
Contract Cheating: Colleges Crack Down on Ghostwritten Essays - HillaryBriss
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/10/710985799/contract-cheating-colleges-crack-down-on-ghostwritten-essays
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strikelaserclaw
The whole sending all kids off to college model is a joke. Most people are
average, they don't enjoy studying or have strong sense of direction in life.
Send these kids at the ripe age of 18 to college, where they pay incredible
amounts of money and are more or less pressured to succeed lest they waste
alot of money and you get a recipe for gaming the system. The older i get, i
believe that for most people going to college slightly later when you have
more maturity and life experience is a lot better. Maybe apprentice type
programs at 18, work at them for a few years and then decide if college is
right for you.

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mips_avatar
I like the national service requirement in Norway. You must either join the
armed forces or some other type of national service for 18 months. I think it
was hugely beneficial for the people I know who did this. Just kind of helps
you grow up, and become more sure of who you are and how capable you are.

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closeparen
I’ve never been in the military so maybe this is overblown in popular culture.
But as I understand it, service in the US is designed to destroy who you are
and replace it with what your branch needs you to be. Right down things like
banning the word “I” in favor of “this recruit.”

Erasure of self and conditioning for obedience might be a good fit for certain
people and certain tasks, like troubled kids and war-fighting, but I hope it’s
never required for the whole population.

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fucking_tragedy
From what I've heard from other people's experiences, it's less _erasure of
self_ and more of a program tuned to deal with the lowest common denominator,
where the LCD is pretty damn low.

The military needs a one size fits all program to deal with dropouts, people
joining to get their shit together, and other societal misfits.

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raincom
There are many courses in humanities (social sciences) that need to be
revamped. What these professors do all the time is this: assign some
publications and write a paper on it. That is not the right way to go about
teaching.

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exogeny
I disagree, mostly on the basis of how many people I know write like shit, and
analyze/synthesize arguments like toddlers.

To put it another way, it’s not about the publication. Or even the material.
It’s about improving and setting standards for how you communicate and
interpret the world.

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raincom
In that case, these students should be sent to different classes like Writing
101 or Analyze Arguments 101, or Evaluate hypotheses 101.

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munchbunny
Many of those classes do exactly those things.

The scholarly criticism exercise uses the subject matter to create "play"
exercises to teach students to organize thoughts, construct and analyze
arguments, etc.

College math classes often do the same thing. For most people, the math is
just a medium for the intellectual "play" that teaches critical thinking
skills.

You probably won't need literary criticism in your day to day life, but then
again you probably don't need much of the math either.

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creaghpatr
In this case, it's obviously cheating.

Ironically, in the real world, upper management is largely delegation and
quality control for an effective price/ROI, rather than individual
contribution.

The essay writers may be able to earn an extra buck, but they could never
scale their performance the way the buyer could.

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pdpi
Delegation and quality control are entirely different skills relative to those
being tested for, though — you wouldn’t be able to pass an English literature
exam by using your amazing calculus skills either!

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ccnafr
I'm actually making a good living from writing other people's works, btw.

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positr0n
Idea: When you pay tuition you agree to pay a fee of $X,000 if the college
catches you red handed cheating.

The college can then offer contract essay writers $X,000 if they provide
communications proving a student is buying an essay, including the essay
itself before the student turns it in. This fee can be as high as it needs to
be to cover the cost of lost revenue (including lost word-of-mouth referrals)
so that it's worth it.

The only pitfall is you would have to carefully design the requirements for
the trap since framing someone is now lucrative.

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twblalock
> The only pitfall is you would have to carefully design the requirements for
> the trap since framing someone is now lucrative.

Another problem is that you turn university life into a witch hunt, with
everyone constantly under suspicion of cheating.

