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Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

107 points by _ttg 7y ago

lettergram 7y ago
One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat an eye. Cheating is way more common than people think.
- abfan1127 7y ago
  what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    Anecdotally, more than half the classes I've taken at GT (OMSCS) so far have graded entirely on homework, projects, and participation, with no tests.
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  - leetcrew 7y ago
    at my school, the weighting was usually designed to emphasize the projects. the projects and homework combined would often be 50% of the grade right there. the homework would be softball questions or stuff you could just look up the answers for on the internet; almost everyone who bothered to do it would have a near perfect homework average. once you pay someone to also get you near perfect scores on the projects, you just needed to get about half the points on exams and quizzes to pass the course.
    - mieseratte 7y ago
      That's how my old college buddy got through, leaning on me and a few other friends for tutoring and help on the big projects and memorizing enough to get through the tests, forgetting the relevant material soon after. As they say, C's get degrees. We used to joke his diploma should come with an asterisk.
  - meowface 7y ago
    Often it's more about laziness and motivation than lack of skill. A high percentage of college students can write a mediocre or above 10 page paper but also just really don't want to. They'd rather do something fun and pay someone if it doesn't cost them much. Answering (typically) multiple choice questions and short-response questions is a totally different thing. I never used such a service, but I do see the appeal. I did kind of similar things, in my own way, to reduce time spent on courses I didn't like (skipping class, skipping or skimming material, exam cramming). Not saying it's a good thing, and it probably hurts one's already poor work ethic, but life is short and I don't really blame them that much.
    - throwawaysea 7y ago
      That suggests that these assignments are more like busy work, since the students are otherwise talented and qualified? Maybe it is a good thing after all?
      - michaelt 7y ago
        Perhaps doing the assignment improves the student's understanding of the course material, which the professor thinks is a good thing, but it's possible to pass the course with only a mediocre understanding of the material?
        leetcrew 7y ago
        > but it's possible to pass the course with only a mediocre understanding of the material probably this. the most time-efficient strategy for studying that I found in college was simply retyping all the bullets from the powerpoints 2-3 times. I didn't understand what I was writing, but I basically trained myself to be a "chinese room" for test questions. I got As on all the tests for classes I didn't care about this way.
        meowface 7y ago
        Pretty much exactly what I did, as well. And I'd usually do it an hour or two before each test.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  If you were really trying to be persuasive you would have said no.
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- woopwoop 7y ago
  Instructors are often unbelievably naive about this, saying things to the effect of "Cheaters are really obvious, so there can't be that much of it." No, the cheaters that you catch are really obvious.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    I occasionally teach a college course as an adjunct (fun, and a little extra spending money). I don't know how wide spread cheating is, though if it were extremely common then students wouldn't struggle so much with some of the material. But personally, while I have an "instant F" policy if caught, I didn't really care: My philosophy and that of many other instructors is not one of indignant, "surely I'd know!" about cheating, It's that it's the student's time, their future debt. If they want to waste it, that's on them.
    - leetcrew 7y ago
      > It's that it's the student's time, their future debt. If they want to waste it, that's on them. I mean, it is pretty unfair to the kids who actually do honest work. if enough people cheat and get near perfect scores, it makes it hard for the instructor to understand what a reasonable two week project is. grades are also (unfortunately) pretty important for internships. on the other hand, sometimes people who cheat are really bad at it. in one of the courses I TA'd, there were two groups of 3-4 students who would always sit together in labs. they would always turn in nearly identical labs and homeworks, including all the same mistakes! it looked like the only differences came from transcription errors. I never bothered to report them because they failed all the assignments anyway.
      - ineedasername 7y ago
        I've never had a problem determining what a reasonable project length or level of difficulty should be. I don't adjust it if I have a particularly apt group of students. Students who really shine are given direction to support that ability but that is case by case, not baked into the overall difficulty of the course. These things can be rubric driven based on what material should be learned and not just improvised based on perceived class characteristics. There's no unfairness to an honest student who gets just as much out of a course with or without cheaters. Perhaps more if I'm not trying to put together complicated "gotcha" assignments and tests to catch potential cheaters. Besides, I didn't say I ignored cheating. My fault if I gave that impression. I put in reasonable effort to look out for it, but don't obsess over it. if it went on without me finding out then by definition it wasn't something I could act on, and neither I nor the honest students were the ones losing time and money.
- davebindy 7y ago
  >One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. It isn't. In the mid-1970s I worked in the office of a company that sold term papers to students. We had a huge catalog of them, on about every conceivable topic. And we weren't the only company in that particular business. It wasn't a particularly lucractive business, and the guy who owned the company closed it fairly quickly. He was an interesting guy - after that company, he spent a year or so developing a solution that would fade denim in your washing machine (I worked for him in that company as well), which he sold for a bundle (at the time) to a major detergent company. Later he became a mover and shaker in the autograph/original document field.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them How does this play out after school? These students obviously have no passion for programming and are probably just there for the money after school. But once they get that job--and I'm not even sure they can land that FAANG job they want; you're not going to cram your way to being a competent whiteboard coder--do they just hope they'll just stumble into a job where they don't do much work, and the work isn't very difficult, and are ok with getting fired from every other job?
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  - imesh 7y ago
    In my experience, those guys end up as IT workers at highschool, hospitals,offices in non tech companies, etc.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    You adapt. Most tech jobs aren’t very technical. Usually these folks are savvy, come in and latch on to someone’s work and pivot quickly into a more abstract role or management role. Sometimes they are even good at those roles.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I accepted a ‘do my computer science homework’ gig from a student in China about 15 years ago, but when I was done, I decided to not do it anymore. A few years later, a married couple (two professors in Saudi Arabia) hired me to remotely tutor their daughter who was an under graduate in CSand that was fun, and I hoped I helped her. I have a niece who has two masters degrees(literature and screenplay writing) and she has never hit it big with her own writing but she works helping exchange students polish their application essays and the money from that pays her bills and lets her write creatively and she gets by with relatively small income from her creative works.
  - rahimnathwani 7y ago
    "helping exchange students polish their application essays" Do those assessing the applications care if the applicants have had this type and extent of help?
spodek 7y ago
Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it. Since I've never written an analytical essay outside of school, I avoid assigning them in favor of projects connected to students' lives. Maybe that's why my students' homework assignments get them covered in the Washington Post, WSJ, Forbes, Inc, and lead to them speaking in TEDx and Harvard, and in Y Combinator, funded by Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt.
- jpm_sd 7y ago
  Tell us more! What's the name of your school? Can I send my kids there?
  - spodek 7y ago
    I teach at NYU. My courses are in book form too: https://www.amazon.com/Initiative-Proven-Method-Bring-Passions/dp/1733039902 https://www.amazon.com/Initiative-Proven-Method-Bring-Passio... https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/dp/0814437931 https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/... My friend's school that inspired me is Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. He's given TEDx talks and keynotes online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS2IPfWZQM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS2IPfWZQM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FEMCyHYTyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FEMCyHYTyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSE-eJAye5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSE-eJAye5Y
- jseliger 7y ago
  We really need to move towards vocational ed and apprenticeships: https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos.... Large numbers of students in colleges shouldn't be there.
  - 6thaccount2 7y ago
mruts 7y ago
I would say that cheating in school isn’t a problem, but it unfortunately devalues other people’s work. Ideally we would live in a world in which no class was graded on a curve and in which going to college wouldn’t be considered by employers at all. But I guess we don’t. But cheating isn’t the root problem, it’s the sports like mentality we have about education (valedictorian, 3rd in your class, etc etc) that’s the problem. At some point cheating will catch up to you, I hope. But some people manage to go a very long way by being total cheats.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > it’s the sports like mentality That's just the human (or maybe cultural) drive to compete. The problem is it turns into an arms race that starts with training (but the training can become overwhelming) and leads to performance-enhancing drugs (could be steroids, could be Adderall). Where do you draw the line? 4 hours of studying? Educational summer camp? 12 year olds taking the SAT? Practically mandatory extra-curriculars? At least on the academic side, obviously smart students who just missed the cutoff for elite schools still do fine, but it's hard to tell kid who has to go to UCLA because they didn't get into Harvard that it affects their opportunities less than they'd think.
user764743 7y ago
To counter this sort of cheating, one of my prof had us defend our papers in a one on one 'podcast' interview with him for 10-15 minutes and then graded the paper based on our performance.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Seems like that would work only in smaller classes. It quickly becomes a real headache when you have hundreds of students.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    That's what TAs are for. Sadly, btw. Students aren't paying $30,000 per year for 23-year-old living in poverty to grade their work and do half the teaching and a checked-out professor focused on research with no passion of teaching. Having graduated from a program with ~60% dropout rate by the second year, I appreciate the quality control side of things, but the number of professors I had to had any sort of passion for teaching was sadly low.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      Who can blame faculty for having no interest in teaching introductory classes when the dropout rate is 60 % and when all the dropouts go whining to administration when they became weeded out? High dropout rates might actually be a good sign - everyone gets to try out, and if they don't manage it's time for them to go do something else. It beats overzealous gatekeeping.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  This is how tutorials work in traditional unis in the UK (or used to anyway) except that sometimes there is no paper just a discussion of the topics one is studying.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Once you realize the point of college is not to learn things, it's to get the degree, all of this makes sense.
- Zanneth 7y ago
  Not everyone is just in it for the degree. Some people actually want to learn things, expand their mind, and meet people who are trying to do the same. We should treat these kinds of students with respect and hold everyone else to the same standard they hold themselves, which means disallowing and discouraging cheating whenever possible.
wallflower 7y ago
Fraternities and sororities have kept libraries of old graded exams and essays for decades. How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year? This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.
- eitland 7y ago
  > How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year? Back when I studied the school would openly distribute old exams - complete with solutions. And no, not everyone got an A despite this, and yes, I still remember my maths (helped someone the other day, I guess it is about 15 years since last time touched it.)
- Spooky23 7y ago
  It screws everyone out of the know because it screws up the curve.
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- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  don't today's students simply photograph the exams while they're taking them?
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  The student chapters of ACM and IEEE-CS at my university kept test banks with full knowledge of the CSE and EE departments. It was allowed by the honor code as long as the tests had previously been used. The university basically neutralized the advantage Greeks had with their test banks by requiring professors to come up with unique tests each time.
TrackerFF 7y ago
When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from internships at those types of firms that what you do / work on VS what you do at a school, varies a lot. Most knew that you didn't really need to have a 4.0 understanding of your topics to do the jr. work at an investment bank. But you still need stellar grades to land those jobs! This, in turn, lead to a culture of test-taking and "gaming the system" rather than learning. Students would take the "easiest" and most predictable classes to maximize their grades, and would religiously study for exams rather than fully soak up the course material (because as it happens, a lot of professors liked to keep their exams fairly standardized and similar). And, of course, if students were desperate, they'd get other people to do their school work. Writing essays, doing homework, even hiring people to do their exams, with fake ID, etc. When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. The Engineering jobs didn't have the same stringent requirements for jobs - well, not most at least. So those are my observations. The more importance you put on grades, the more cheating and focused studying seems to appear. edit: Also, when a college degree stops being a certification/vetting of knowledge, work ethics, and persistence, and rather becomes a mere formality to for work, people will start treating it differently. I've heard classmates say things like "It's no big deal if you don't know x and y, you'll learn it through work anyway", which seems like a bad sign to me.
- 6thaccount2 7y ago
  Engineering is a bit different. I found that most of the classes had professors that switched up the problems significantly every year to where old tests didn't help much. Memorization is useless when there are a nearly infinite amount of different circuit problems that can go on the test. You have to actually understand the material and how to apply it in diverse situations. You also typically find that most required classes outside of the math/physics/engineering (Ex: literature and psychology) are pretty simple to ace. I never heard of anyone who had someone write them a paper.
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Will the students who purchased these essays go on to build bridges, rockets to the moon, cure cancer? Hah... Interestingly, there is probably little or no supply of German, Dutch, Scandinavian bootleg essay mills.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  Can just speak for Norway; There are few (if any) essay mills I can think of, but then again I haven't used them. The biggest hurdle over here seems to be get accepted to your study or college of choice - because as our system is, the only thing that counts during admission are your grades from HS or Undergrad. We have no interviews, essays, entrance exams, etc. only your GPA. And on top of your GPA, some studies require a certain grade in specific classes. For example, to get admitted to the top Engineering school, you'd need a 3.0 in AP Math classes from HS (well, translated to American equivalent). I'm still active on some homework forums, and I've been contacted quite a few times by posters that want to pay me for doing their homework, and even exams, because they needed to pass a minimum grade. And in college / universities, there's an equivalent to the US "frat files" system, where senior students hand down previous HW and exam solutions to junior students.
- ausbah 7y ago
  That's a bit dramatic.
- adolph 7y ago
  Uh, the “American” rockets to the moon were built by Germans, former Nazis picked up by Operation Paperclip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip Some were even accused of crimes against humanity after they were done with rocket work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph
  - GnarfGnarf 7y ago
    It takes more than science to go to the Moon. It takes money, and most of all organization and management skills. The U.S. is good at the latter. When Nazi scientists were imprisoned after WWII, they were secretly recorded as saying they could not believe Americans had built the A-bomb. Even though the Germans had the scientific knowledge, in-fighting and jealousy prevented them from cooperating. They never could have mustered the resources, coordination and leadership required to achieve a practical bomb. For example, the precise refining of tons of ore to get uranium.
pochamago 7y ago
Ready solution: make tests the only thing that matters.
gumby 7y ago
I’d like to know who writes those essays — and hire them!
gumby 7y ago
High school tutoring appears to be the same thing but in person: the tutors basically do the homework for you (ahem, "with" you). It was so bad that in one class at my son's high school, the kids were turning in great homework but failing the in class tests, so the parents protested and had the homework's weight increased (and test weight decreased) in the computation of the overall grade -- and had the change made in the middle of the year! I was quite naïve and was shocked by this. I'd gone to schools where where external tutors or essay-writers weren’t really viable.
gumby 7y ago
This can extend beyond school. Once we hired someone who had a good phone interview, and not that great an interview, though there were some language issues. We were growing rapidly and this person got the job. They liked to work late, often talking on the phone...within a few days we realized that they were discussing the work with someone on the phone, who had probably been on the phone screen and probably had a day job. The employee couldn’t program at all, and was employed by us about a week total. I don’t know how they made it through the interview process but the VP of engineering immediately revamped the hiring process!
sosodev 7y ago
I paid to have a few history essays written for me. Judge me if you please but the class was ridiculously hard for an introductory history class and I had my plate full already. The writer I stuck with for the semester was excellent. She was very well written, followed instructions well, and always delivered on time. I'm sure she was making good money doing it. If anything she was under charging.
jacquesm 7y ago
Since they technically retain copyright of those papers the overseas people should be able to claim their status as co-author after the paper has been published. And throw in a complimentary scholarship as well.
swiley 7y ago
I only had one proffessor that wrote reasonable writting assignments and actually graded them based on content. You could tell most writting assignments were getting graded entierly on APA formatting and word count (if the "writting" assignment wasn't just "fill in the blanks in this word document using so many words per question.") Near the end durring capstone people wrote the most useless wordy documents because they had just spent 4 years learning how to draw small simple ideas out into paragraphs instead of comming up with enough ideas to fill a paragraph. It's not surprising that many of them are hiring other people to write them, the whole exercise seems silly.
dade_ 7y ago
I dropped out of highschool, and decided to learn whatever I want. How sad to incarcerate oneself with so much debt without the slightest interest in learning anything.
ineedasername 7y ago
Many people here are writing about classmates that didn't care, coasted, cheated, etc., painting a picture of that as the norm. I'm sure that goes on, but it's by no means universal, or even (in my experience) dominant. I went to a middle of the road public university because I got a full scholarship. I thought I was smart, the smartest in any room-- for about a month. (It says how young & dense I was that it took so long) Then I realized I was surrounded by people who were at least as smart, plenty of them smarter, harder working (and I wasn't lazy) and intellectually curious. I was humbled (and better for it). I have also worked in higher ed technology and in contact with many students as a result, and my experience with them was the same. So absolutely there are cynical grade chasers, and worse those that pay their way to do it. But a very large portion are not. You probably just don't know it because they aren't loudly bragging about how they got the easiest professor, coasted to an A, plagiarizes a paper without getting caught, etc. They're just doing the work.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
I'm just glad I went to a very traditional uni that didn't do this essay stuff. We had tutorials, open note exams, and final year project reports. Not much of that can be bought from outside and even if you did it wouldn't help you much because it all had to be defended in a viva voce. I suppose you could buy the notes but the final quantum mechanics exam was pretty much of the character take what you have studied and answer questions that had not been discussed in the course. If you weren't familiar with the notes then I think you would have struggled as in fact many of my contemporaries did. Well my tutor did assign me a project to be done in the long vacation after my second year but he didn't 'mark' it, we discussed it and I had to defend my conclusions. It didn't affect any grades anyway because the uni didn't do grades. There were end of year exams to check that you were keeping up but the class of your degree depended only on the final and the final year project report and its associated viva.

107 points by _ttg 7y ago

One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat an eye. Cheating is way more common than people think.

abfan1127 7y ago
what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Anecdotally, more than half the classes I've taken at GT (OMSCS) so far have graded entirely on homework, projects, and participation, with no tests.
- deleted 7y ago
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- leetcrew 7y ago
  at my school, the weighting was usually designed to emphasize the projects. the projects and homework combined would often be 50% of the grade right there. the homework would be softball questions or stuff you could just look up the answers for on the internet; almost everyone who bothered to do it would have a near perfect homework average. once you pay someone to also get you near perfect scores on the projects, you just needed to get about half the points on exams and quizzes to pass the course.
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    That's how my old college buddy got through, leaning on me and a few other friends for tutoring and help on the big projects and memorizing enough to get through the tests, forgetting the relevant material soon after. As they say, C's get degrees. We used to joke his diploma should come with an asterisk.
- meowface 7y ago
  Often it's more about laziness and motivation than lack of skill. A high percentage of college students can write a mediocre or above 10 page paper but also just really don't want to. They'd rather do something fun and pay someone if it doesn't cost them much. Answering (typically) multiple choice questions and short-response questions is a totally different thing. I never used such a service, but I do see the appeal. I did kind of similar things, in my own way, to reduce time spent on courses I didn't like (skipping class, skipping or skimming material, exam cramming). Not saying it's a good thing, and it probably hurts one's already poor work ethic, but life is short and I don't really blame them that much.
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    That suggests that these assignments are more like busy work, since the students are otherwise talented and qualified? Maybe it is a good thing after all?
    - michaelt 7y ago
      Perhaps doing the assignment improves the student's understanding of the course material, which the professor thinks is a good thing, but it's possible to pass the course with only a mediocre understanding of the material?
      - leetcrew 7y ago
        > but it's possible to pass the course with only a mediocre understanding of the material probably this. the most time-efficient strategy for studying that I found in college was simply retyping all the bullets from the powerpoints 2-3 times. I didn't understand what I was writing, but I basically trained myself to be a "chinese room" for test questions. I got As on all the tests for classes I didn't care about this way.
        meowface 7y ago
        Pretty much exactly what I did, as well. And I'd usually do it an hour or two before each test.
maxerickson 7y ago
If you were really trying to be persuasive you would have said no.
- deleted 7y ago
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woopwoop 7y ago
Instructors are often unbelievably naive about this, saying things to the effect of "Cheaters are really obvious, so there can't be that much of it." No, the cheaters that you catch are really obvious.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  I occasionally teach a college course as an adjunct (fun, and a little extra spending money). I don't know how wide spread cheating is, though if it were extremely common then students wouldn't struggle so much with some of the material. But personally, while I have an "instant F" policy if caught, I didn't really care: My philosophy and that of many other instructors is not one of indignant, "surely I'd know!" about cheating, It's that it's the student's time, their future debt. If they want to waste it, that's on them.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    > It's that it's the student's time, their future debt. If they want to waste it, that's on them. I mean, it is pretty unfair to the kids who actually do honest work. if enough people cheat and get near perfect scores, it makes it hard for the instructor to understand what a reasonable two week project is. grades are also (unfortunately) pretty important for internships. on the other hand, sometimes people who cheat are really bad at it. in one of the courses I TA'd, there were two groups of 3-4 students who would always sit together in labs. they would always turn in nearly identical labs and homeworks, including all the same mistakes! it looked like the only differences came from transcription errors. I never bothered to report them because they failed all the assignments anyway.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      I've never had a problem determining what a reasonable project length or level of difficulty should be. I don't adjust it if I have a particularly apt group of students. Students who really shine are given direction to support that ability but that is case by case, not baked into the overall difficulty of the course. These things can be rubric driven based on what material should be learned and not just improvised based on perceived class characteristics. There's no unfairness to an honest student who gets just as much out of a course with or without cheaters. Perhaps more if I'm not trying to put together complicated "gotcha" assignments and tests to catch potential cheaters. Besides, I didn't say I ignored cheating. My fault if I gave that impression. I put in reasonable effort to look out for it, but don't obsess over it. if it went on without me finding out then by definition it wasn't something I could act on, and neither I nor the honest students were the ones losing time and money.
davebindy 7y ago
>One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. It isn't. In the mid-1970s I worked in the office of a company that sold term papers to students. We had a huge catalog of them, on about every conceivable topic. And we weren't the only company in that particular business. It wasn't a particularly lucractive business, and the guy who owned the company closed it fairly quickly. He was an interesting guy - after that company, he spent a year or so developing a solution that would fade denim in your washing machine (I worked for him in that company as well), which he sold for a bundle (at the time) to a major detergent company. Later he became a mover and shaker in the autograph/original document field.
dehrmann 7y ago
> Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them How does this play out after school? These students obviously have no passion for programming and are probably just there for the money after school. But once they get that job--and I'm not even sure they can land that FAANG job they want; you're not going to cram your way to being a competent whiteboard coder--do they just hope they'll just stumble into a job where they don't do much work, and the work isn't very difficult, and are ok with getting fired from every other job?
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- imesh 7y ago
  In my experience, those guys end up as IT workers at highschool, hospitals,offices in non tech companies, etc.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  You adapt. Most tech jobs aren’t very technical. Usually these folks are savvy, come in and latch on to someone’s work and pivot quickly into a more abstract role or management role. Sometimes they are even good at those roles.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I accepted a ‘do my computer science homework’ gig from a student in China about 15 years ago, but when I was done, I decided to not do it anymore. A few years later, a married couple (two professors in Saudi Arabia) hired me to remotely tutor their daughter who was an under graduate in CSand that was fun, and I hoped I helped her. I have a niece who has two masters degrees(literature and screenplay writing) and she has never hit it big with her own writing but she works helping exchange students polish their application essays and the money from that pays her bills and lets her write creatively and she gets by with relatively small income from her creative works.
- rahimnathwani 7y ago
  "helping exchange students polish their application essays" Do those assessing the applications care if the applicants have had this type and extent of help?

spodek 7y ago

Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it. Since I've never written an analytical essay outside of school, I avoid assigning them in favor of projects connected to students' lives. Maybe that's why my students' homework assignments get them covered in the Washington Post, WSJ, Forbes, Inc, and lead to them speaking in TEDx and Harvard, and in Y Combinator, funded by Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt.

jpm_sd 7y ago
Tell us more! What's the name of your school? Can I send my kids there?
- spodek 7y ago
  I teach at NYU. My courses are in book form too: https://www.amazon.com/Initiative-Proven-Method-Bring-Passions/dp/1733039902 https://www.amazon.com/Initiative-Proven-Method-Bring-Passio... https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/dp/0814437931 https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/... My friend's school that inspired me is Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. He's given TEDx talks and keynotes online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS2IPfWZQM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS2IPfWZQM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FEMCyHYTyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FEMCyHYTyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSE-eJAye5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSE-eJAye5Y
jseliger 7y ago
We really need to move towards vocational ed and apprenticeships: https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos.... Large numbers of students in colleges shouldn't be there.
- 6thaccount2 7y ago

mruts 7y ago

I would say that cheating in school isn’t a problem, but it unfortunately devalues other people’s work. Ideally we would live in a world in which no class was graded on a curve and in which going to college wouldn’t be considered by employers at all. But I guess we don’t. But cheating isn’t the root problem, it’s the sports like mentality we have about education (valedictorian, 3rd in your class, etc etc) that’s the problem. At some point cheating will catch up to you, I hope. But some people manage to go a very long way by being total cheats.

dehrmann 7y ago
> it’s the sports like mentality That's just the human (or maybe cultural) drive to compete. The problem is it turns into an arms race that starts with training (but the training can become overwhelming) and leads to performance-enhancing drugs (could be steroids, could be Adderall). Where do you draw the line? 4 hours of studying? Educational summer camp? 12 year olds taking the SAT? Practically mandatory extra-curriculars? At least on the academic side, obviously smart students who just missed the cutoff for elite schools still do fine, but it's hard to tell kid who has to go to UCLA because they didn't get into Harvard that it affects their opportunities less than they'd think.

user764743 7y ago

To counter this sort of cheating, one of my prof had us defend our papers in a one on one 'podcast' interview with him for 10-15 minutes and then graded the paper based on our performance.

rootusrootus 7y ago
Seems like that would work only in smaller classes. It quickly becomes a real headache when you have hundreds of students.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  That's what TAs are for. Sadly, btw. Students aren't paying $30,000 per year for 23-year-old living in poverty to grade their work and do half the teaching and a checked-out professor focused on research with no passion of teaching. Having graduated from a program with ~60% dropout rate by the second year, I appreciate the quality control side of things, but the number of professors I had to had any sort of passion for teaching was sadly low.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    Who can blame faculty for having no interest in teaching introductory classes when the dropout rate is 60 % and when all the dropouts go whining to administration when they became weeded out? High dropout rates might actually be a good sign - everyone gets to try out, and if they don't manage it's time for them to go do something else. It beats overzealous gatekeeping.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
This is how tutorials work in traditional unis in the UK (or used to anyway) except that sometimes there is no paper just a discussion of the topics one is studying.

BurningFrog 7y ago

Once you realize the point of college is not to learn things, it's to get the degree, all of this makes sense.

Zanneth 7y ago
Not everyone is just in it for the degree. Some people actually want to learn things, expand their mind, and meet people who are trying to do the same. We should treat these kinds of students with respect and hold everyone else to the same standard they hold themselves, which means disallowing and discouraging cheating whenever possible.

wallflower 7y ago

Fraternities and sororities have kept libraries of old graded exams and essays for decades. How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year? This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.

eitland 7y ago
> How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year? Back when I studied the school would openly distribute old exams - complete with solutions. And no, not everyone got an A despite this, and yes, I still remember my maths (helped someone the other day, I guess it is about 15 years since last time touched it.)
Spooky23 7y ago
It screws everyone out of the know because it screws up the curve.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
HillaryBriss 7y ago
don't today's students simply photograph the exams while they're taking them?
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
The student chapters of ACM and IEEE-CS at my university kept test banks with full knowledge of the CSE and EE departments. It was allowed by the honor code as long as the tests had previously been used. The university basically neutralized the advantage Greeks had with their test banks by requiring professors to come up with unique tests each time.

TrackerFF 7y ago

When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from internships at those types of firms that what you do / work on VS what you do at a school, varies a lot. Most knew that you didn't really need to have a 4.0 understanding of your topics to do the jr. work at an investment bank. But you still need stellar grades to land those jobs! This, in turn, lead to a culture of test-taking and "gaming the system" rather than learning. Students would take the "easiest" and most predictable classes to maximize their grades, and would religiously study for exams rather than fully soak up the course material (because as it happens, a lot of professors liked to keep their exams fairly standardized and similar). And, of course, if students were desperate, they'd get other people to do their school work. Writing essays, doing homework, even hiring people to do their exams, with fake ID, etc. When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. The Engineering jobs didn't have the same stringent requirements for jobs - well, not most at least. So those are my observations. The more importance you put on grades, the more cheating and focused studying seems to appear. edit: Also, when a college degree stops being a certification/vetting of knowledge, work ethics, and persistence, and rather becomes a mere formality to for work, people will start treating it differently. I've heard classmates say things like "It's no big deal if you don't know x and y, you'll learn it through work anyway", which seems like a bad sign to me.

6thaccount2 7y ago
Engineering is a bit different. I found that most of the classes had professors that switched up the problems significantly every year to where old tests didn't help much. Memorization is useless when there are a nearly infinite amount of different circuit problems that can go on the test. You have to actually understand the material and how to apply it in diverse situations. You also typically find that most required classes outside of the math/physics/engineering (Ex: literature and psychology) are pretty simple to ace. I never heard of anyone who had someone write them a paper.

GnarfGnarf 7y ago

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Will the students who purchased these essays go on to build bridges, rockets to the moon, cure cancer? Hah... Interestingly, there is probably little or no supply of German, Dutch, Scandinavian bootleg essay mills.

TrackerFF 7y ago
Can just speak for Norway; There are few (if any) essay mills I can think of, but then again I haven't used them. The biggest hurdle over here seems to be get accepted to your study or college of choice - because as our system is, the only thing that counts during admission are your grades from HS or Undergrad. We have no interviews, essays, entrance exams, etc. only your GPA. And on top of your GPA, some studies require a certain grade in specific classes. For example, to get admitted to the top Engineering school, you'd need a 3.0 in AP Math classes from HS (well, translated to American equivalent). I'm still active on some homework forums, and I've been contacted quite a few times by posters that want to pay me for doing their homework, and even exams, because they needed to pass a minimum grade. And in college / universities, there's an equivalent to the US "frat files" system, where senior students hand down previous HW and exam solutions to junior students.
ausbah 7y ago
That's a bit dramatic.
adolph 7y ago
Uh, the “American” rockets to the moon were built by Germans, former Nazis picked up by Operation Paperclip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip Some were even accused of crimes against humanity after they were done with rocket work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph
- GnarfGnarf 7y ago
  It takes more than science to go to the Moon. It takes money, and most of all organization and management skills. The U.S. is good at the latter. When Nazi scientists were imprisoned after WWII, they were secretly recorded as saying they could not believe Americans had built the A-bomb. Even though the Germans had the scientific knowledge, in-fighting and jealousy prevented them from cooperating. They never could have mustered the resources, coordination and leadership required to achieve a practical bomb. For example, the precise refining of tons of ore to get uranium.

pochamago 7y ago

Ready solution: make tests the only thing that matters.

gumby 7y ago

I’d like to know who writes those essays — and hire them!

gumby 7y ago

High school tutoring appears to be the same thing but in person: the tutors basically do the homework for you (ahem, "with" you). It was so bad that in one class at my son's high school, the kids were turning in great homework but failing the in class tests, so the parents protested and had the homework's weight increased (and test weight decreased) in the computation of the overall grade -- and had the change made in the middle of the year! I was quite naïve and was shocked by this. I'd gone to schools where where external tutors or essay-writers weren’t really viable.

gumby 7y ago

This can extend beyond school. Once we hired someone who had a good phone interview, and not that great an interview, though there were some language issues. We were growing rapidly and this person got the job. They liked to work late, often talking on the phone...within a few days we realized that they were discussing the work with someone on the phone, who had probably been on the phone screen and probably had a day job. The employee couldn’t program at all, and was employed by us about a week total. I don’t know how they made it through the interview process but the VP of engineering immediately revamped the hiring process!

sosodev 7y ago

I paid to have a few history essays written for me. Judge me if you please but the class was ridiculously hard for an introductory history class and I had my plate full already. The writer I stuck with for the semester was excellent. She was very well written, followed instructions well, and always delivered on time. I'm sure she was making good money doing it. If anything she was under charging.

jacquesm 7y ago

Since they technically retain copyright of those papers the overseas people should be able to claim their status as co-author after the paper has been published. And throw in a complimentary scholarship as well.

swiley 7y ago

I only had one proffessor that wrote reasonable writting assignments and actually graded them based on content. You could tell most writting assignments were getting graded entierly on APA formatting and word count (if the "writting" assignment wasn't just "fill in the blanks in this word document using so many words per question.") Near the end durring capstone people wrote the most useless wordy documents because they had just spent 4 years learning how to draw small simple ideas out into paragraphs instead of comming up with enough ideas to fill a paragraph. It's not surprising that many of them are hiring other people to write them, the whole exercise seems silly.

dade_ 7y ago

I dropped out of highschool, and decided to learn whatever I want. How sad to incarcerate oneself with so much debt without the slightest interest in learning anything.

ineedasername 7y ago

Many people here are writing about classmates that didn't care, coasted, cheated, etc., painting a picture of that as the norm. I'm sure that goes on, but it's by no means universal, or even (in my experience) dominant. I went to a middle of the road public university because I got a full scholarship. I thought I was smart, the smartest in any room-- for about a month. (It says how young & dense I was that it took so long) Then I realized I was surrounded by people who were at least as smart, plenty of them smarter, harder working (and I wasn't lazy) and intellectually curious. I was humbled (and better for it). I have also worked in higher ed technology and in contact with many students as a result, and my experience with them was the same. So absolutely there are cynical grade chasers, and worse those that pay their way to do it. But a very large portion are not. You probably just don't know it because they aren't loudly bragging about how they got the easiest professor, coasted to an A, plagiarizes a paper without getting caught, etc. They're just doing the work.

kwhitefoot 7y ago

I'm just glad I went to a very traditional uni that didn't do this essay stuff. We had tutorials, open note exams, and final year project reports. Not much of that can be bought from outside and even if you did it wouldn't help you much because it all had to be defended in a viva voce. I suppose you could buy the notes but the final quantum mechanics exam was pretty much of the character take what you have studied and answer questions that had not been discussed in the course. If you weren't familiar with the notes then I think you would have struggled as in fact many of my contemporaries did. Well my tutor did assign me a project to be done in the long vacation after my second year but he didn't 'mark' it, we discussed it and I had to defend my conclusions. It didn't affect any grades anyway because the uni didn't do grades. There were end of year exams to check that you were keeping up but the class of your degree depended only on the final and the final year project report and its associated viva.