The Shadow Scholar: He writes the papers for students.

[madfloridian]

I of course knew this went on, but I did not realize the extent of it. I taught elementary grades no higher than 6th grade, but I do know that we were already working on organizing thoughts and writing essays...on a smaller scale naturally.

I do know that when I went to high school we had to do term papers using a strict process. We even had to turn in the index cards with the notes and bibliography. I can't imagine how we would have gotten away with buying a paper and turning it in. Also it would have been hard at the small university I attended. Not impossible, but hard. The advent of the internet has made it easier.

But this article really surprised me. Apparently the Chronicle of Higher Education researched this fellow's contribution thoroughly.

The Shadow Scholar

It's very long, and it is so hard to just pick a few gems from it. The writer does not sound like a pleasant person, but he really is honest about what he is doing.

I just picked a few of his comments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

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. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it.

Well, I don't know if his claim is true, but I do one thing. If he thinks things are bad now....just wait until he gets to write papers for the new group of students.

They are trained to take tests, and it's getting worse by the day. The high stakes testing is narrowing the curriculum to just what is on the test which is designed by companies with no oversight and no regulation.

Wait till he gets to be the term paper writer for the new test-taking generation.

More from his article.

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid. For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. 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.

He is fairly kind to the ESL student and the deficient ones, but the last ones, the "lazy rich" get his scorn.

One more paragraph...I love this one.

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.

Commissioned to write many a "passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution."

That just says so much about our nation's seminaries, doesn't it? Really filled with the love of Jesus Christ.

I loved the way he describes his mental library of "stock academic phrases."

I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.

Sounds all too familiar.

Just think. He works at an online company that generates thousands of dollars a month. He says in the midst of the recession their business is booming.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. And these cheaters get their degrees...

And then they go out to work. And they cannot think, because they've never had to.

A lot of colleges now require their students to submit their papers through "Turnitin.com." I know mine does. The teacher can look at the paper and find out if it was plagiarized.

The whole business is just horrifying.

[Mojambo]

2. Mine does too

I wonder if that would work on this guy though. He seems to be writing custom essays.

[Bobbieo]

4. How any of them go into oil exploration or uranium mining?

[AlabamaLibrul]

11. It wouldn't. Turnitin is for the morons that manage to copy entire web articles, complete with

blue, underlined hyperlinks that they forgot to change to regular formatting in Word.

[amborin]

25. turn it in

will show partial plagiarism

even plagiarized single sentences will be highlighted

[Chan790]

28. I can tell you this...

as someone who makes a living as a writer, teaches collegiate-level writing as an adjunct lecturer and in more-desperate moments a few years back, wrote an A term paper or two for a class I never took...

turnitin.com is a scam. The entire industry is fraudulent.

A waste of an educational institution's money. They can make any assertion they would like upon its' effectiveness, it doesn't work. It catches the morons and the low-hanging fruit I could have caught myself.

It doesn't even detect sentence-by-sentence re-parsing of recent NYT articles. I know because I have done that very thing to prove its' inefficacy...taken a featured column (it was by Paul Krugman if that matters) from the NYT, reworded every sentence (changing only "voice" while maintaining the exact same tone and content) and run it through the plagiarism filters clean. Go through it again, sprinkling in vocab from the "Intro to Economics" coursework and it's a free-and-clear A.

Problem is, it's Krugman's argument and ideas, my words...and it beats the computer.

[1monster]

48. My son had to submit his term paper to Turnitin.com. It didn't stop at sentences,

it flagged phrases. The final analysis of his paper from Turn it in was that 1% of his paper was "similar" to other papers. The flagged portions of his paper were two phrases in long sentences.

[wickerwoman]

26. It won't.

Turnitin works by comparing the essay the student submits with all the other essays and sources in the database and then flags sections that contain more than five or six words in a row that are identical and not in quotation marks.

Paying someone to write an essay from scratch for you will not be picked up by Turnitin.

The only way to really foil this is to have smaller class sizes so that teachers can realistically either grade multiple assignments and drafts to get a better sense for each student's style or can ask for notes, etc. to show the student did the research behind the paper.

[mike_c]

3. turnitin.com won't necessarily help with this problem...

...if the papers being commissioned are either not published online or are in fact relatively unique writings (but written by someone else). If someone commissions a third party to do their homework for them and the ghost writer doesn't plagiarize-- how's that for irony?-- then there really isn't any good way to catch the cheating. Except that one day the cheater will by your emergency room doctor, or your lawyer, or whatever.

[truedelphi]

9. Ihear what you are saying, but no teacher can use a service to find out if

Each and every term paper was plagiarized.

If a paper is repeatedly plagiarized, it might show up on such a service. But as long as the term paper writer offers an original paper to each student that he writes for, there isn't any way in Hell that that can be found out, unless the writer or the buyer of the term paper service confesses.

[Greyhound]

10. C'mon Peggy, get real. Dull average students with daddy's credit card have been buying

their degrees this way forever. This guy has perhaps gone too far by openly commercializing it, but this is nothing new at all.

And BTW, everybody gets their degree unless they run out of money.

From the other side however, there are more than a few of us that were able to get our degrees because these dullards enabled us to stay in.

Removing the financial factor from all education would go a long way to realizing the myth of scholastic integrity, but I don't hear anyone that matters suggesting this.

[mudplanet]

40. How do you think George Bush earned two college degrees? You didn't

think he ever actually wrote anything, did you?

[Greyhound]

57. One of the best examples. n/t

[a la izquierda]

45. All of my students' papers are subject to Turnitin.com

I caught two plagiarists last semester. My students had to write a short research paper using a book of primary sources compiled by...my adviser. I knew the book inside and out, yet two students still felt the need to try and test both my patience and my intelligence. They did not purchase papers, they cribbed them from various websites. You'd be amazed at how quickly google can find sketchy phrases.

One student was expelled just before he was to graduate. The other simply dropped out. Sad, really. But completely avoidable.

[garthranzz]

68. I've had similar experiences...

I think a good teacher can catch the plagiarism, by and large. There's a frame or level of writing students are capable of, and within that frame of sophistication or maturity, their personalities and class participation reveals where they reside.

[JDPriestly]

62. It is easy to find the plagiarized work, but difficult to determine

whether work that is original was written by the author named on it.

[kiva]

5. Luckily, my students at the community college who want to cheat

(a small minority) are too poor to buy customized papers and rely on businesses like freeessays.com to buy a low cost plagiarized paper. Easy to catch.

[Starry Messenger]

6. And after winning a bought degree

the customer can apply to TFA. You know, those young "experts" who are supposed to be so clever...

[MineralMan]

8. I do writing projects for people. Mostly I write entire websites for

small businesses, but I also do some ghost writing. I solicit business with a local Craig's List ad and my own website.

In a typical month, I get at least a dozen letters from University of Minnesota students wanting me to write a paper or a thesis. I turn them all down, with a sharply worded letter about honesty and ethics. I'm still amazed that I get such requests. I would never write something like that for anyone.

And as someone said, it would be virtually impossible to prove plagiarism in cases like this. Of course, professors often know that a student has almost certainly not written a paper that was done by a ghostwriter. Based on classroom participation and other factors, it's usually pretty clear. Still, there's no way to prove it, so these people most often slip through.

It's one thing to ghost write something, but I look at each case individually. If there is any ethical problem, I won't do it. I could sure use the money, but I refuse to compromise my own ethics in that way.

[eridani]

7. I used to do research for $5.00/hr (good pay in the late 60s)

I'd gin up an outline, lay out talking points with footnotes, and that was it. My clients were on their own for the actual writing. Often people just need a starting point to get going with a paper--they had access to the original books and papers, after all. It wasn't at all odd to see them take the whole thing in a different direction once they got going.

[grasswire]

12. a former SO of mine made $$$ moonlighting editing theses

He would totally rework the paper, but at least the student had to make a draft attempt. It was quite a lucrative sideline; he works by day as an editor for a government agency in Washington.

[Odin2005]

13. The rich have been doing this crap since who knows when.

[TBF]

35. Very true - at my very affordable state school 20 years ago we were able to buy

lecture notes for classes taken by grad students (I did so if I missed a class due to illness, but others did it frequently in addition to class or instead of going to class). Obviously these were for the huge lecture classes, not small sections. I'm sure there were ways to buy papers as well.

[NJCher]

14. the other side of the story

Those of you who think these papers fool writing teachers (and teachers from other disciplines) are only seeing one side of the story--the side that's presented here. Maybe this guy does make plenty of money but the article isn't telling you what it's like when the student submits the paper to the instructor.

Papers not written by the student are very easy to spot. I'm a writing teacher and have been for a couple decades. I can't ever remember being fooled by a student.

Their attitude in class is the sure tip-off. I know who's likely to try something like this and when they do, I toss the paper back to the student, telling them to submit their own work.

If I ever do get one toward the end of the semester, I tell them I want to see all their sources. That usually does it right there. They can never come up with all their sources.


Cher

[verges]

16. And if they got away with it....

you would find out how? So, of course you can't remember it. You never found out.

[NJCher]

55. you just know

Believe me, it's no challenge. I do know because I read about 40 hours a week, excluding student papers.

Every writer has a style. I have them do a writing sample in the beginning of class and from that, I can tell what their style is--what their grammatical mistakes are, etc. When they turn in a paper with no or few errors, it's suspicious.


Cher

[Odin2005]

49. I'm surprised the rich kids' families didn't get on your ass.

I suspect that a lot of teachers pass the rich kids lest they piss off the wrong people.

[NJCher]

56. I've been fired from two jobs because of that

But after a couple years, both institutions called me back and asked to rehire me.


Cher

[garthranzz]

69. HEY! Shout out from another writing teacher

With a similar set of experiences.

(OR soon to be "former writing teacher".)

[xocet]

15. i can haz dipplomuh? n/t

[Toucano]

20. ROFL!

I'm easy.

[madfloridian]

21. That's funny.

:D

[Viva_La_Revolution]

53. +1

:rofl:

[Posteritatis]

17. I wonder how this guy'd do in front of a freshman composition course

If his customers are passing "their" courses and he's not lying about his writing output and breadth of subjects, it's obvious he knows how to put together an essay.

[Toucano]

18. Finally, something we can't outsource to Asia!

Actually, I'm sure they can eventually.

Fascinating read. Thanks.

[somone]

19. How much of his article is fiction?

The numbers are impressive.

[madfloridian]

22. Did you read the editor's note at the link?

"In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student."

They verified.

[Toucano]

23. He's retiring...now comes the extortion phase.

Isn't that the next logical step?

[dimbear]

32. Probably wiser to sell his client list to a 3rd party for a lump sum.

There has to be distance maintained.

[amborin]

24. "turn it in"

helps detect these; so, also, assigning very specific assignments that make it harder to use a mass-produced paper

[Chan790]

29. turn it in doesn't work though. n/t

[Posteritatis]

41. And is bad for a variety of other reasons on top of its ineffectiveness. (nt)

[Book Lover]

27. This was discussed at College Misery a week or so ago

They came to the conclusion that there was a lot of bullshit in this article. My take on this is that while I have zero doubt this guy writes papers for money, there is no way he writes PhD theses in the time he says he does, and he is not making 60 large a year doing it.

[Frisbee]

30. we're fucked.

it's only the timeline that remains in question.

[jtuck004]

31. Freire tried to tell us about banking education. It's not about learning,

it's about placing that store of "knowledge" from the instructors brain into the students, then testing for recall. No education, no learning to learn. And it has been that way, for too many, since the first day they entered a school door.

"How dispiriting to find out that college was just another place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and the threat of failure was used to encourage learning."

These young men and women didn't learn to look to this writer for help the day they enrolled in college. For those of you that think his article is about cheating, read it again. Don't get defensive, plenty of good schools and teachers exist. But this isn't about cheating.

Thank you for the article...

[XemaSab]

33. I'm amused by the many typos

in the responses. :P

[RadiationTherapy]

34. Hahaha. Good. College is little but a 5-year job interview.

This country, culture, and economy do not value education. It is made clear by the "careers" available after graduating. It is made clear by the tuition hikes and fees. It is made clear by the professors who do as little as possible while waiting for a book deal or another job to come through.

College is something to be endured. While some important learning and socializing occurs, college, now, is a joke. There is nowhere else for young people to go.


*10 year university employee and soon to graduate with his first degree at age 36*

[MadHound]

36. Perhaps you went to the wrong school?

The one I just graduated from, was a little liberal arts college, and it certainly wasn't something to be "endured", nor was it a joke.

[RadiationTherapy]

37. No. It is great. I love it.

But I am 36 years old and know what I want to learn about and am doing so. I certainly find there is an excessive amount of "busywork" and that is what I am referring to when I talk of enduring. I don't condone academic dishonesty, but it is a laughable consequence of a system that has become a business.

[MadHound]

38. Well, again, perhaps you're going to the wrong school

I'm not trying to be insulting or an asshole, but I certainly didn't find that there was "an excessive amount of "busywork" to be endured. Nor was there an excessive amount of academic dishonesty because the faculty didn't just rely on sites like Turnitin.com and other such technical methods, but also their judgment of their students' capabilities. Perhaps this is a result of small class sizes and my professors intimate knowledge of their students:shrug:

Oh, and I'm 49, graduated last year with my first three degrees(the result of many years of part time education at several other institutions), and actually learned a lot from my time spent in class. Like I said earlier, perhaps this is a school specific thing.

[coalition_unwilling]

42. I actually think it is a student-specific thing. What a student gets from post-secondary education

is pretty much what the student makes of it, imho.

I had taken first two semesters of German with a very inspiring prof and had then started a third semester with a professor whom I considered less than inspiring. When I commented that she was not too inspiring, this professor quite wisely told me that it was my responsibility to inspire myself. It was not what I wanted to hear at the time but, over the years, the wisdom of that prof's words have resonated within me and influenced me profoundly.

Edited for typo. Laptop keyboard acting up. grr!

[kurtzapril4]

58. I hear you on the "busywork"

I go to a community college in my area, and some classes are all about un-necessary excercises in stuff I don't really care about. I'm a non-traditional(older)student.

Please don't assign me a damn paper. I already know how to do research, I've had to do it out in the real world. I come pre-loaded with critical thinking skills, too. Just give me quizzes, a mid-term and final please. T/F, multiple choice, and short answer. Give me my grade and leave me alone.

Two of my classes(entomology and plant pathology) were with the same teacher. The final project in each class was pick 25 bugs, and 25 plant diseases, and DRAW their life cycles. No tracing allowed. The teacher's belief was that drawing these things would help you learn them. And it would...if you're a visual learner. Most people aren't visual learners. So everybody had to do what I call a colouring book in order to pass these classes. Ridiculous. Do I need to mention that my profs. day gig was teaching grade school?

And then to top it off...I was required to take speech. WTF? I'm 51 years old, and if I wanted to be a public speaker, I think I'd have figured that out by now. Having to take this class meant I couldn't take another class, so I didn't graduate last May. Not to mention I had to spend money to take a class that doesn't apply to my field of study, or interest me at all.

[rucky]

39. I made a decent chunk of change in college writing term papers

for dumb rich kids.

[Jackpine Radical]

43. I have a confession to make.

I have hired this guy to write my DU posts for me.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

44. Years ago I was offered $5000 if I could get a moron to pass econ

Basically, write the papers and tutor the dipshit enough to pass the midterm and final. Couldn't do it though, I wrote a number of published articles on the negotiation of the original FTA agreement and didn't want to risk my reputation. The parents said if I stuck with their dumbass son all the way through they would buy me the same car they bought him on graduation.

[backscatter712]

46. It's sad. Speaking as a college student, I take pride in my work.

Of course, accidental plagiarism (the minor kind where you forget to cite when you include a piece of information you got from another work, as opposed to copy-and-pasting entire paragraphs or papers) is sometimes hard to avoid, but I do work to make sure I turn in honest work.

It's not like the professors don't know who's cheating.

Even if you're not caught red-handed, they can figure out from writing style, other hints whether you're plagiarizing or not.

And they can also find the students who are busting their butts and turning in excellent, honest work.

Guess which students are getting letters of recommendation, a hand up when it's time to find jobs, get into grad school, etc.?

And if you're cheating instead of learning, where does that get you when it's time to leave college and find work? A lot of jobs assume you have learned some things, like how to write and communicate effectively, how to do research, and if you're not able to do that, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

[kurtzapril4]

63. That's what I don't get.....

Every bit of book knowledge you have in your brain is "plagiarised" from someone/somewhere else.

For instance: I am studying to be a horticulturist. I know that deciduous trees shed their leaves in the fall. I can't remember the first time I heard the word deciduous, or where I heard it. I don't remember the first time I heard that some trees lose their leaves in the fall. Does a person really have to cite common knowledge? I have had professors tell me that yes, you do. Frankly, I call BS on that.

[jpgray]

47. The saddest thing? Big grammatical error in his stock phrase example.

"A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come."

Subject and verb are not getting along there. :) The standard of academic writing these days is absolutely abysmal, and that people would pay for tripe like the above and leave satisfied amounts to yet another piece of evidence.

[1monster]

50. Good catch. I have a tendency to drop off the "s" in my typing (not sure why, but

it is one of my most recurring typos) and don't notice it when I'm proofing. Drives me :crazy: :D

[jpgray]

51. It's common when a prepositional phrase separates verb from subject

Such as: "A portion of these words are grammatically incorrect." :)

[1monster]

52. Yeah, but I do it with plurals and words ending in "s" and even names ending in "s"

It's not like I have any psychological issues with the "S." I'm just glad my name starts with an S, rather than ends in an "S."

[madfloridian]

54. Also from Harpers 1995, an article called This Pen for Hire.

Jeez I am naive.

Here is the pdf version, since Harper's is pay for the archives.

http://www.eacfaculty.org/pchidester/Eng%20102f/Plagiarism/This%20Pen%20for%20Hire.pdf

[jtuck004]

59. I really liked this one. Especially the paragraph about the t.v. expose

that turned into more of a commerical for their business than a backlash by so-called educators. ;)

Thanks for posting this.

[madfloridian]

61. I would live to copy some snips from it.

That's why I hate pdf so much. There should be a way to copy/paste.

[XemaSab]

67. It's really disturbing how in a 15-year period

essay-writing stopped being about research in the library and started being exclusively about the Google. :o

[bongbong]

60. Teaching reflections

I have taught adult ed at night in the past, in the days before the Internet made cheating easy. I still caught students cheating during tests (mostly I taught UNIX & programming).

I've read the various caveats about turnitin.com and other anti-plagarism sites. Why don't teachers do a spot check on every student by verbally asking them a question or two or more about their essays after they're turned in? Seems like an easy double check to me.

Although my teaching experience is very niche & limited, I foresaw more than 15 years ago that the future of grading is going to be oral exams. Is this something that mainstream educators & theorists echo, or do they see another trend happening?

If I taught today, I would require students to turn in their cell phones, their ipods, and their books before a test. Check out the "how to cheat" videos on youtube. Lotsa sneaky techniques there you have to guard against.

I'm proud to say, on a personal note, that I never cheated in any way from 1st grade thru grad school, and never puffed up my resume even .01%. I wonder what (small) percentage of Americans can make that same claim?

[McCamy Taylor]

64. Good to know that someone in this country can write a decent paper---

---and good to know that some English majors have found a way to make their training pay off.

A good professor who knows the students and who demands classroom participation as part of the grade will have no trouble spotting work that is above the intellectual capacity of the student.

[XemaSab]

65. Even at the high school level a teacher might have 150 kids

Expecting teachers or professors at that level to know the intellectual capacity of every student is unreasonable. :(

[XemaSab]

66. How do you break the cycle of ignorance and declining academic standards?

:(