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The Shadow Scholar

chronicle.com

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Re: The Shadow Scholar

#11

Post by yinmoneyhuang »

To a very limited extent, schools have tried to protect themselves from such cheating by requiring students (or prospective students) to compose writing samples under controlled conditions.

The Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for instance, requires students to write an essay. The essay is not scored; rather, it is forwarded to the schools to which the student has applied. The schools then compare the LSAT essay to the personal statement submitted with the student's application. A gross disparity between the quality of writing seen on the LSAT essay and that on the personal statement presumably raises suspicions that the personal statement was ghostwritten.

Perhaps such measures should be implemented more widely.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#12

Post by groaner »

Eliezer wrote: post #6

Most telling quote: As long as it doesn't require me to do any math, I will write anything.

Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even better-paid assignments (supply vs. demand, after all) to interview with the Chronicle.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#14

Post by mdwrigh2 »

yinmoneyhuang wrote: post #11

To a very limited extent, schools have tried to protect themselves from such cheating by requiring students (or prospective students) to compose writing samples under controlled conditions. The Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for instance, requires students to write an essay. The essay is not scored; rather, it is forwarded to the schools to which the student has applied. The schools then compare the LSAT essay to…

While this is an interesting way of comparing, I'd be slightly worried if I were applying to law school. Given that you have a limited amount of time to write your LSAT essay, and an essentially unlimited amount of time to write and polish your personal statement (plus have professors, friends and family look over it), I could see there being a large but legitimate gap between the two.

Perhaps it's not as great as I think though.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#15

Post by thebooktocome »

Eliezer wrote: post #6

Most telling quote: As long as it doesn't require me to do any math, I will write anything.

You know, maybe after I finish my Ph. D. in maths, I can go on to become the "Shadow Scholar" for online math courses.

...

That actually kind of sounds like fun.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#16

Post by jorleif »

I can churn out four or five pages an hour.

I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging.

On a more serious note, I think a key benefit for computer science as an academic discipline is that much work is published in conference articles, rather than journals as in most other fields. This means that computer scientists must be able to communicate complicated ideas on 8 pages, rather than 30-40. It really forces the communication to be terse and efficient. I've done course assignments together with people who only publish in journals and it's amazing how these people can blabber on for ages. We had a maximum page length of 20 pages, which left about 3 pages per author. I was very puzzled when some people wrote 6 pages of stuff which I could have easily expressed in 1.5 pages without any loss of clarity, but I'm blaming the culture of their fields, where many words are better than few, and no hard limits are imposed.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#17

Post by Alex3917 »

hko wrote: post #2

"it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst."

This isn't especially surprising considering that education students have the second lowest GRE scores of any academic field. (The lowest being public administrators.)

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#18

Post by rick_2047 »

jorleif wrote: post #16

I can churn out four or five pages an hour. I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be…

I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject

I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#19

Post by jorleif »

rick_2047 wrote: post #18
jorleif wrote: post #16

I can churn out four or five pages an hour. I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be…

I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.

What is your writing process like? Do you edit a lot, or just write it in one go? I notice with the academic articles I'm involved in, that they are edited to death by the separate authors. Comments are often good, but sometimes I feel that when everything is edited many times, the coherence of the first (sloppy) version is often lost.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#20

Post by jseliger »

jorleif wrote: post #16

I can churn out four or five pages an hour. I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be…

I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject?

Yes: journalists do this routinely.

My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. We routinely write on subjects that we initially know nothing about; we described some of that process in a post about writing Department of Energy grants: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/ .

Granted, this is not "academic text," exactly, and neither is journalism. But neither is what the guy cited is doing; he's really just regurgitating stuff that sounds okay. This works surprisingly well surprisingly far into the educational system.

I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging.

You could, if you wanted to. The "want" is the key part here, and the skill is not as easy as it sounds: it took me many years to be able to write proposals efficiently and synthesize unknown information efficiently.

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