An article at The New Inquiry is a conversation between a college-level philosophy teacher and a person who writes college papers for money. Much of it concerns the prevalence, ease, and mechanics of cheating on papers, whether the work is plagiarized or commissioned. But this explanation of why so many students cheat saddened me:
If the only purpose in going to college is to get a diploma (not knowledge, not an education, and not good grades), then its no wonder students assume that you should get one just for paying the tuition and arranging for the required papers by any means necessary. Link -via TYWKIWDBI, where you can join the discussion.
(Image credit: The "Gold Guys")
I think that the system, grading in general, grading as a gold standard of employability, college as the necessary step between high school and employment, all of these things alone aren’t necessarily wrong. But when you get them all together in this network, and college is going to define your future, the grades will determine where you go, one, for a fifth of you, those of you who are going to grad school or law school or med school. For the rest of you, to get that job, you need that paper that says, “Diploma,” which means you need to pass. That’s all that matters.
If the only purpose in going to college is to get a diploma (not knowledge, not an education, and not good grades), then its no wonder students assume that you should get one just for paying the tuition and arranging for the required papers by any means necessary. Link -via TYWKIWDBI, where you can join the discussion.
(Image credit: The "Gold Guys")
Many classes these days assign papers because they feel obligated to. They aren't papers designed to stimulate students minds or teach them anything new and useful. They're basically busywork and grade-padder.
Plus, there's a lot of paper writing for classes that aren't likely to have anything to do with the student's job performance after they graduate. For instance, one of my best customers was going to school to be a radiologist. The chance that her in-depth analysis of the Epic of Gilgamesh would ever be needed on the job were incredibly slim. By paying me to write about Gilgamesh, she had time to study harder on the things that had something to do with radiology.
The paid writers also aren't going to make enough of a difference on most people's grades overall to pass someone who's clearly unfit for their profession. I don't worry about having my MRI read by the radiologist I wrote for because I know that she still had to take the tests herself. The test grades would weed out the people that genuinely didn't know the material that was the real meat of the course. The paid-for paper would never add up to be enough of a difference in most classes to make much of a difference grade point wise for most students. It might slide a class or two from one letter grade to the next if the scores were close enough, but overall, over the course of a student's whole academic career, it wasn't going to make a big change. They weren't paying to go from D students to B students. They were paying to stay B students with a bit less hassle.
Real world professionals delegate. Professionals don't do every job in the office themselves. Your doctor likely doesn't do all the billing, insurance paperwork, radiology, lab work, admissions forms,wheeling the patients from their room to the operating room, etc. personally. They pay someone else to do a lot of those tasks while they focus on the part that they're uniquely qualified for. It's often more practical and efficient to pay someone else to work for you. Why not start being realistic about that at the college level?
What goes around comes around - maybe put a little effort into TEACHING a class and students would put in more effort in taking the class.
It's a moot point anyways - undergrad degrees are pretty much useless these days except for the Uni's name on the diploma (cheap school = little to no worth). Unless you're going to grad school (and therefore need the preliminary degree), save your time and money, or do what the smart kids are doing, pay someone else to do the regurgitation work for you.
Nevertheless, I still got 98% on the exams. Three of us achieved 98th percentile or higher, myself, my friend John and my brother. The three of us really wanted to know how computer networks worked, and we spent a considerable amount of free time in additional study, practice and dialog. The majority of the class appeared to be having a free lunch, they'd been admitted to the course by a government program aimed at establishing wayward youth, pretty much all of them failed. A good instructor, and government handouts are no substitute for the desire to know.
The learning process is catalysed by curiosity (And stress). There is sufficient neuroscientific support for this.
All of this was said to be impossible by the learned coders that frequented the adminmod and HLSDK forums. We made it work through sheer determination. However, due to unforseen and unrelated circumstances, I wasn't able to provide support for HLFX and it quickly disappeared. I managed to salvage a copy of the code from an abandonware site. A new mod sprung up that took the name "HLFX", so there is yet another one that is not the one we built.
Employers who cannot tell the difference between cheaters and knowledge-seekers get what they deserve.
when you are an architecture major
most poetry is awful
I agree. I mean, did you even count the syllables in your haiku? Way off.
I still remember the quote one of my high school literature teachers had on the door to her classroom, from George Bernard Shaw:
"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."
Did it ever occur to you that the reason you can’t get into grad school is that people like you have raised the bar. Now you are competing with kids that can’t write their way out of a paper bag, but they can hire people like you to write wonderful papers for them.
Just think about it. While people like you screw up the education system, you screw yourself by having to compete with the bad students who hire your kind. So, work hard and keep trying, and maybe with a little luck you won’t have to compete with kids that were dedicated enough to hire someone who was even better than you. Although, don’t let that get you down, you can always hire those guys too, then it will be “fair” again.