Paper Mills
Nov. 19th, 2010 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gmonkey42See, wouldn't my title have been better than "The Shadow Scholar" for this article by an anonymous writer whom students pay to write their papers for them? I saw the link on Pharyngula. It's an interesting read. I was aware that this happened but not that these places actually write entire PhD theses for people. I notice the author doesn't even mention science. They could write review papers, that's easy enough, but I don't see how they could write a thesis based on the student's research. Right? Or maybe the student could throw the data at them and they'd actually do the statistics and interpretation of results for you? I like to think that wouldn't be possible. I hope my work can be distinguished from that of someone who has no expertise in my field and is just paid to write papers on whatever subject comes up, based on what they can find on Wikipedia and Google. I'm not surprised that subjects like Business and Sociology are susceptible to that, but surely not STEM subjects. The author did say they don't do assignments involving math. It bothers me that an instructor probably can't tell the difference between my paper that I spend weeks on and a paper someone's paid to write in two days. Obviously the author of this article is extremely intelligent and hard-working. That softens the blow a little.
Secondly, I'm also a little disturbed by how the writer's process is pretty similar to mine for a lot of the papers I've written. Step 1: Wikipedia. Step 2: Google. Step 3: read abstracts. But I have to go beyond that and read some actual papers. And there was no Wikipedia when I was an undergrad; I did spend a lot of time in the library reading the primary literature. And it bothers me a little that the amount of work I put into it makes me a chump when this guy can crank out dozens of pages every day. The response to that could be that I benefit from working hard on it but do I really? There have been an awful lot of assignments that were on subjects I never even thought about after the class was done. I am a huge proponent of lifelong learning but the author of the article makes a very valid point about school being a series of hoops to jump through and it being all about grades, at the expense of learning.
The third thing this article makes me think is "wow, I wonder if I could get in on that." I don't think I could be as prolific as this guy but if I could write papers in my spare time for $20k-$30k a year, that would be pretty sweet. One would think I'd have more of an ethical problem with it. Especially given that I plan to be a teacher. I'm not sure why I don't. Reading this article inspires in me a feeling of futility; the system is irreparably broken anyway. The smart kids are going to learn whether the system fosters that or not - that's what the author of the article did. And the idiots are going to find a way to get by one way or another. Because if they didn't then graduation rates would be unacceptably low. I definitely see the author's point, that if they didn't help the students cheat then the students would just cheat some other way. That should be more depressing to me but it inspires resignation more than anything else. It's certainly depressing when I experience it firsthand in my Spanish class: no matter how easy it is, the students are constantly whining and begging for it to be made easier.
It would be easy to blame it on this generation of undergrads except a lot of the people in my class are my age or older. I guess I wasn't aware of it when I was an undergrad because I was in biochem along with all the hyperachieving pre-meds and future scientists. There probably was cheating; I know med students routinely sabotage each other and do whatever else they have to to get ahead. But that's out of cutthroat competitiveness (the unfortunate result of the necessary culling the university has to do before it decides who should even apply to medical school), I didn't see among my peers the laziness and entitlement that seem to be an epidemic among students now.
Secondly, I'm also a little disturbed by how the writer's process is pretty similar to mine for a lot of the papers I've written. Step 1: Wikipedia. Step 2: Google. Step 3: read abstracts. But I have to go beyond that and read some actual papers. And there was no Wikipedia when I was an undergrad; I did spend a lot of time in the library reading the primary literature. And it bothers me a little that the amount of work I put into it makes me a chump when this guy can crank out dozens of pages every day. The response to that could be that I benefit from working hard on it but do I really? There have been an awful lot of assignments that were on subjects I never even thought about after the class was done. I am a huge proponent of lifelong learning but the author of the article makes a very valid point about school being a series of hoops to jump through and it being all about grades, at the expense of learning.
The third thing this article makes me think is "wow, I wonder if I could get in on that." I don't think I could be as prolific as this guy but if I could write papers in my spare time for $20k-$30k a year, that would be pretty sweet. One would think I'd have more of an ethical problem with it. Especially given that I plan to be a teacher. I'm not sure why I don't. Reading this article inspires in me a feeling of futility; the system is irreparably broken anyway. The smart kids are going to learn whether the system fosters that or not - that's what the author of the article did. And the idiots are going to find a way to get by one way or another. Because if they didn't then graduation rates would be unacceptably low. I definitely see the author's point, that if they didn't help the students cheat then the students would just cheat some other way. That should be more depressing to me but it inspires resignation more than anything else. It's certainly depressing when I experience it firsthand in my Spanish class: no matter how easy it is, the students are constantly whining and begging for it to be made easier.
It would be easy to blame it on this generation of undergrads except a lot of the people in my class are my age or older. I guess I wasn't aware of it when I was an undergrad because I was in biochem along with all the hyperachieving pre-meds and future scientists. There probably was cheating; I know med students routinely sabotage each other and do whatever else they have to to get ahead. But that's out of cutthroat competitiveness (the unfortunate result of the necessary culling the university has to do before it decides who should even apply to medical school), I didn't see among my peers the laziness and entitlement that seem to be an epidemic among students now.
