Every now and then an article pops up written by a professional essay writer. That is, someone who writes students’ essays for them for high school, college, grad school, etc. I always find these articles fairly interesting but I thought this particular one was really good.
I’ve read enough academic material to know that I’m not the only bullshit artist out there. I think about how Dickens got paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak House is … well, let’s be diplomatic and say exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me.
I remember, a few years ago, seeing a program that is used to detect plagiarism. It was able to neatly highlight the plagiarized information and, in a move that would likely infuriate the guilty student (if only because the same technology was not easily available to them), properly cite the information. I guess hiring a writer would avoid being caught by said technology, but it seems surprising that such papers aren’t caught – or at the very least graded poorly. The author admits to writing papers based off of google searches, Amazon.com book previews, and abstracts found on Google Scholar. Does this not limit every illicit paper to being, at the very least, shockingly superficial? I guess not.
You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school.
Another thing that amazes me is the price tag. Taking a word count from one of my own (personally written) essays, it looks like they’re charging 7.5 cents a word. And that’s for a standard, as opposed to rushed, order. How can anyone possibly afford that? The paper that is mentioned throughout the article would effectively bankrupt me for a semester – I wouldn’t just be cutting beer and Qdoba out of my budget but food and shelter as well!
I guess I just need to work hard in school so that one day I’ll be able to afford the luxury of hiring someone to do my work for me. This post, including this very sentence, would have cost me over 27 dollars to buy. Baffling.
I read this like a month ago!
Also, this made me think of something. Someone in Andri’s Chinese class told her that his frat had a database of all the LFIT quiz answers and so he never had to actually watch those obnoxious videos. I can’t even blame the students for this… they are going to do it, and it is stupid but the University should just know that it is going to happen and rotate quiz questions or make new ones. At least make it difficult to cheat!
Yup, you caught me… this post has been sitting in my “drafts” folder for about a month. I just forgot about it for awhile.
That’s pretty smart to keep a database. I don’t understand why that program isn’t taken more seriously than it is by the school. I remember hearing about some TAs passing around a list of answers for the exam being passed around the week before the test. Unfortunately, ours wasn’t one of them, haha.
Pingback: the reckless abandon » Blog Archive » The Company of Myself