any academic field. (The lowest being public administrators.)
- kenjackson 16y ago
  I'm not really sure how that follows. Was there some established link between GRE scores and ethics? I suspect it has as much to do with the following requirements: 1) A degree that is take-home essay heavy. 2) Very vocational -- the goal being the degree, not the learning. I'd expect business and law schools to be high on the list too, although maybe the dynamic is somewhat different for professional schools.
  - gwern 16y ago
    Suggested link is lack of brains, not lack of scruples - remember the shadow scholar's list of reasons includes 1 group that is simply too stupid to handle the work.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      This would imply a large variance of ability in the group, not a lower average GRE score. Although it could be speculated that as the GRE score regresses to the mean (of the general population), the variance likely increases.

dcbell 16y ago

This is why I like HN so much---the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process. It's extremely focused on what can you do? An hour spent hacking to make something useful or cool is never a wasted hour. But wouldn't it suck to realize that you spent years in grad school without even learning anything? In any case, this sort of news---the rise of cheating---is both good news and bad news for founders. The good is that your competitors are probably hiring these people. Especially so for folks like AirBnB who are competing with hotel chains, etc. The bad, of course, is that when hiring, you might run into people like this. But if your hiring process>your competitor's process, then this is very much a net gain for you.

azanar 16y ago
...the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process. I think the entire culture is aimed at a much broader motivation than that. It is aimed at a culture of intense intellectual curiosity, which makes the community self-selecting in meritocratic way. This carries into startups as well, because they are as much about what you can learn as what you can do. Presumably, most startups are exploring at least some uncharted territory. How curious you are about that territory will suggest how much you can learn from it, and what you can learn from it will certainly have an effect on how well you execute. As a result, startups end up as one of the primary focusses of the culture, but I think this as much a byproduct as it is an end to itself.

deleted 16y ago

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thefool 16y ago

I am involved with a startup working on this problem (http://GuruFi.com http://GuruFi.com). Fundamentally this problem is derives from the fact that it is difficult for people to learn how to write and structure their ideas. Hell thats basically the whole point of PhD programs, and people spend years finishing them. With the internet, it becomes really easy to just pay someone else who already knows how to write to do the work for you. The only real solution to this that I see is to make these services legitimate as a teaching outlet rather than as a cheating outlet. Force people to write a draft. In editing, don't rewrite, just comment and give people feedback as to how they can improve the structure of their document. In general have the people feel that they are getting taught rather than just getting a product. My hope is that creating a legitimate service will encroach the market people like this target, and will actually force students to learn something through their writing assignments.

rick_2047 16y ago
I don't think getting writers only from the top 20 uni will work. I wouldn't like my high school paper to be edited by a grad student at an Ivey League college
- thefool 16y ago
  This is something we are doing just in the beginning to build credibility. Once we are a little more established we plan on being less selective with our editors and letting the market decide who the great people are.
  - rick_2047 16y ago
    The best people to do this work will be someone who has just passed (or is working on) a level high than that. A high school lab report can be much better drafted by a undergrad freshmen than a grad student as he has done this recently and is much more connected with it while the grad student has elevated in terms of language and lowest common denominator of knowledge in any subject. They also tend to forget the basics somehow.

Eliezer 16y ago

Most telling quote: As long as it doesn't require me to do any math, I will write anything.

groaner 16y ago
Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even better-paid assignments (supply vs. demand, after all) to interview with the Chronicle.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even better-paid assignments I think that opportunists with those abilities went to work for Wall Street. Some people call them quants. I suspect it's much more lucrative than any crumb gathering around academia.
thebooktocome 16y ago
You know, maybe after I finish my Ph. D. in maths, I can go on to become the "Shadow Scholar" for online math courses. ... That actually kind of sounds like fun.
- hyperbovine 16y ago
  Something tells me you'd manage to sell about one problem set per assignment. Live by the sword, die by the sword :-)
kenjackson 16y ago
Math shadow scholars probably don't pay well. Most of my math courses had a large fraction of the grade based on an in class test, not homework.

Detrus 16y ago

This is good news for the education system. Now they have competition that magnifies the flaws in their practice.

DanielN 16y ago
I don't know. Isn't this a subsystem that hides the flaws. Writing the article exposes some flaws but even then, most professors who read this aren't going to be able to pick out of a line up which of their students have used such services.
- Detrus 16y ago
  Widespread cheating means people don't take education seriously for whatever reason. Cheating frequency is an indicator that the education system is doing something wrong. "The customer is always right" is applicable here. A similar attitude existed in the USSR. Students cheated cooperatively to stick it to the man. When education is "the man" it's a sign that something must change. People see it as another obstacle, not a stepping stone. Cheating became socially acceptable. You could detect it with software, make students use an app that records the time of every keystroke and save. If a paper is written too quickly, while shorter papers from the student were not, it's a red flag. But that would make the problem worse, cheaters will get smarter, detecting them will get harder. Educators must try new things so that people won't want to cheat in the first place. Then after detecting cheating they should use it as a metric of their own performance. Otherwise we're well on our way to social acceptance of cheating.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

"Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal." Lol.

CoreDumpling 16y ago

While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top. What's scary is how far the lazy rich kid will be able to go with this, with a promising career in management. I wouldn't want to work for someone like this, but it is easy to imagine him being very effective. (For all I know I could have worked under one of these before, and not even hated it.)

yters 16y ago
Managing effectively is more about people skills than education.
- mak120 16y ago
  So, I guess you could just pick up an illiterate guy with good people skills to run a large corporation or be the president?
  - yters 16y ago
    Yep, pretty much. As long as he can talk with experts and understand their position he can lead.
    - GFischer 16y ago
      Yep, I can personally attest that a director at one large corporation has a BOUGHT undergraduate degree, and no other education. He inherited the position from the hardworking founder through being extremely good at people skills and corporate backstabbing (he should have a degree in that :) ). It saddens me and makes me a bit more cynical every time I see him. The corporation survives because these monsters are mostly self-sustaining, and those at lower levels do the actual work (I wouldn't give it a chance if some disruption came along, though).

yinmoneyhuang 16y ago

To a very limited extent, schools have tried to protect themselves from such cheating by requiring students (or prospective students) to compose writing samples under controlled conditions. The Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for instance, requires students to write an essay. The essay is not scored; rather, it is forwarded to the schools to which the student has applied. The schools then compare the LSAT essay to the personal statement submitted with the student's application. A gross disparity between the quality of writing seen on the LSAT essay and that on the personal statement presumably raises suspicions that the personal statement was ghostwritten. Perhaps such measures should be implemented more widely.

mdwrigh2 16y ago
While this is an interesting way of comparing, I'd be slightly worried if I were applying to law school. Given that you have a limited amount of time to write your LSAT essay, and an essentially unlimited amount of time to write and polish your personal statement (plus have professors, friends and family look over it), I could see there being a large but legitimate gap between the two. Perhaps it's not as great as I think though.
- yardie 16y ago
  There are style markers (the writer's voice) that are in the paper no matter how it is edited. This is how critics and editors can tell when a book is written by the real author and when it is ghostwritten. The only way it's possible to avoid this is to digest a lot of material by the original author so you learn to become that voice. This is also prevalent in song lyrics. You can hear when a rapper, for example, is using their own material rather than a ghostwriters. The flow and definition will be really different.

BoppreH 16y ago

I envy the knowledge that this guy has amassed.

light3 16y ago
Sure he probably goes through more material per day than 99.99999% of the population, but whether he remembers or understands is another matter.
- BoppreH 16y ago
  And there is also the sad fact that he has to hide all that under heavy layers of academic wording. But even in the worst case scenario, he has some degree of familiarity with almost everything. Except math.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    You might not believe me, but I've seen essays in place of equations on math tests before. I think one was even relevant enough to get partial credit...
obiterdictum 16y ago
There is probably a lot of redundancy. It's like learning a new technology. Your first project will take a long time, then, once you've solved the meta-problem, it gets incrementally faster each iteration until it reaches some lower bound. But the knowledge you gain each iteration gets lower too, until it's marginal.

jorleif 16y ago

I can churn out four or five pages an hour. I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging. On a more serious note, I think a key benefit for computer science as an academic discipline is that much work is published in conference articles, rather than journals as in most other fields. This means that computer scientists must be able to communicate complicated ideas on 8 pages, rather than 30-40. It really forces the communication to be terse and efficient. I've done course assignments together with people who only publish in journals and it's amazing how these people can blabber on for ages. We had a maximum page length of 20 pages, which left about 3 pages per author. I was very puzzled when some people wrote 6 pages of stuff which I could have easily expressed in 1.5 pages without any loss of clarity, but I'm blaming the culture of their fields, where many words are better than few, and no hard limits are imposed.

jimbokun 16y ago
"Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph." I almost find this more depressing than the rampant cheating in which this author engages.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  "Politician's Patter" http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politicians-patter-20091129.mp3 http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politici...
rick_2047 16y ago
I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.

twrensch 16y ago

I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for an e-mail. I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonesty policy, which would lead to--at least--failure of the course. It didn't happen. The student came up with a lame excuse, I was chided for harassing the student, and it was all swept under the rug. I was tempted to resign in protest, but kept with it for two more years before quietly leaving academics. I enjoy teaching, I think I'm good at it and my students tended to agree. Unfortunately, I can't make myself teach in the current educational system here in the US.

Female 16y ago
A resounding upvote. I only taught for 2 years as a graduate teaching assistant, but we were told in training to never accuse anyone of cheating ever. It opened the university up to being sued, and made everyone's life more complicated.
oz 16y ago
Sounds similar the story about a week ago where are professor is being disciplined for recommending that a grad student's degree be revoked, because the student did not meet the requirements. Robin Hanson from OvercomingBias says it best: School isn't about learning: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html
_delirium 16y ago
I guess this particular part has never greatly bothered me about academia, though plenty of things are quite broken and bother me. I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring myself to care that much about that, though. To me the important question is whether people who want to learn are able to; not whether people who don't want to learn slip through or don't slip through. The much bigger failing in my mind isn't that cheaters aren't sufficiently punished, but that motivated students who want to learn things other than exactly what they're assigned are given virtually no assistance, and often actively discouraged (the side-projects-are-bad, keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you're-told mentality).

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

grellas 16y ago

Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is? I vividly remember the slackers of my generation (college/law school in the 1970s). They took the basket-weaving classes on the cynical assumption that it was a short-cut to getting an "easy A." They padded their papers with junk - that is, whenever they couldn't avoid having to do a paper. They feared the demanding teachers and ran from them. They continually looked for outline-level materials (Cliff notes, Gilberts law summaries) by which they could try to cram for a test without really having to master any of the materials. In short, they did everything possible to avoid having to think or work at the process of learning and, hence, they graduated, if at all, miles behind the hard-working students in their ability to think or to work as they turned to face real-world challenges. I have never understood this mind-set. For me, the challenge was always to take on the harder challenges if that meant developing either your substantive knowledge or your skills in writing, analyzing, communicating, or whatever. Wasn't that the point of being there, after all? The one precious commodity you have as a student that you will likely never have again is the privilege of being able to devote large blocks of uninterrupted time to diving into any given area and mastering it. Once you get into the real world, it is very difficult, if not impossible, ever to have that resource available to you again. Whatever you do, don't squander this resource but, instead, use it to advantage. You will sacrifice in the short term as you watch your friends party away while you slave away, but you will develop depth of knowledge and habits of discipline that will endure for a lifetime while those who choose to cut corners, sadly, will not. Cheating does have its victims. Those who cheat, however, will one day realize that the primary victim of that cheating is none other than they themselves. Caveat discipulus!

oz 16y ago
"Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?" In a word, yes. You see, education, for most people, is NOT about learning. It's about getting a job. We HN types value learning for its own sake, and would happily curl up with a copy of SICP or TAOCP and feel content. The average person wants the whole thing to be over as quickly and painlessly as possible. In the words of some of my classmates, concerning cheating: "Better to cheat than to repeat." or perhaps more poignantly: "Don't be a hero and get zero." We, my dear grellas, are not normal.

oz 16y ago

I, who dropped out of CompSci after my first year, was a small-time shadow scholar. It started innocently enough: I wasn't working, and a friend of a friend who was doing her Master's (in Education, wouldn't you know) needed help typing and formatting a document according to APA Style. I needed the money, so I visited her at the school where she worked. I took the draft she had penned and started reading. I nearly vomited. The quality of writing was atrocious. It wasn't just 'bad', or 'needing improvement'. It was shockingly, horrifyingly terrible. Poor structure. Poor grammar. Not answering the question. excessive circumlocution. Hackneyed phrases every other sentence. I diplomatically told her that I would 'change some of the words'. As she dictated and I typed, I changed sentence order and modified her word choices. When it was finished, there was a semblance of respectability. A few days later, I heard that the lecturer loved it. That, dear friend, was the beginning. I completed quite a few assignments for her, but stopped after she started quibbling over the already small fee I charged. (Note to self: Always charge what you're worth.) Sometime later, a neighbour in my building called me upstairs to help a friend of his. She was typing a paper for her degree to submit that evening, and he, knowing my language skills and typing speed wanted me to help. I went, sat down, and read. Oh, dear. I told her that in all honesty, it sucked. I made a few changes, typed up the rest. 'Twas enough for her to get hooked. Over the next two years, I did several assignments for her. It got to where she would simply email me the research question, and I'd 'learn' the subject (yes, in 2 hours), get references, and like 'Ed Dante' divide the paper into sections, and prepare material. I could do a 10 page paper in one day, which would probably net a 90% grade or better. This was after never having heard of the topic before. She would get wonderful comments from lecturers about her 'wonderful exposition' and 'excellent analysis'. This from a girl who, although not dunce, could never verbally put sentences together half that well. I often wondered about the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of her teachers. It's a smug feeling, walking around as a college dropout while knowing that you can run intellectual circles around people with graduate degrees. I should note, though, that these were all humanities subjects: Use 10 words where 1 would suffice and make up some bullshit, and you're good to go. It doesn't have to make sense because Most teachers aren't going to read it anyway! For those of us here on HN, who are in all probability above the average, it might be difficult to understand how stupid most people are; but take it from me: they are. Very. I'm done with it now, though. I hated researching stuff that bored me, although I sometimes learned a lot. The most important lesson? The world is bullshit. http://www.designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=3347 http://www.designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=3...

djm 16y ago

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Parents, government, and everybody in between seem focused on pushing as many young people into university education as possible. But it seems to me that we have pushed them too hard if they are cheating on this scale. Lots of them just don’t belong there. I imagine a fantasy future world in which ageing professors tell stories of the dark ages of their early careers; a time in which most of their students were not really interested in the subject of their degrees. A brave new world in which young people who might like to get a job, start a business, write a book, or just study independently of any official course, can go ahead and do so without putting themselves through three years of painful essay faking and pretense because “that’s what everyone else does”.

henrikschroder 16y ago

Why is there such a large focus on writing long essays in US education? When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing them was always done in school, as an exam, i.e. sit down for three hours and write. And the grading of our essays were never on length, it was always on grammar, spelling, style, form and coherency. University was largely the same. Granted, being a CS major you're expected to write a lot more code than essays. I took a few courses that had essays as part of the requirements such as technical writing and history of technology, but those were outliers, and not the norm. I mean, my Master's thesis was "only" 45 pages, and again, the professor was a lot more interested in it being coherent, correct, and actually saying something, rather than being long. So what's the point of long essays in every subject? To me, it seems like that will just make students write a lot of voluminous bullshit without ensuring that they actually learn what they write about?

zecho 16y ago
I was a double major in Communications and American Studies in my first go-around at an undergrad degree. It's not so much the fact that essays are necessarily the problem, but the expectation of length as the ultimate point of the exercise--from professors and students--that causes confusion. As a writer, I hate filling prose with word soup just to fill space, but early in college I often ended up writing in 15 words what could be said in 5. By my junior year, I stopped caring about meeting the length requirements and focused on solid research and arguments in my papers. Most profs didn't seem to dock me for it when I showed competence in the subject matter. Those that did were reasonable after speaking with them about it. But, that's the difference between me and the people that hire ghostwriters. I made it clear to my teachers I was there to learn and grow, regardless of many of the arbitrary milestones and requirements. I was there for the journey. People who enter university simply to pass through a series of checkpoints on their way to an end goal focus entirely on the end goal of getting a degree (and presumably shortly thereafter, a job) rather than getting an education.

skybrian 16y ago

Hmm, I suppose one way to go would be to require students to use a version-controlled word processor for their writing, and submit the version history. It could still be faked, but the difficulty of creating a good fake would make the economics less favorable. If it's badly faked, then the version history would provide evidence that's more likely to hold up than a teacher's suspicion about the student's writing.

forensic 16y ago
So the shadow scholar submits his version history. And then?
- hardy263 16y ago
  A 75 page paper usually takes longer than 48 hours for normal students to write. If the version history for the paper is submitted, but all the commits are within a very short time frame, then either the student stayed up all night to write it, or they paid someone else to stay up all night to write it. And if you ask them about what the wrote on on something they took all night to write, they should know it fairly well. But if they paid someone else to do it, they wouldn't know anything that's on the paper.
  - gwern 16y ago
    So then this big company hires a programmer to write a tool to randomize entries over a week or a month or whatever, and our shadow scholar has 1 additional step when he finishes up. Basically, this idea is DRM in another guise, and terrible for all the same reasons. If you don't trust the student that much, then simply abandon take-home work in general.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - skybrian 16y ago
      Randomized entries would be obviously fake. To be a convincing fake, they have to make sure it doesn't conflict with the student's work schedule, class schedule, and so on. That means deciding when the student was supposed to have been writing the paper, which requires quite a bit more coordination and drives up the cost.

NHQ 16y ago

That guy is a good writer!

jimbokun 16y ago

"It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal." It's quite funny that such utterly dishonest people are so willing to accept someone else's word at face value. Also, that they place such stock in the institutional accreditations that they are proving to be worthless through their actions.

partition 16y ago

It's worse than the actions of individual students being dishonest. The fact that someone can do this, for so many students, in so little time, along with the fact that the students themselves have not been called out for the obvious mismatch between what they write and the signals they send out in real life with other students shows that things are fucked in a strong way; if a particular school and student is named as being part of this, it's not just that the student is called out for not doing the work that represents the degree, but that it serves as strong evidence that the particular degree or school is worthless, and the school's accreditation should be called into question. Higher education has truly gone down the toilet.

mak120 16y ago

I live in a country where cheating is rampant (although it has gotten a little better in recent years). Most of the best students (in terms of grades) at my university were outright cheaters, or employed other indirect means of academic dishonesty. Most blamed the teachers for making the courses "unpassable". You know what, no course is "unpassable". Its just something people make up to justify their incompetence and laziness. Yes, some educators are pretty bad, while others just don't care enough to stop this. But no matter what the teachers and authorities try, you cannot stop a reasonably adept cheater from using some way of gaming the system. People who are not interested in learning will cheat no matter what. Trying to lay the blame on the education system and the students is like a drug dealer saying he is not to blame but the addicts are. By providing this service, people like him are making the cheating option easier for students. I just seem to get the vibe that he is just frustrated that his novel got rejected by his university. This, compounded by financial (and perhaps academic and social?) problems, possibly results in him being bitter about university and the education system as a whole. He has every right to have whatever opinions he has. But IMHO he is no rebel working to dismantle a corrupt system. He's just a bitter writer exploiting and fueling the immorality of some people to make a buck. (Disclaimer: I am not an educator (I work as a software engineer) and I don't even have any post-graduate degree. I just don't like people who go about buying and cheating their way through life while the rest of do it the hard way.)

grovulent 16y ago

Student cheating is a systemic part of the culture and there is nothing that can be done about it. I mark logic papers. There might be a question where you have to provide a model that makes the logical formula come out as true or false - the sort of question which has an infinity of possible answers. They never follow the particular method I suggest for working through these which would lead them to the simplest answer in each case (usually a model with only one object in the domain). Yet, somehow, one paper after another, they all come up with the exact same model, with the same number of objects in the domain, the same extensions... everything. So they all just copy from one another. One student complained to me this year that a large group of them were copying answers from one another right in front of the office where they have to submit papers. Largely the university can't do much more than turn a blind eye - for without absolutely concrete evidence the students can (and often do) sue, and win.

3dFlatLander 16y ago

> Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph. I did this a lot while in college--I'm sure many did. The quality of the work was terrible in hindsight, and I did cheat myself out of some good learning opportunities. But, the thing that bothers me to this day is that no teacher ever called me out. My writing tends to be technically correct, which wasn't very common in most of my classes. I think the fluff was acceptable in comparison to sloppy spelling and grammar.

gyardley 16y ago

It's a shame the author didn't discuss where he worked, and how this industry is connected to other aspects of for-profit online education. I 'edited' college admissions essays for a couple of years, back when I was a hungry grad student. The company I worked for, CyberEdit, was acquired by Peterson's, a subsidiary of the Thompson Corporation. When Thompson started divesting its education-based businesses, Peterson's (and CyberEdit) were acquired by Nelnet, which holds and services a large portion of federally subsidized student loans. CyberEdit helps you get into a school you couldn't otherwise attend and Nelnet helps you pay for a school you couldn't otherwise afford - with all parties financially underwritten by your tax dollars. Great business.

simonjoe 16y ago

The one thing I've learned from one of the most prestigious technical universities in the world is that results are more important than integrity.

xmv 16y ago

This person's work completely lacks the kind of civic virtue that traditional liberal education was meant to inculcate. The responsibility lies with us, that we do not support the classical Western liberal tradition of virtue.