I was taught honesty is the best policy but??

Rob Keeble

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Location
GTA Ontario Canada
Hi All

I am feeling rather upside down by some news i heard the other day that just well simply blew me away and i cannot seem to reconcile it.

Call me stupid, call me naive but I caught a piece on the news about how students today are paying for term papers to be written by someone in the East. Turns out there are websights that offer a term paper for about $80 on any subject. What parent would foot the bill for this and think it will do any good.:(:doh:

I could not believe we are outsourcing our education. Where do the students that participate in this as I understand it booming industry think this is going to go?

Is this as real as it appears or was this some sort of prank on the part of the news network.

Whats your thoughts. My guess is most of the people on this forum have worked hard for everything they have regardless of how much that is.

I am finding it difficult to grasp that this is what we as a generation have spawned. Please tell me i am dreaming and will wake up to find it all a joke like Aprils fool.
 
From a great Canadian Band, the Bare Naked Ladies............

"What A Good Boy"

I go to school, I write exams,
if I pass, if I fail, if I drop out,
does anyone give a damn?
And if they do, they'll soon forget
'cause it won't take much for me
to show my life ain't over yet.

People who cheat on exams and or cheat by getting someone else to writer their papers, are just cheating themselves, IMHO. In the end, the the most important thing that schooling can teach you is how to learn.

If you pay someone else to do your learning for you, then you are the stupid one, and it will not take long to show.

Parents who pay for such things (knowingly) are really abusing their kids, which is sad.

There have always been cheats and charlatans, and that is not about to end, the internet has just made it easier, but, at the same time, the internet can be used for great things like this forum here.

Cheers!
 
There have been articales about that subject around for a few years. I totally am against it. If you bought the term paper you don't know what is in it. What is really scarey is that person that bought a term paper may someday be your doctor. There are also websites that the instructors can go to check to see if a paper has been purchased. It seems like anything for a buck anymore.
 
Seems like most anything can be for sale nowadays. We do our best to teach our children integrity.

On another track Rob, when my kids were applying to colleges, they had to answer [in an essay] a question like "if we had only one spot left, why should we accept you?" Now, my wife and I value modesty and humility. We taught our children not to boast, not to show off and not to think too highly of themselves. So then they have to compete with those who were raised thinking that everything they did, said, and thought was fabulous. Who's got the right attitude? I'll stick with what we did, but it did make it difficult for our young adults sometimes.
 
Rob, this is neither new, nor it is 'outsourcing'. It is cheating, plain and simple. And, in the final wash, it is society that is being cheated the most.
College [cheating] grads will get jobs ahead of those with no degree. And, society has these cheats working for us, in one way or another.
 
I'm with you Ken :thumb:

Unfortunately, cheating on exams or term papers is not a new idea. Just more sophisticated now with the internet.

I have a large family and raised my kids in a small town where everyone knows everyone. I think all my kids had the same teachers. So when my youngest changed the name on her older sisters report and passed it in as her own, it took about 5 minutes for the teacher to figure it out. :huh: :She didn't get punished by the school other than a failing grade but she lost car privileges for a month. Lesson learned.

Today she is a world renowned brain surgeon.....No she's not..just kidding, but she is a great Mom of 2 girls...I'm just waiting for the payback when her kids give her a tough go. :rofl:
 
holy cow!...........ya mean kids aren`t entitled to a degree just for breathing:eek:
work?......why?........that`s why mom-n-pop are sendin` `em to college in the first place isn`t it?;)
from here it seems as though precious few teachers promote thought and the majority are concerned the kids being able to recite their lesson long enough to pass a test.
 
I didn't read the report but someone told me the reports are written by people in India and perhaps China. I wonder how someone who's not a native speaker of English could write a report that would not tip off the teacher. I've done a lot of communication with people from Asia and while their writings are understandable, they would never be taken as native speakers. Just too many verb mistakes, generally.

And I wonder how many of those reports are "copies". That is, I wonder if they have a library of reports and just make minor modificaitons for each customer.

Mike
 
its very easy to understand.

For alot of kids college has nothing to do with getting an education, its all about getting the paperwork that entitles them to land or score a certain job.
since so many jobs require proper paperwork, students look to cut down on their study time, for whatever reasons. I dont agree with it, but then again colleges today are charging enormous fees, housing is off the wall, food is outrageous, and the stress factors push alot of kids over the edge.
If some kid can work at his partime job making 10 dollars an hour, money that he needs to survive in todays hard time, it may be worth working a Saturday for a paper instead of giving up 2 weeks worth of time, research, etc, to write a paper. It all boils down to money.
That is the pressure todays society put on our youth. If you dont make decent money, especially if you go to college, youre viewed as failure material.(this is not how I view college students, my daughter struggled with school her entire life, and has finally graduated with a degree in teaching, and now the struggle is to find a job, and Im sitting on pins and needles cause this week were waiting for one call, for anything)
 
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Here in Spain the are several web pages to do just that for free.
One is called "The lazy man corner" on it you can find works on any subject, some are good, others are crap. The only rule is that you can download any of them at the price of uploading a new one, about any other subject.

It became so popular among students that the teacher found several students presenting the same essay without even changing a comma.
 
This went on (sans computer) back when I was in college in the mid 70's. I'm sure it was going on in some form before that. I was always amazed that the teachers could recognize the re-hashed material so quickly. No, not mine, I was broke; I had to use my noggin. Maybe that explains why I don't have a career in what I went to college for :rolleyes:.
 
Rob,

Yep, there's a whole industry in it. And a counter industry. One of the big ones is called turnitin.com. Like Glenn says, it's been going on forever. I saw, with my own eyes, back in the 70's, a frat house that had a big plywood box. Every time one of the brothers wrote a paper, he'd throw it in there. Next year, when someone was hungover or pressed for time, he'd just dig one out of the box.

But it's not as troubling as it might seem. Professors are a little smarter than people give them credit for. It works like this: you assign a term paper, and you tell the students to get you their paper proposals. You go over each one with the student, revising their idea. They write a draft, you go over the draft with them, making revisions, pointing them in the different directions their research has taken them. By the time they write up their final draft, it's often much different than their original proposal. You can't buy a paper from a paper mill to complete this process. It's impossible to cheat. It's called, um, teaching, and most people I know do it. ;)

So the paper mills are not really a big deal. Far more troubling is the sense of entitlement we see from certain economic groups. I once had a student who told me "I don't need to learn to write, my secretary will do that for me!" Needless to say, he didn't even make it to the end of freshman year. We even had a guy (he was literally a foreign prince) who paid one of his 'subjects' to take all his classes for him. Same guy, in all the classes, all four years. So the prince shows up at graduation to claim his degree. He had no idea we have verification processes in place before we award a degree. Me, I thought we should have given the degree to the guy who took, and passed, the classes. But it is true that he participated in academic fraud, so he didn't get anything either. :doh:

Anyway, we hear this stuff about cheating all the time, how widespread it it, etc. But the vast majority of students I know are working hard, struggling with their studies, trying to make something of themselves. We expect the best from them, and they generally give it, and everyone's the richer. :thumb:

Oh, and Ken, that's a pretty standard entrance essay question, and it's a good one. It's there to help the student write a good essay. The writer is supposed to say "because I'll work hard, and learn everything I can, and be a credit to my family and the university." But in a big way, they're not looking at *what* they say, but *how* they say it, how well they can put their thoughts together, since that's the best indication of how well they'll succeed at the university... way better than any test score, or even what grades they got in high school! :wave:

Thanks,

Bill
 
Bill, I agree with you that at better universities, with good teachers, this is not a problem, but the main problem I have seen is in high school.

PS funny story about the prince, must have made him real happy :D
 
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