During my life as a ghost writer for bloggers and authors, I had very similar interactions. It got to a point where I was writing comments/replies on behalf of some people because they didn't know how to defend work. Knowing what I know about online content, it gets me wondering how much of what we read is really written by the name attached to it.
As for the topic of schools, I'm not bothered by it. Part of the learning in college comes from learning how to meet deadlines and get results. It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user. That type of skill will serve people well later in life.
>As for the topic of schools, I'm not bothered by it. Part of the learning in college comes from learning how to meet deadlines and get results.It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user. That type of skill will serve people well later in life.
I love when people are honest about their cynicism! Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think the other "part of the learning" is about learning skills and internalizing habits. On the one hand, becoming a good cheat may very well enrich you, but you won't actually learn how to write a freaking paragraph via that route.
Yet again, I am amazed by the decadence and worthlessness of so much of humanity... perhaps that is what happens when you turn 40 ....
EDIT: I don't find the poster I replied to worthless and decadent, just the customers of the ghost writer.
If it makes you feel any better, I outsourced my java homework in college because I didn't think I'd need to learn programming.
Come to find out, I did need to learn it, but I also needed to learn how to manage freelancers, which I do now on a daily basis. So maybe cheating/taking shortcuts paid off a bit, just not how you would expect it to.
I hope it goes without saying that if a prospective student wants to learn how to "meet deadlines and get results", he should go get a job, not go to college. Going to college and cheating is both a destructive (it takes away time, resources, and credibility from the students who are actually there to learn the topic) and inefficient way to learn those skills.
I don't think people cheat to learn skills. They cheat to get a credential that can be used to get them into a job. The credential differentiates them from the non-cheating or non-intelligent population. With it they can manipulate others into thinking they are worth more than they are.
Of course, at that point you might think they'd be out of their league but in many cases this won't be the case. There are a lot of jobs which require great degrees but only to get in...
Sure, but they want the paper, so students figure out the most efficient way to get the paper. The fix isn't to catch cheaters, but to stop valuing the damn paper so much.
Well, if it were that easy to come up with good assignments year-after-year that did a great job of aiding and testing the students' progress but weren't amenable to cheating, then we wouldn't have this problem.
I disagree completely. Businesses do this every day, and many hackers here, especially those learning to code, fake it until they make it, learning on the fly.
I'm not saying education is useless, but it's amazing how quickly you can learn when forced to.
As for the topic of schools, I'm not bothered by it. Part of the learning in college comes from learning how to meet deadlines and get results. It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user. That type of skill will serve people well later in life.