
Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas - _ttg
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/us/college-cheating-papers.html
======
TrackerFF
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.

~~~
omarhaneef
As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was
depressing.

The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do
the work.

Let me explain.

When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually
over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright,
smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any
of them could do the job. And yet we had to pick maybe 10-30 from the school
for that summer. (Keep in mind we recruited from many schools for many
different positions).

So you have 1000 resumes and they all seem smart and interesting and you have
to pick 10. What do you do?

The GPA is a great way to numerically and “objectively” make a cut. Then when
you see a typo and maybe you can exclude that one and so on.

The reason you have to rely on these non predictive elements is exactly
because everyone signals well on the predictive elements.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
So why not try random instead?

It sounds like a great opportunity for an experiment. Say you have 20 slots,
pick 10 using the GPA/nitpick method, and 10 at random, and then compare the
results 5 or 10 years later.

~~~
Spooky23
I’ve done that a few times when I’ve had to hire people very quickly.

I numbered each resume without reading it and drew lots. We had 6 people
interview ~30 people for 10 slots. Each person had 15 minutes to talk.
Candidates were out of the running if 3 people said “no”. We stopped when we
had 10 people.

It worked out pretty good, but made HR angry. We ended up with 2 bozos, but
the rest were pretty great.

I worked at another place years ago where we would mentor call center agents
to become DBAs and Unix people. Those folks were all awesome, and a few had
GEDs only. One of them called me to thank me for the opportunity, he just
became a CIO!

Personally, if you have the time, you can mentor and get better results from a
marginally qualified, engaged candidate than a person with the right
credentials.

~~~
bsanr2
Investment > innate capability

You would think the tech industry, with its endless graveyard of technically-
superior-but-undermarketed or under-supported products would recognize this.

------
lettergram
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
what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.

~~~
meowface
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
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
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
> 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
Pretty much exactly what I did, as well. And I'd usually do it an hour or two
before each test.

------
spodek
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.

~~~
cco
You've never had to read and understand some data, analyze it, and then
communicate your results via written word in your career? I'm totally willing
to grant you that the majority of careers do not require this skill but most
white collar work does.

Agreed that essays are overused but I'm just surprised to hear you downplay
them so much.

~~~
nitwit005
The handful of times I've been asked to analyze something, the result has been
a list or graph with some accompanying description.

I had a coworker who had a reputation for long emails. It was clear, based on
hallway comments, that no one was reading them. People don't appear to have
much tolerance for essays unless there's good reason for it.

~~~
hugey010
Agreed. When I write an email, I usually address the topic generically, then
list options or reasons or whatever, then give a takeaway or action item. Most
people seem to only read the topic statement. Not sure if I have lazy
coworkers or I'm not an effective emailer.

~~~
rahimnathwani
TO: hugey010@...

SUBJECT: Put the action statement in the subject line, starting tomorrow

Your colleagues read your emails in sequence. You care that they have read the
action statement so they can follow up or disagree. Putting it first will get
it read.

Put the action statement in the subject line, starting tomorrow. You can also
repeat it at the end.

If you have a better suggestion, let me know today please.

------
ineedasername
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.

------
gumby
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.

------
GnarfGnarf
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.

~~~
adolph
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
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.

------
wallflower
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.

~~~
Spooky23
It screws everyone out of the know because it screws up the curve.

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

~~~
Zanneth
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.

------
user764743
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
Seems like that would work only in smaller classes. It quickly becomes a real
headache when you have hundreds of students.

~~~
dehrmann
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
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.

------
swiley
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.

------
gumby
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!

------
mruts
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
> 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.

------
kwhitefoot
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.

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

------
sosodev
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
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.

------
dade_
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.

------
pochamago
Ready solution: make tests the only thing that matters.

