3 ms·

The Term Paper Artist

30 points by robg 18y ago

TrevorJ 18y ago
I'm becoming more and more convinced that "Idiocracy' was a documentary. It's truly scary to me that not only does this happen a lot, but that professors have class sizes so largest that it's literally impossible for them to get to know students well enough to put two and two together.
- robg 18y ago
  up-vote for Idiocracy, but this current election gives me some hope. I'm actually less concerned about people getting through school by cheating. Sooner or later they'll have to actually prove themselves or face the consequences. Character is destiny.
  - jumper 18y ago
    Well, see, except that's the problem! A lot of time they don't have to prove themselves for a long time, certainly not in school, almost never in certain bureaucratic blobs, and when the consequences come for them... often they come for us as well.... see any massively incompetent's screw up that cost us all dearly.
jcl 18y ago
Fascinating, and a little creepy. I found this part hilarious: You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers -- several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups.
jbert 18y ago
My theory is that if you try to "manage by metrics", the quality of what you are managing will go down. Unhappily, this often leads to more metrics, since more quality control is clearly needed... To me, the alternative of "managing by metrics" is knowing your staff and being familiar with their work. This is hard to do and harder to scale (say, to national level), since it requires that the managers are doing a good job. Metrics scale much more easily. But - those who care have to fight the measurement system to produce quality. This reduces their effectiveness or drives them to leave, leaving you with the less-motivated. Being a teacher, being a student and software development are areas which can and do suffer from this. (Students perhaps less so, they have to learn to play the system since they have fewer alternatives.)
- timcederman 18y ago
  Um, what?
  - mlinsey 18y ago
    One of two possibilities: First possibility: Jbert was arguing that the reason students can get away with this is because classroom grading standards are too mechanical (did you fill at least X pages? Did you have a thesis statement? Did you cite at least Y sources). Furthermore, many teachers are themselves evaluated based "metrics" like standardized tests which don't test writing ability very well. I don't really think that this explains the paper mill business, but you could make the argument. Second possibility: Jbert is paying a starving blogger a couple of bucks to write his comments for him!
    - jbert 18y ago
      > I don't really think that this explains the paper mill business, but you could make the argument. I was thinking along those lines (then thought it relevant to the way students are judged too, as well as coders). Teaching used to be a well-regarded profession and has instead become much lower status (and low paid). Some random stats I googled for seem to support this (possibly biased source): http://www.nea.org/edstats/losingground.html http://www.nea.org/edstats/losingground.html I would think that you would be less likely to get away with the paper mill business if your teacher was a highly motivated professional. In the UK at least, teaching is rigidly controlled, with schools' success or failure being evaluated according to various metrics. These are can be easily gamed (e.g. # of pupils achieving 5 A-C grades at GCSE. You focus effort on the C/D students, and push kids towards 'soft' subjects) - but only by teachers who are prepared to put the score-against-metric above the quality of the education they give. Of course, if you don't perform to those metrics, the school suffers (lower in league table => fewer pupils => less cash for school => worse education for kids), so you're effectively screwed either way. Basically it's the old perverse incentive business, but yes, I do appear to have pulled a random rant out of thin air, so apologies to the regular HN readers. We now return you to your regularly scheduled viewing. HN question: given that management needs info to make decisions and metrics are often gameable/perverse, how does one approach this problem? Is it just "good metrics"? > Second possibility: Jbert is paying a starving blogger a couple of bucks to write his comments for him! Now that's a startup waiting to happen: karmachameleon.com - "building your online reputation" (name appears to be squatted).
Dilpil 18y ago
Note that this only happens in humanities classes. It says something about a class when a passable term paper can be produced in the space of 4 hours. Imagine asking someone to complete your engineering term project in a similar fashion.
- utnick 18y ago
  Outsourcing CS projects and homework actually seems to be a pretty big business on most rentacoder and freelancer sites.
  - eru 18y ago
    I hope math is not tainted, yet.
- lacker 18y ago
  Just take a look at the Yahoo Answers sections on math, chemistry, biology, etc. to see people who are obviously doing their homework. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545227 http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545227
- ibsulon 18y ago
  An expert writer can do a passable term paper in four hours. I've written over a million words in my life. As such, I can write a thousand words an hour in subjects which I have passing familiarity. (I might even be able to gust to 1500 wph) A double spaced word document with one inch margins is approximately 300 words. As such, that's nine pages in three hours, and an hour of pre-research. Considering that these papers are mass-produced by an individual who has already researched the same topic before, putting together a term paper of note would not be considerably hard. Similarly, I'll go back to my Object Oriented Programming final project. It took four of us half a semester to put together a game that would take me 80-120 hours now. (This was not a particularly competitive university.) This given program would be much better than what we turned in. I'm sure an engineer with a decade of experience could put together a college project at an average university in a weekend.
sdp 18y ago
This does a good job of exemplifying the Sex & Cash Theory (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333278). One sexy writing job, and another that pays the bills in a pinch.
radley 18y ago
I wish I had something intelligent to say as a response, but I can't. Teh awesomez!
- noonespecial 18y ago
  I think for about $20, that guy will write one for you! :)

30 points by robg 18y ago

I'm becoming more and more convinced that "Idiocracy' was a documentary. It's truly scary to me that not only does this happen a lot, but that professors have class sizes so largest that it's literally impossible for them to get to know students well enough to put two and two together.

robg 18y ago
up-vote for Idiocracy, but this current election gives me some hope. I'm actually less concerned about people getting through school by cheating. Sooner or later they'll have to actually prove themselves or face the consequences. Character is destiny.
- jumper 18y ago
  Well, see, except that's the problem! A lot of time they don't have to prove themselves for a long time, certainly not in school, almost never in certain bureaucratic blobs, and when the consequences come for them... often they come for us as well.... see any massively incompetent's screw up that cost us all dearly.

jcl 18y ago

Fascinating, and a little creepy. I found this part hilarious: You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers -- several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups.

jbert 18y ago

My theory is that if you try to "manage by metrics", the quality of what you are managing will go down. Unhappily, this often leads to more metrics, since more quality control is clearly needed... To me, the alternative of "managing by metrics" is knowing your staff and being familiar with their work. This is hard to do and harder to scale (say, to national level), since it requires that the managers are doing a good job. Metrics scale much more easily. But - those who care have to fight the measurement system to produce quality. This reduces their effectiveness or drives them to leave, leaving you with the less-motivated. Being a teacher, being a student and software development are areas which can and do suffer from this. (Students perhaps less so, they have to learn to play the system since they have fewer alternatives.)

timcederman 18y ago
Um, what?
- mlinsey 18y ago
  One of two possibilities: First possibility: Jbert was arguing that the reason students can get away with this is because classroom grading standards are too mechanical (did you fill at least X pages? Did you have a thesis statement? Did you cite at least Y sources). Furthermore, many teachers are themselves evaluated based "metrics" like standardized tests which don't test writing ability very well. I don't really think that this explains the paper mill business, but you could make the argument. Second possibility: Jbert is paying a starving blogger a couple of bucks to write his comments for him!
  - jbert 18y ago
    > I don't really think that this explains the paper mill business, but you could make the argument. I was thinking along those lines (then thought it relevant to the way students are judged too, as well as coders). Teaching used to be a well-regarded profession and has instead become much lower status (and low paid). Some random stats I googled for seem to support this (possibly biased source): http://www.nea.org/edstats/losingground.html http://www.nea.org/edstats/losingground.html I would think that you would be less likely to get away with the paper mill business if your teacher was a highly motivated professional. In the UK at least, teaching is rigidly controlled, with schools' success or failure being evaluated according to various metrics. These are can be easily gamed (e.g. # of pupils achieving 5 A-C grades at GCSE. You focus effort on the C/D students, and push kids towards 'soft' subjects) - but only by teachers who are prepared to put the score-against-metric above the quality of the education they give. Of course, if you don't perform to those metrics, the school suffers (lower in league table => fewer pupils => less cash for school => worse education for kids), so you're effectively screwed either way. Basically it's the old perverse incentive business, but yes, I do appear to have pulled a random rant out of thin air, so apologies to the regular HN readers. We now return you to your regularly scheduled viewing. HN question: given that management needs info to make decisions and metrics are often gameable/perverse, how does one approach this problem? Is it just "good metrics"? > Second possibility: Jbert is paying a starving blogger a couple of bucks to write his comments for him! Now that's a startup waiting to happen: karmachameleon.com - "building your online reputation" (name appears to be squatted).

Dilpil 18y ago

Note that this only happens in humanities classes. It says something about a class when a passable term paper can be produced in the space of 4 hours. Imagine asking someone to complete your engineering term project in a similar fashion.

utnick 18y ago
Outsourcing CS projects and homework actually seems to be a pretty big business on most rentacoder and freelancer sites.
- eru 18y ago
  I hope math is not tainted, yet.
lacker 18y ago
Just take a look at the Yahoo Answers sections on math, chemistry, biology, etc. to see people who are obviously doing their homework. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545227 http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545227
ibsulon 18y ago
An expert writer can do a passable term paper in four hours. I've written over a million words in my life. As such, I can write a thousand words an hour in subjects which I have passing familiarity. (I might even be able to gust to 1500 wph) A double spaced word document with one inch margins is approximately 300 words. As such, that's nine pages in three hours, and an hour of pre-research. Considering that these papers are mass-produced by an individual who has already researched the same topic before, putting together a term paper of note would not be considerably hard. Similarly, I'll go back to my Object Oriented Programming final project. It took four of us half a semester to put together a game that would take me 80-120 hours now. (This was not a particularly competitive university.) This given program would be much better than what we turned in. I'm sure an engineer with a decade of experience could put together a college project at an average university in a weekend.

sdp 18y ago

This does a good job of exemplifying the Sex & Cash Theory (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333278). One sexy writing job, and another that pays the bills in a pinch.

radley 18y ago

I wish I had something intelligent to say as a response, but I can't. Teh awesomez!

noonespecial 18y ago
I think for about $20, that guy will write one for you! :)