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Doing Western students' homework is big business in Kenya
- chrisseaton 7y ago> has completed ... PhD dissertations How can that possibly work? You don't just go away and write a PhD dissertation in isolation, it grows slowly over three or more years with intimate private discussion with your advisor, and intermediate peer-reviewed publications that you have to present and defend in-person. I can't understand how you could conceivably out-source that to someone else?
- trevyn 7y agoSame as how middle managers can explain work product to their superiors -- they didn't personally create it, but they have grown familiar over time as an intermediary.
- bawolff 7y agoI've never done an oral defense, but surely there is a difference between someone expected to be an intermediary to higher ups who know nothing, and an oral defense where subject matter experts attempt to stump you with tricky questions
- rjsw 7y agoThe client could be perfectly capable of doing an oral defence, and to have done all the research that is described in the thesis, just not that great at putting it down in a formal way.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI still don't get how that would work. When your advisor asks you in person how you think some technique that they've only just explained to you applies to your work, what do you do? Text your Kenyan ghost-writer under the table?
- Double_a_92 7y ago"Hmm... Yes.. Sounds interesting, I'll see if I can apply that to my work. Thank your for your valuable input." Also you probably still have some idea of what is going on. You still had to pass all your in-person exams in your academic career so far.
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- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThere's plenty of people who can understand specialized subject matter in great detail, well enough to edit a dissertation, but can't write very well in the first place. Ethical or not these people probably benefit greatly from outsourcing the initial draft of most of their writing.
- gryson 7y agoI imagine for something like a diploma mill (or not too far removed), where a dissertation may be required to get the degree but there is little genuine advising or research taking place. I heard a story from an outraged faculty member at a legitimate university concerning the PhD process in the school of education at said university (not EdD, but PhD). Apparently, none or almost none of the education faculty had themselves received a PhD (most had M.S.Ed), yet they were awarding large numbers of PhDs to students each year. Furthermore, the students were apparently doing "group dissertations", which I'm still not sure of how to interpret (I trust the person who told me of this, and I don't think it was hearsay). The point of this anecdote is to suggest that even at good universities, there may be situations where students are able to get away with doing less than would typically be expected of a good PhD program.
- badpun 7y agoThere are advisers at universities here in Poland who are basically happy for you to write your PhD on your own (with zero supervision), as long as it meets the required quality standard (which can be rather low). This way, he fills his quota of mentees without devoting work to it.
- ChainOfFools 7y agoI can say from firsthand experience (albeit a data set of 1) that is happens in the US at the Ph.D level program in a rather well known school with a sculpture of the founder whose shoe is as frequently rubbed for good luck as it is defiled by drunken frat boys.
- Maken 7y agoThere are some really bad PhD programs out there. It could be they were outsourcing only the writing of the dissertation itself, dumping a bunch of papers and expecting the ghost writer to turn it into a coherent story.
- backupcavalry 7y agoWhen I was a teaching assistant in university in Singapore here I knew a guy that ran the same sort of business, albeit for coding assignments instead of essays. He was making a couple of thousand a month - showed me the bank records and everything. I'll admit, only reason why I didn't sign up was because I was already swamped and sorta lazy - we're talking about like a hundred bucks for something as trite as the first assignment for CS101. Apparently the most generous clients were Chinese students with more money than drive.
- throwawa66 7y agoWow, the students have a lot of money! And they arent spending it wisely. Whats the point of education if somebody else does it for you? Just the diploma?
- ativzzz 7y agoFor many people, the degree itself provides more financial value in the long term than the material the degree teaches.
- throwawa66 7y agoYeah but all those wasted years in school, wasted time for professors, wasted energy to keep the the school building warm or cold depending on the season, there must be a more efficient way to do things.. There should be a school bypass mode for the manager types who need the diploma but aren't interested in learning anything
- ativzzz 7y agoUnfortunately that's not the way human society works. > There should be a school bypass mode for the manager types There used to be. These people could start at a company doing unskilled labor and work their way up to management. But that has pretty much stopped happening in the past 40-50 years. See this relevant HN post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231579
- lopmotr 7y agoImagine if cheating rates for each university were somehow measured and published independently so that a cheat rank was as well known as the usual rankings. Then, to avoid a poor ranking, universities would have to pay their staff to actually assess their students instead of taking the shortcuts they are.
- buzzkillington 7y agoUniversities don't touch international students because they are cash cows. The local students though will be penalized and expelled for random matches to make the 'zero tolerance' policy look good.
- mkl 7y agoActually assessing students [1] won't usually help with this kind of thing. Well-ghostwritten assignments can be pretty hard to detect. [1] Not sure what you mean by that, as actual assessment is already universally happening IME.
- pathsjs 7y agoActually assessing students could mean, you know, testing them orally instead of handing them assignments. Or at least letting them have a written exam in front of you.
- bluenose69 7y agoThis is true. The best scheme is the formal written exam, because oral exams can have issues with bias. Assignments can be useful for learning, as a way to keep students on-track. In my undergraduate days, assignments were optional, and scores on them were ignored if the exam had a higher score. That struck me as a good approach, but nowadays I think it would lead professors to create easy final exams, to avoid the low scores that lead to student complaints and problems at tenure time.
- JPLeRouzic 7y agoThat's a good startup idea: Provide independent testing (like Toefl/Toic) to assess if the student is up to the task!
- tr33house 7y agoKenya is a very undervalued country... Lots of highly educated folks. Too bad poverty and a lack of opportunities causes people to aid in cheating
- qwerty456127 7y agoWhy is there poverty and lack of opportunities if there are lots of highly educated folks? I always believed education is the key to prosperity of a nation.
- Double_a_92 7y agoKenya is actually fairly rich and democratic. There is definitely opportinity there. If I had to bet by gut-feel, I'd say prosperity on the African continent will start from there.
- qwerty456127 7y agoThere is always a huge and easy-to-implement potential for stagnation and regular regressions, let alone for hard and long work before actual progress happens. Look at Russia - it also is fairly rich and democratic (as compared many other countries, although hardly an example of democracy in itself) yet you can hardly observe much prosperity (but for a small selection of people) starting there. African prosperity may start in Kenya but this will probably take at least 100 years.
- xupybd 7y agoYou also need good infrastructure and low corruption. Business fail when corruption is too high
- socialdemocrat 7y agoThe nature of corruption probably matters. Corruption is quite high in China e.g. yet it still develops very quickly. Some quite rich countries like Italy are quite corrupt but still kind of manage. I suspect the devil is in the details. Certain forms of corruption is likely more corrosive than others.
- lurcio 7y agoThere’s a more lucrative thriving non-location based market at degree/PhD level too (Harvard, etc)
- unlimit 7y agoI have heard it is big business in India as well. People from US/UK also outsource their day jobs too. I used to know a guy who bought a flat doing this in India and also got invited to his client's wedding. :-)
- badpun 7y agoWhat kind of job requires so little human interaction to be outsourceable without anyone noticing?
- username90 7y ago100% remote jobs.
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- jonono 7y agoIs there anyone with a more legitimate freelance work here (like data entry)? Please contact me via johnwalker475@gmail.com
- bluenose69 7y agoIt can be easy to spot this kind of thing. I recall a student paper that was very well written, although almost every paragraph contained a sentence or two of terribly garbled English. This was a foreign student with weak English skills, so it was pretty clear that the majority of the paper had been written or at least edited by someone else who was a skilled writer. This was not a case of copying something from a source, because I avoid asking the same question twice, or asking a question for which a websearch can turn up anything useful.
- dielll 7y agoIt's not as easy as you think. I am from Kenya and we speak and write good English. with the aid of Grammarly premium, all grammatical mistakes are easily spotted and corrected.
- russfink 7y agoHold a three question interview with the claimed author. Ensure that only two questions are based on the paper's claims, eg, So, Professor Newton, is rate of fall linearly or exponentially related to mass?
- abhishekjha 7y agoWait, it isn't related to mass, right? Or am I forgetting my physics? g is m/s^2. No mass factor.
- xzcat 7y agoThat's the joke/trick, it's basically begging the question. You can out a cheater by asking a question of the form: Which is true, (A and A->B) or (A and A->C)? A cheater will fret over whether B or C is true, while someone who did the work will probably immediately identify that A is false and that the question is misleadingly worded.
- 2zcon 7y agoIt takes a very low false-positive rate before most of the people you're catching are just nervous, not cheaters.
- spodek 7y ago> institutions should focus on learning why students cheat in the first place. The students didn't create the system. I suggest the institutions look into their pedagogy that motivates cheating with abstract assignments unrelated to students' lives. Project-based learning helps solve it. As a side note, I wouldn't call the Kenyans' work cheating. They didn't enroll in an institution with an honor code like the students did. They're working for pay.
- irrational 7y agoEh. I teach introduction to web development at the college level. All of the assignments are project-based (each week the students build a web page starting out with just html, then adding css, then adding JS, then AJAX, then some simple server-side code, etc.). Yet, cheating is still rampant.
- arcturus17 7y agoI think cheating is _especially_ rampant in CS courses with a practical component like programming psets.
- throwawa66 7y agoThey are clearly not interested in the subject. Why are they there? Are they just taking this class because they are pursuing the money in IT or is it peer pressure? The problem can possibly be solved if the root cause is studied
- ativzzz 7y ago> Why are they there? Are they just taking this class because they are pursuing the money Yes. Having a piece of paper makes you more qualified when competing against thousands of people. Of course you can do other things to make yourself stand out by showing off your projects you've worked on, but that's a lot harder than gaming the system to get good grades. As it stands now, a college degree is just a qualifier that tells companies "this person is willing to play the game that current society has established, and will make a better employee than those that aren't willing"
- drpgq 7y agoKind of supportive of Bryan Caplan's idea of education as signaling.
- nateburke 7y agoJob Requirements: - research and vet outsourced service providers - manage multiple outsourced projects concurrently - effectively present project outputs to stakeholders
- cproctor 7y agoMaybe the final exam should be a closed-book test where each student is given questions about their own essay.
- hyperpallium 7y agoThose who do the work (in Kenya) get the education, whie those who pay (Western students) don't. If education is worthwhile, the scales of merit will eventualy tip in their favour. If...
- zerr 7y agoThat reinforces the point that the school in the west is not about education but networking/nepotism.
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- throwawa66 7y agoWhats the next level of outsourcing? Is the western world slowly corrupting itself to the lowest level?
- hyranck 7y agoI'm an American and I have done this many times. The money is much better than the vast majority of other freelance writing jobs, and the work is more rewarding than pumping out low effort blog spam. Better to just use craigslist, etc. to find clients in my experience though. I can typically charge as much, if not more than the paper mill sites, and no one is taking a cut.