YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#31

Post by nfoz » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

sithadmin wrote: post #3

I paid my rent and living expenses when pursuing my Masters degree by writing papers for services that helped undergrads cheat on class/term papers. I don't regret it at all. It helped me become a faster, more efficient author, and in my experience, the sort of student that would pay someone else to buy a paper will end up failing out one way or another regardless. I knew people that paid for papers in undergrand, an…

I think that lying is wrong (immoral), even if your assessment of the externalities of it aren't that bad. Here you're not the one lying, you're selling the mechanism of another's dishonesty. It's interesting to think about where that fits, but I can't see it in a favourable light.

When you're profiting from it, it makes it hard to fairly assess those externalities. The rationalizing in your post is pretty apparent.

I think there are a lot of legitimate concerns about the idea of class grading and hiring metrics etc., but "I might as well profit from others' dishonesty" is maybe not the right way to respond to that.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#32

Post by matz1 » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #24

matz1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>cheating hurts everyone. Not the paper writers and some of the students who can benefit from it.

I think it hurts them too. Have you even done a shitty job? It's soul-destroying. In high school I answered an ad in the paper and ended up doing "charity fundraising" by telephone. It turned out that the charity only got ~15% of the money raised. The people working there were all sleazeballs. I'm sure had I stayed there I would have ended up a sleazeball as well.

Its not a shitty job for some of the right people. I can easily think few possible advantage of this job:

- flexible time

- potential to earn lot of money

- sheer enjoyment of writing

- improve one writing skills

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#33

Post by badlucklottery » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

sithadmin wrote: post #12

badlucklottery wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>or barely graduated and ended up worse off than our other classmates in terms of job/grad school prospects. And also devalues the degree their peers actually worked for, even if only a little. I've been in a lot of interviews where I'm wondering, "How the hell did this person graduate from ${school}?" and the obvious answer is "a non-zero amount of cheating". I don't think you should beat yourself up over it but I a…

Personally, I don't really see meaningful value in degrees anyway, so I don't really buy that line of argumentation. My only reason for pursuing graduate studies was to pass the barrier to entry for an academic position, but I gave up on that and went into consulting.

>I don't really see meaningful value in degrees anyway

Do you see how that's a rationalization strategy? Maybe you honestly don't but discounting the value of the degree to zero makes your actions victimless. But, if the value is non-zero, damage has been done.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#34

Post by openasocket » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #26

openasocket wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the target of this kind of service are large classes where the professor can't practically get to examine each person's essays and internalize that unique voice. Classes like that also tend to not require a lot of in-class participation, again because it isn't practical to do with a large number of students. As for finding people "skilled in the particular cirriculums," I'm guessing this is meant for som…

> I'm guessing the target of this kind of service are large classes where the professor can't practically get to examine each person's essays and internalize that unique voice. They say they can write your PhD thesis for you. How on earth can that work? You'll have years of intense one-on-one tuition with an expert in the field and they're not going to notice someone wrote the thesis? How are you going to withstand s…

They can? I didn't see anything about that in the article. I've got no clue how you would pull that off

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#35

Post by GW150914 » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #26

openasocket wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the target of this kind of service are large classes where the professor can't practically get to examine each person's essays and internalize that unique voice. Classes like that also tend to not require a lot of in-class participation, again because it isn't practical to do with a large number of students. As for finding people "skilled in the particular cirriculums," I'm guessing this is meant for som…

> I'm guessing the target of this kind of service are large classes where the professor can't practically get to examine each person's essays and internalize that unique voice. They say they can write your PhD thesis for you. How on earth can that work? You'll have years of intense one-on-one tuition with an expert in the field and they're not going to notice someone wrote the thesis? How are you going to withstand s…

Maybe they’re lying? I mean, they’re a cheating service, so bullshitting their customers seems par for course. What are they going to do, try and get their money back? Bring a suit in Ukraine? Leave bad feedback? I’m sure the review system is gamed by the company, since they are professiomsl cheaters.

Getting a shitty paper from them is going to be like buying powdered sugar from a coke dealer.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#36

Post by wpietri » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #29

On a related theme - does anyone know how many people cheat on the initial round hiring tests? Seems pretty easy to outsource, but I'm not sure how common it is. I've always assumed our applicants did the work themselves but maybe I'm naieve. TBH if I was applying myself I'd be pretty tempted as usually its just a time suck.

The downside would be that you'd be more likely to work at a place that either isn't sharp enough to detect cheaters or can't get it together to care.

Personally, if I suspect somebody is a liar or a cheater, I won't hire them. I build teams that are low on micromanagement and high on independence and trust. Somebody inclined toward fraud can be a big problem in a context like that, both because of the direct damage they do and because they lower ambient level of trust.

I recently had somebody apply for an internship claiming extensive iOS experience with a nice iOS project on GitHub. But the commit history was shallow, so I did some digging. Turns out it was a group project, and one of the other people did almost all the work.

That person was instantly dead to me. They surely got a job somewhere, but I feel sorry for their coworkers, who at best had to pick up a lot of slack, and at worst had to put up with a bunch of new rules and micromanagement because one employee couldn't be trusted.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#37

Post by GW150914 » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

sithadmin wrote: post #4

baldfat wrote: post #2

As a former University Librarian and Residents Director A) Cheating happens more then it doesn't. In a Philosophy Class which had a dozen seniors all cheated in Spring Semester. Professor flunked them all by giving them an F and told them they were lucky they weren't expelled. President Graduated the students and fired the professor. Then on appeal the President was fired and the Professor rehired with a raise. B) Sh…

As someone that used to write papers for cheaters: it doesn't bother me much, because higher education is already eating itself alive in the US. The impact of a few students paying others to author papers on their behalf is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US.

You were a professionally immoral person, so it not bothering you much is probably a shitty metric. Surely the people who gravitate to this work are the least reliable people to assess the impact, sort of like pimps and dealers.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#38

Post by chrisseaton » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

openasocket wrote: post #34

chrisseaton wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm guessing the target of this kind of service are large classes where the professor can't practically get to examine each person's essays and internalize that unique voice. They say they can write your PhD thesis for you. How on earth can that work? You'll have years of intense one-on-one tuition with an expert in the field and they're not going to notice someone wrote the thesis? How are you going to withstand s…

They can? I didn't see anything about that in the article. I've got no clue how you would pull that off

https://uk.edubirdie.com/thesis-writing

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#39

Post by majormajor » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

A bit of chatter here about "it eventually catches up to people anyway" that I think misses the point.

You want people to learn when the stakes are low. This is better for them, and it's better for all of us. School should gradually go from low stakes to higher stakes, not be a low-stakes zone the whole time that then tosses people into the real world. Otherwise you're presented with terrible choices like expelling a 20 year old for a habit they learned when they were 8 and never got called on, vs letting them get away with continuing to cheat.

Making it easy to cheat and lie when the stakes are low helps create situations like "we can't trust anyone who says they know how to program so we have to waste a lot of interview time on tedious crap."

The first solution that occurs to me seems to be smaller class sizes and differently structured assignments with more of a "tell me about why you wrote this" type interactive stuff. The same way you'd do when looking at someone's github, to see how deep their understanding of the code there goes.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#40

Post by lr4444lr » Tue, May 01, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

sithadmin wrote: post #4

baldfat wrote: post #2

As a former University Librarian and Residents Director A) Cheating happens more then it doesn't. In a Philosophy Class which had a dozen seniors all cheated in Spring Semester. Professor flunked them all by giving them an F and told them they were lucky they weren't expelled. President Graduated the students and fired the professor. Then on appeal the President was fired and the Professor rehired with a raise. B) Sh…

As someone that used to write papers for cheaters: it doesn't bother me much, because higher education is already eating itself alive in the US. The impact of a few students paying others to author papers on their behalf is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US.

You're a lesser purveyor of counterfeit goods, but you're still a counterfeiter.