Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
1–10 of 122 posts
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#2One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing.
I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat an eye.
Cheating is way more common than people think.
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#3One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat…
what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#4One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat…
what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.
[deleted]
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#5Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it.
Since I've never written an analytical essay outside of school, I avoid assigning them in favor of projects connected to students' lives.
Maybe that's why my students' homework assignments get them covered in the Washington Post, WSJ, Forbes, Inc, and lead to them speaking in TEDx and Harvard, and in Y Combinator, funded by Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt.
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#6Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it. Since I've never written an analyti…
Tell us more! What's the name of your school? Can I send my kids there?
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#7One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat…
If you were really trying to be persuasive you would have said no.
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#8One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat…
what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.
at my school, the weighting was usually designed to emphasize the projects. the projects and homework combined would often be 50% of the grade right there. the homework would be softball questions or stuff you could just look up the answers for on the internet; almost everyone who bothered to do it would have a near perfect homework average. once you pay someone to also get you near perfect scores on the projects, you just needed to get about half the points on exams and quizzes to pass the course.
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.
at my school, the weighting was usually designed to emphasize the projects. the projects and homework combined would often be 50% of the grade right there. the homework would be softball questions or stuff you could just look up the answers for on the internet; almost everyone who bothered to do it would have a near perfect homework average. once you pay someone to also get you near perfect scores on the projects, yo…
That's how my old college buddy got through, leaning on me and a few other friends for tutoring and help on the big projects and memorizing enough to get through the tests, forgetting the relevant material soon after. As they say, C's get degrees. We used to joke his diploma should come with an asterisk.
Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas
#10I would say that cheating in school isn’t a problem, but it unfortunately devalues other people’s work. Ideally we would live in a world in which no class was graded on a curve and in which going to college wouldn’t be considered by employers at all. But I guess we don’t. But cheating isn’t the root problem, it’s the sports like mentality we have about education (valedictorian, 3rd in your class, etc etc) that’s the problem.
At some point cheating will catch up to you, I hope. But some people manage to go a very long way by being total cheats.