
The Shadow Scholar - harscoat
http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/
======
oz
I, who dropped out of CompSci after my first year, was a small-time shadow
scholar.

It started innocently enough: I wasn't working, and a friend of a friend who
was doing her Master's (in Education, wouldn't you know) needed help typing
and formatting a document according to APA Style. I needed the money, so I
visited her at the school where she worked. I took the draft she had penned
and started reading.

I nearly vomited.

The quality of writing was atrocious. It wasn't just 'bad', or 'needing
improvement'. It was shockingly, horrifyingly terrible.

Poor structure. Poor grammar. Not answering the question. excessive
circumlocution. Hackneyed phrases every other sentence.

I diplomatically told her that I would 'change some of the words'. As she
dictated and I typed, I changed sentence order and modified her word choices.
When it was finished, there was a semblance of respectability. A few days
later, I heard that the lecturer loved it.

That, dear friend, was the beginning. I completed quite a few assignments for
her, but stopped after she started quibbling over the already small fee I
charged. (Note to self: Always charge what you're worth.)

Sometime later, a neighbour in my building called me upstairs to help a friend
of his. She was typing a paper for her degree to submit that evening, and he,
knowing my language skills and typing speed wanted me to help. I went, sat
down, and read.

Oh, dear.

I told her that in all honesty, it sucked. I made a few changes, typed up the
rest. 'Twas enough for her to get hooked.

Over the next two years, I did several assignments for her. It got to where
she would simply email me the research question, and I'd 'learn' the subject
(yes, in 2 hours), get references, and like 'Ed Dante' divide the paper into
sections, and prepare material. I could do a 10 page paper in one day, which
would probably net a 90% grade or better. This was after never having heard of
the topic before. She would get wonderful comments from lecturers about her
'wonderful exposition' and 'excellent analysis'. This from a girl who,
although not dunce, could _never_ verbally put sentences together half that
well. I often wondered about the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of her
teachers.

It's a smug feeling, walking around as a college dropout while knowing that
you can run intellectual circles around people with graduate degrees. I should
note, though, that these were all humanities subjects: Use 10 words where 1
would suffice and make up some bullshit, and you're good to go. _It doesn't
have to make sense_ because _Most teachers aren't going to read it anyway!_

For those of us here on HN, who are in all probability above the average, it
might be difficult to understand how stupid most people are; but take it from
me: they are. Very.

I'm done with it now, though. I hated researching stuff that bored me,
although I sometimes learned a lot. The most important lesson?

The world is bullshit.

[http://www.designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=3...](http://www.designobserver.com/observatory/entry.html?entry=3347)

~~~
azanar
_The world is bullshit._

And you certainly did your part in helping the world that direction.

You were willing to undersell yourself in allowing people to pass off your
work and knowledge and skills as your own, and then you wonder why everyone
around you seems to be so amazingly stupid. They're stupid because you
provided them absolutely no incentive not to be. You made ignorance cheap, and
as a result, it is precisely what you got.

There must've been some incentive for you, I presume. It probably wasn't the
money, because you already said your fee was small. It wasn't the desire to
wise these people up, because there was nothing for them to do once you were
done. Why did you do this? I certainly hope it wasn't just for the sake of
walking around smug amongst the uneducated masses, because then you are
damning a monster you helped create.

~~~
oz
I'm not going to play dumb and act like I didn't realize what I was doing.

I did it partly for the money, and partly for the sake of helping someone who
would probably not have a chance to improve their life (via education). We
remain good friends to this day - she called just before I read your comment.

 _" They're stupid because you provided them absolutely no incentive not to
be."_

There are some people who, irrespective of the work they put in, who will
never be able to learn somethings. I used to think that people were just lazy,
but then I realized that many things are beyond most people. Don't believe for
a second that one day, everyone will be smart, uber-rational and we'll all
live in some Randian, Galt-led utopia.

Deep, critical thinking is not possible for most people. Through no fault of
their own, they simply lack the mental hardware. I recognize that this view is
very un-PC, but if mind is a function of matter as I believe, some people,
regardless of what they do, will never be able to reason at a high level.

The logical question then, is this: How moral is it to help someone game the
system? I wouldn't feel good helping an incompetent med student or civil
engineer, but what about some mid-level paper pusher? But then again, if I'm
willing to make exceptions, that puts me on the slippery slope: where,
exactly, do I draw the line?

I'm sorry, but I don't have easy answers. Thanks for your comment, though.

~~~
derefr
> Don't believe for a second that one day, everyone will be smart, uber-
> rational and we'll all live in some Randian, Galt-led utopia.

Not even with properly-applied eugenics (i.e. widespread pre-fertilization
gene therapy)?

~~~
moshezadka
How will the "properly-applied" eugenics be done? I mean, currently people get
other people to write their papers for a college degree -- think of how much
they'd be willing to pay if it was their kids' existence on the line!

tl;dr: Eugenics won't be properly applied because pre-eugenics people will
game the system.

------
grellas
Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where
learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?

I vividly remember the slackers of my generation (college/law school in the
1970s). They took the basket-weaving classes on the cynical assumption that it
was a short-cut to getting an "easy A." They padded their papers with junk -
that is, whenever they couldn't avoid having to do a paper. They feared the
demanding teachers and ran from them. They continually looked for outline-
level materials (Cliff notes, Gilberts law summaries) by which they could try
to cram for a test without really having to master any of the materials. In
short, they did everything possible to avoid having to think or work at the
process of learning and, hence, they graduated, if at all, miles behind the
hard-working students in their ability to think or to work as they turned to
face real-world challenges.

I have never understood this mind-set. For me, the challenge was always to
take on the _harder_ challenges if that meant developing either your
substantive knowledge or your skills in writing, analyzing, communicating, or
whatever. Wasn't that the point of being there, after all?

The one precious commodity you have as a student that you will likely _never
have again_ is the privilege of being able to devote large blocks of
uninterrupted time to diving into any given area and mastering it. Once you
get into the real world, it is very difficult, if not impossible, ever to have
that resource available to you again.

Whatever you do, don't squander this resource but, instead, use it to
advantage. You will sacrifice in the short term as you watch your friends
party away while you slave away, but you will develop depth of knowledge and
habits of discipline that will endure for a lifetime while those who choose to
cut corners, sadly, will not.

Cheating does have its victims. Those who cheat, however, will one day realize
that the primary victim of that cheating is none other than they themselves.
_Caveat discipulus_!

~~~
oz
_"Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where
learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?"_

In a word, yes.

You see, education, for most people, is NOT about _learning_. It's about
_getting a job_.

We HN types value learning for its own sake, and would happily curl up with a
copy of SICP or TAOCP and feel content. The average person wants the whole
thing to be over as quickly and painlessly as possible. In the words of some
of my classmates, concerning cheating:

"Better to cheat than to repeat."

or perhaps more poignantly:

"Don't be a hero and get zero."

We, my dear grellas, are not normal.

~~~
liuhenry
> "You see, education, for most people, is NOT about _learning_. It's about
> _getting a job._ "

That is exactly true. But I challenge that "learning for its own sake" is not
normal; rather, the educational system is atrocious in its ability to foster
"learning" in kids who never experienced truly mastering something in the
first place.

I daresay that the sense of accomplishment from solving a problem or truly
learning something is a universal human response. The problem lies with the
educational system.

~~~
oz
Upvoted. I see your point.

Question for you: Is there any way it could be different, given the
constraints the education system faces, such as limited time, untalented
teachers, and the human need to quantify?

~~~
liuhenry
That's a very good question, and one I think everyone needs to be asking.

I can't claim to be an expert on education, but we can all speak from
experience. Being currently in the educational system, I honestly think it's
about inspiration vs. motivation. The current system is fairly good at
motivating students, but this is on a superficial level - grades, getting into
a good college/job, or the threat of failure. In general, though, I can't say
that I've really been _inspired_ to learn, apart from a few teachers whom I
deeply respect. The crucial difference between the 2 - motivation only works
as long as the motivator is there, and people have no problem with cheating.
Inspiration is what drives people, and what education is missing.

So where does inspiration come from? Both internally and externally - the
intrinsic value or joy of learning, and being able to apply what we learn to
life. I think there are 2 places where real improvement could be seen:

TL;DR - In short, I think we need to develop internal inspiration when
students are young, and then tie that into external inspiration as we get
older.

1\. Childhood education - Learning is something that really needs to be made
fun, and internalized. I think that this is where most people gain an initial
passion for learning. There is an intrinsic joy to truly learning something or
solving a problem, but we need to teach perseverance - there was some study
which showed that, given an impossible problem, U.S. students spent far less
time on it than some students from other countries. Anecdotally, though, we
tend to give up too easily; most of the rewards are from completion, but we
never get there in the first place. We need to show our kids both the value in
challenging yourself and also the value in the end result. I think a large
part of this comes from parents and your home environment, rather than
formalized education.

2\. Middle/HS - Most of us have that one teacher that really inspired us. I
think we need to look for teachers that may not be _great_ at teaching, but
rather are visionaries and are able to inspire. In the end, all of us learn in
different ways, and arguably a lot of it is done outside of the classroom.
Especially given the problem of limited time, teachers need to in inspire
students first, and teach second - if a student wants to learn, they will,
regardless of their resources or environment. Granted, that's hyperbole, but
think about the lengths you go to if you really want to do something. The best
teachers are the ones that are truly passionate about what they teach, and are
able to impart that on the students. We need to show students that what they
are learning has real value, and can be applied to whatever the student is
interested in.

------
twrensch
I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end
of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of
my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To
me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for
an e-mail.

I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's
academic dishonesty policy, which would lead to--at least--failure of the
course. It didn't happen. The student came up with a lame excuse, I was chided
for harassing the student, and it was all swept under the rug. I was tempted
to resign in protest, but kept with it for two more years before quietly
leaving academics.

I enjoy teaching, I think I'm good at it and my students tended to agree.
Unfortunately, I can't make myself teach in the current educational system
here in the US.

~~~
_delirium
I guess this particular part has never greatly bothered me about academia,
though plenty of things _are_ quite broken and bother me.

I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if
someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for
people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep
unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring myself to care that
much about that, though. To me the important question is whether people who
want to learn are able to; not whether people who don't want to learn slip
through or don't slip through.

The much bigger failing in my mind isn't that cheaters aren't sufficiently
punished, but that motivated students who want to learn things other than
exactly what they're assigned are given virtually no assistance, and often
actively discouraged (the side-projects-are-bad, keep-your-head-down-and-do-
what-you're-told mentality).

~~~
robryan
Different perspective though, from an academics point of view that does make
an effort to reach out to students and teach them well this cheating would be
disheartening.

~~~
_delirium
I can see that, but I'm an academic myself, and somehow it doesn't bother me
much (it does bother many of my colleagues).

I guess I'm most strongly motivated by providing assistance and resources to
people who want to learn, so whatever happens with the people who don't want
to learn doesn't bother me that much. I'll enforce whatever rules I have to,
to the extent the institution provides me a means to do so (and requires me
to), but it just isn't a big motivator for me.

I _would_ prefer the proportion of students who are there to learn to be
higher (it'd be a more enjoyable and motivating environment), but I don't
think being more of a hardass on cheating is going to solve that problem. It's
probably true that there are students who, while tempted to cheat, would be
great students if they were scared away from that temptation by vigorous
enforcement. My guess is that number is fairly small, though.

I think most of the people who cheat are the kind of student who doesn't
really want to be in this major at all, but feels they need to get this degree
to get a job. I think vigorous enforcement with those students, even if it
successfully stamps out cheating, will just result in a bunch of students
grudgingly doing the work because they now have no choice. But that kind of
student still isn't that fun to teach, so my motivation to expend more effort
than I have to on converting "cheaters" into "grudging teeth-gritters" is
pretty low.

~~~
jacques_chester
I'm sorry to be a pain, but by not punishing the cheating 'free riders', you
are pushing the cost of those free riders onto the good students.

The value of of the good students' education is eroded by poor quality of the
cheaters.

------
thefool
I am involved with a startup working on this problem (<http://GuruFi.com>).

Fundamentally this problem is derives from the fact that it is difficult for
people to learn how to write and structure their ideas. Hell thats basically
the whole point of PhD programs, and people spend years finishing them.

With the internet, it becomes really easy to just pay someone else who already
knows how to write to do the work for you.

The only real solution to this that I see is to make these services legitimate
as a teaching outlet rather than as a cheating outlet. Force people to write a
draft. In editing, don't rewrite, just comment and give people feedback as to
how they can improve the structure of their document. In general have the
people feel that they are getting taught rather than just getting a product.

My hope is that creating a legitimate service will encroach the market people
like this target, and will actually force students to learn something through
their writing assignments.

~~~
rick_2047
I don't think getting writers only from the top 20 uni will work.

I wouldn't like my high school paper to be edited by a grad student at an Ivey
League college

~~~
thefool
This is something we are doing just in the beginning to build credibility.

Once we are a little more established we plan on being less selective with our
editors and letting the market decide who the great people are.

~~~
rick_2047
The best people to do this work will be someone who has just passed (or is
working on) a level high than that. A high school lab report can be much
better drafted by a undergrad freshmen than a grad student as he has done this
recently and is much more connected with it while the grad student has
elevated in terms of language and lowest common denominator of knowledge in
any subject. They also tend to forget the basics somehow.

~~~
thefool
I agree completely. For this reason, there are undergraduate students, grad
students, and professionals on the site.

We simply require that they attend a top 20 school at this point. This is
mostly so that customers know that all editors meet that baseline measure of
credibility (i.e. they made it through the same process that the applicant is
pursuing, and thus probably know what it takes).

~~~
rick_2047
Umm.. I don't think they need to _meet that baseline measure of credibility_.
What about a home schooled kid who made it into one of those colleges?

------
CoreDumpling
_While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he
wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he
wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do.
Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top._

What's scary is how far the lazy rich kid will be able to go with this, with a
promising career in management. I wouldn't want to work for someone like this,
but it is easy to imagine him being very effective. (For all I know I could
have worked under one of these before, and not even hated it.)

~~~
yters
Managing effectively is more about people skills than education.

~~~
mak120
So, I guess you could just pick up an illiterate guy with good people skills
to run a large corporation or be the president?

~~~
yters
Yep, pretty much. As long as he can talk with experts and understand their
position he can lead.

~~~
GFischer
Yep, I can personally attest that a director at one large corporation has a
BOUGHT undergraduate degree, and no other education.

He inherited the position from the hardworking founder through being extremely
good at people skills and corporate backstabbing (he should have a degree in
that :) ). It saddens me and makes me a bit more cynical every time I see him.

The corporation survives because these monsters are mostly self-sustaining,
and those at lower levels do the actual work (I wouldn't give it a chance if
some disruption came along, though).

------
jorleif
_I can churn out four or five pages an hour._

I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an
unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday.
That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still
producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very
impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce
this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of
blogging.

On a more serious note, I think a key benefit for computer science as an
academic discipline is that much work is published in conference articles,
rather than journals as in most other fields. This means that computer
scientists must be able to communicate complicated ideas on 8 pages, rather
than 30-40. It really forces the communication to be terse and efficient. I've
done course assignments together with people who only publish in journals and
it's amazing how these people can blabber on for ages. We had a maximum page
length of 20 pages, which left about 3 pages per author. I was very puzzled
when some people wrote 6 pages of stuff which I could have easily expressed in
1.5 pages without any loss of clarity, but I'm blaming the culture of their
fields, where many words are better than few, and no hard limits are imposed.

~~~
jseliger
_I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an
unknown subject?_

Yes: journalists do this routinely.

My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. We
routinely write on subjects that we initially know nothing about; we described
some of that process in a post about writing Department of Energy grants:
<http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/> .

Granted, this is not "academic text," exactly, and neither is journalism. But
neither is what the guy cited is doing; he's really just regurgitating stuff
that sounds okay. This works surprisingly well surprisingly far into the
educational system.

 _I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind
of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging._

You could, if you wanted to. The "want" is the key part here, and the skill is
not as easy as it sounds: it took me many years to be able to write proposals
efficiently and synthesize unknown information efficiently.

~~~
jorleif
It seems to me that if one becomes a professor, a very big chunk of one's time
goes into writing grant applications. All of that is "wasted time", in the
sense that it takes time away from the primary goal of making good research.
In the private sector one would hire separate people to perform this kind of
support functions, but in academia that is often impossible. For these
reasons, even being able to synthesize known information efficiently would be
a very useful skill in this line of work.

------
Eliezer
Most telling quote: _As long as it doesn't require me to do any math, I will
write anything._

~~~
groaner
Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even
better-paid assignments (supply vs. demand, after all) to interview with the
Chronicle.

~~~
stcredzero
_Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even
better-paid assignments_

I think that opportunists with those abilities went to work for Wall Street.
Some people call them _quants_. I suspect it's much more lucrative than any
crumb gathering around academia.

------
henrikschroder
Why is there such a large focus on writing long essays in US education?

When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to
write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could
have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or
so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of
the Swedish subject, but actually writing them was always done in school, as
an exam, i.e. sit down for three hours and write. And the grading of our
essays were never on length, it was always on grammar, spelling, style, form
and coherency.

University was largely the same. Granted, being a CS major you're expected to
write a lot more code than essays. I took a few courses that had essays as
part of the requirements such as technical writing and history of technology,
but those were outliers, and not the norm. I mean, my Master's thesis was
"only" 45 pages, and again, the professor was a lot more interested in it
being coherent, correct, and actually saying something, rather than being
long.

So what's the point of long essays in every subject? To me, it seems like that
will just make students write a lot of voluminous bullshit without ensuring
that they actually learn what they write about?

~~~
zecho
I was a double major in Communications and American Studies in my first go-
around at an undergrad degree. It's not so much the fact that essays are
necessarily the problem, but the expectation of length as the ultimate point
of the exercise--from professors and students--that causes confusion.

As a writer, I hate filling prose with word soup just to fill space, but early
in college I often ended up writing in 15 words what could be said in 5. By my
junior year, I stopped caring about meeting the length requirements and
focused on solid research and arguments in my papers.

Most profs didn't seem to dock me for it when I showed competence in the
subject matter. Those that did were reasonable after speaking with them about
it.

But, that's the difference between me and the people that hire ghostwriters. I
made it clear to my teachers I was there to learn and grow, regardless of many
of the arbitrary milestones and requirements. I was there for the journey.
People who enter university simply to pass through a series of checkpoints on
their way to an end goal focus entirely on the end goal of getting a degree
(and presumably shortly thereafter, a job) rather than getting an education.

~~~
jimbokun
In one of the first writing classes I took in college, the professor said on
the first day "You have just spent your high school years finding ways to add
words and fill more pages. In this class, you will learn to take them out."

The length of every assignment was exactly 1 page.

------
yinmoneyhuang
To a very limited extent, schools have tried to protect themselves from such
cheating by requiring students (or prospective students) to compose writing
samples under controlled conditions.

The Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for instance, requires students to write
an essay. The essay is not scored; rather, it is forwarded to the schools to
which the student has applied. The schools then compare the LSAT essay to the
personal statement submitted with the student's application. A gross disparity
between the quality of writing seen on the LSAT essay and that on the personal
statement presumably raises suspicions that the personal statement was
ghostwritten.

Perhaps such measures should be implemented more widely.

~~~
mdwrigh2
While this is an interesting way of comparing, I'd be slightly worried if I
were applying to law school. Given that you have a limited amount of time to
write your LSAT essay, and an essentially unlimited amount of time to write
and polish your personal statement (plus have professors, friends and family
look over it), I could see there being a large but legitimate gap between the
two.

Perhaps it's not as great as I think though.

~~~
yardie
There are style markers (the writer's voice) that are in the paper no matter
how it is edited. This is how critics and editors can tell when a book is
written by the real author and when it is ghostwritten. The only way it's
possible to avoid this is to digest a lot of material by the original author
so you learn to become that voice.

This is also prevalent in song lyrics. You can hear when a rapper, for
example, is using their own material rather than a ghostwriters. The flow and
definition will be really different.

------
dcbell
This is why I like HN so much---the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by
startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process. It's extremely focused
on _what_ _can_ _you_ _do?_

An hour spent hacking to make something useful or cool is never a wasted hour.
But wouldn't it suck to realize that you spent years in grad school without
even learning anything?

In any case, this sort of news---the rise of cheating---is both good news and
bad news for founders. The good is that your competitors are probably hiring
these people. Especially so for folks like AirBnB who are competing with hotel
chains, etc.

The bad, of course, is that when hiring, you might run into people like this.
But if your hiring process>your competitor's process, then this is very much a
net gain for you.

~~~
azanar
_...the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a
mercilessly meritocratic process._

I think the entire culture is aimed at a much broader motivation than that. It
is aimed at a culture of intense intellectual curiosity, which makes the
community self-selecting in meritocratic way.

This carries into startups as well, because they are as much about what you
can learn as what you can do. Presumably, most startups are exploring at least
some uncharted territory. How curious you are about that territory will
suggest how much you can learn from it, and what you can learn from it will
certainly have an effect on how well you execute.

As a result, startups end up as one of the primary focusses of the culture,
but I think this as much a byproduct as it is an end to itself.

------
djm
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

Parents, government, and everybody in between seem focused on pushing as many
young people into university education as possible. But it seems to me that we
have pushed them too hard if they are cheating on this scale. Lots of them
just don’t belong there.

I imagine a fantasy future world in which ageing professors tell stories of
the dark ages of their early careers; a time in which most of their students
were not really interested in the subject of their degrees. A brave new world
in which young people who might like to get a job, start a business, write a
book, or just study independently of any official course, can go ahead and do
so without putting themselves through three years of painful essay faking and
pretense because “that’s what everyone else does”.

------
jimbokun
"It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding
on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of
my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked
if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have
professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when
asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and
documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal."

It's quite funny that such utterly dishonest people are so willing to accept
someone else's word at face value. Also, that they place such stock in the
institutional accreditations that they are proving to be worthless through
their actions.

------
gyardley
It's a shame the author didn't discuss where he worked, and how this industry
is connected to other aspects of for-profit online education.

I 'edited' college admissions essays for a couple of years, back when I was a
hungry grad student. The company I worked for, CyberEdit, was acquired by
Peterson's, a subsidiary of the Thompson Corporation. When Thompson started
divesting its education-based businesses, Peterson's (and CyberEdit) were
acquired by Nelnet, which holds and services a large portion of federally
subsidized student loans.

CyberEdit helps you get into a school you couldn't otherwise attend and Nelnet
helps you pay for a school you couldn't otherwise afford - with all parties
financially underwritten by your tax dollars. Great business.

------
hko
"it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating.
But I'd say education is the worst."

~~~
Alex3917
This isn't especially surprising considering that education students have the
second lowest GRE scores of any academic field. (The lowest being public
administrators.)

~~~
kenjackson
I'm not really sure how that follows. Was there some established link between
GRE scores and ethics?

I suspect it has as much to do with the following requirements:

1) A degree that is take-home essay heavy. 2) Very vocational -- the goal
being the degree, not the learning.

I'd expect business and law schools to be high on the list too, although maybe
the dynamic is somewhat different for professional schools.

~~~
gwern
Suggested link is lack of brains, not lack of scruples - remember the shadow
scholar's list of reasons includes 1 group that is simply too stupid to handle
the work.

~~~
kenjackson
This would imply a large variance of ability in the group, not a lower average
GRE score. Although it could be speculated that as the GRE score regresses to
the mean (of the general population), the variance likely increases.

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skybrian
Hmm, I suppose one way to go would be to require students to use a version-
controlled word processor for their writing, and submit the version history.
It could still be faked, but the difficulty of creating a good fake would make
the economics less favorable.

If it's badly faked, then the version history would provide evidence that's
more likely to hold up than a teacher's suspicion about the student's writing.

~~~
forensic
So the shadow scholar submits his version history. And then?

~~~
hardy263
A 75 page paper usually takes longer than 48 hours for normal students to
write. If the version history for the paper is submitted, but all the commits
are within a _very_ short time frame, then either the student stayed up all
night to write it, or they paid someone else to stay up all night to write it.
And if you ask them about what the wrote on on something they took all night
to write, they should know it fairly well. But if they paid someone else to do
it, they wouldn't know anything that's on the paper.

~~~
gwern
So then this big company hires a programmer to write a tool to randomize
entries over a week or a month or whatever, and our shadow scholar has 1
additional step when he finishes up.

Basically, this idea is DRM in another guise, and terrible for all the same
reasons. If you don't trust the student that much, then simply abandon take-
home work in general.

~~~
skybrian
Randomized entries would be obviously fake. To be a convincing fake, they have
to make sure it doesn't conflict with the student's work schedule, class
schedule, and so on. That means deciding when the student was supposed to have
been writing the paper, which requires quite a bit more coordination and
drives up the cost.

~~~
mitcheme
You're assuming that the student doesn't own a laptop (or at least doesn't
bring it to lectures) and that TPTB know the student's work schedule.

------
mak120
I live in a country where cheating is rampant (although it has gotten a little
better in recent years). Most of the best students (in terms of grades) at my
university were outright cheaters, or employed other indirect means of
academic dishonesty. Most blamed the teachers for making the courses
"unpassable".

You know what, no course is "unpassable". Its just something people make up to
justify their incompetence and laziness. Yes, some educators are pretty bad,
while others just don't care enough to stop this. But no matter what the
teachers and authorities try, you cannot stop a reasonably adept cheater from
using some way of gaming the system. People who are not interested in learning
will cheat no matter what.

Trying to lay the blame on the education system and the students is like a
drug dealer saying he is not to blame but the addicts are. By providing this
service, people like him are making the cheating option easier for students.

I just seem to get the vibe that he is just frustrated that his novel got
rejected by his university. This, compounded by financial (and perhaps
academic and social?) problems, possibly results in him being bitter about
university and the education system as a whole. He has every right to have
whatever opinions he has. But IMHO he is no rebel working to dismantle a
corrupt system. He's just a bitter writer exploiting and fueling the
immorality of some people to make a buck.

(Disclaimer: I am not an educator (I work as a software engineer) and I don't
even have any post-graduate degree. I just don't like people who go about
buying and cheating their way through life while the rest of do it the hard
way.)

------
grovulent
Student cheating is a systemic part of the culture and there is nothing that
can be done about it.

I mark logic papers. There might be a question where you have to provide a
model that makes the logical formula come out as true or false - the sort of
question which has an infinity of possible answers.

They never follow the particular method I suggest for working through these
which would lead them to the simplest answer in each case (usually a model
with only one object in the domain). Yet, somehow, one paper after another,
they all come up with the exact same model, with the same number of objects in
the domain, the same extensions... everything.

So they all just copy from one another. One student complained to me this year
that a large group of them were copying answers from one another right in
front of the office where they have to submit papers. Largely the university
can't do much more than turn a blind eye - for without absolutely concrete
evidence the students can (and often do) sue, and win.

------
BoppreH
I envy the knowledge that this guy has amassed.

~~~
light3
Sure he probably goes through more material per day than 99.99999% of the
population, but whether he remembers or understands is another matter.

~~~
BoppreH
And there is also the sad fact that he has to hide all that under heavy layers
of academic wording.

But even in the worst case scenario, he has some degree of familiarity with
almost everything. Except math.

~~~
Natsu
You might not believe me, but I've seen essays in place of equations on math
tests before.

I think one was even relevant enough to get partial credit...

------
Detrus
This is good news for the education system. Now they have competition that
magnifies the flaws in their practice.

~~~
DanielN
I don't know. Isn't this a subsystem that hides the flaws.

Writing the article exposes some flaws but even then, most professors who read
this aren't going to be able to pick out of a line up which of their students
have used such services.

~~~
Detrus
Widespread cheating means people don't take education seriously for whatever
reason. Cheating frequency is an indicator that the education system is doing
something wrong. "The customer is always right" is applicable here.

A similar attitude existed in the USSR. Students cheated cooperatively to
stick it to the man. When education is "the man" it's a sign that something
must change. People see it as another obstacle, not a stepping stone. Cheating
became socially acceptable.

You could detect it with software, make students use an app that records the
time of every keystroke and save. If a paper is written too quickly, while
shorter papers from the student were not, it's a red flag.

But that would make the problem worse, cheaters will get smarter, detecting
them will get harder. Educators must try new things so that people won't want
to cheat in the first place. Then after detecting cheating they should use it
as a metric of their own performance. Otherwise we're well on our way to
social acceptance of cheating.

------
partition
It's worse than the actions of individual students being dishonest.

The fact that someone can do this, for so many students, in so little time,
along with the fact that the students themselves have not been called out for
the obvious mismatch between what they write and the signals they send out in
real life with other students shows that things are fucked in a _strong way_ ;
if a particular school and student is named as being part of this, it's not
just that the student is called out for not doing the work that represents the
degree, but that it serves as strong evidence that the particular degree or
school is worthless, and the school's accreditation should be called into
question. Higher education has truly gone down the toilet.

------
3dFlatLander
> Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-
> word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and
> I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what
> most normal people could say in a paragraph.

I did this a lot while in college--I'm sure many did. The quality of the work
was terrible in hindsight, and I did cheat myself out of some good learning
opportunities. But, the thing that bothers me to this day is that no teacher
ever called me out. My writing tends to be technically correct, which wasn't
very common in most of my classes. I think the fluff was acceptable in
comparison to sloppy spelling and grammar.

------
xmv
This person's work completely lacks the kind of civic virtue that traditional
liberal education was meant to inculcate. The responsibility lies with us,
that we do not support the classical Western liberal tradition of virtue.

------
NHQ
That guy is a good writer!

------
SkyMarshal
_"Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No
matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is
in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate
thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university
slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say
yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked
if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say
yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine
and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal."_

Lol.

------
simonjoe
The one thing I've learned from one of the most prestigious technical
universities in the world is that results are more important than integrity.

