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Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

nytimes.com

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Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#31

Post by MegaButts »

6thaccount2 wrote: post #28
TrackerFF wrote: post #25

When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from interns…

Engineering is a bit different. I found that most of the classes had professors that switched up the problems significantly every year to where old tests didn't help much. Memorization is useless when there are a nearly infinite amount of different circuit problems that can go on the test. You have to actually understand the material and how to apply it in diverse situations. You also typically find that most require…

I'm guessing it varies a lot by school. I went to a top engineering school as an undergrad and cheating was rampant - probably something like 1/3 of the graduating class participated in cheating to some extent. I then went to another top engineering school as a graduate student and I never saw anyone cheat.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#32

Post by HarryHirsch »

dehrmann wrote: post #24
rootusrootus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like that would work only in smaller classes. It quickly becomes a real headache when you have hundreds of students.

That's what TAs are for. Sadly, btw. Students aren't paying $30,000 per year for 23-year-old living in poverty to grade their work and do half the teaching and a checked-out professor focused on research with no passion of teaching. Having graduated from a program with ~60% dropout rate by the second year, I appreciate the quality control side of things, but the number of professors I had to had any sort of passion f…

Who can blame faculty for having no interest in teaching introductory classes when the dropout rate is 60 % and when all the dropouts go whining to administration when they became weeded out?

High dropout rates might actually be a good sign - everyone gets to try out, and if they don't manage it's time for them to go do something else. It beats overzealous gatekeeping.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#33

Post by spamizbad »

jseliger wrote: post #26
spodek wrote: post #5

Visiting 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…

We really need to move towards vocational ed and apprenticeships: https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos... . Large numbers of students in colleges shouldn't be there.

That’s true but I doubt the types dropping $ to have their papers professionally written are the types who would otherwise go and become plumbers or electricians.

Who buys a paper? A lazy child of the ruling class.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#34

Post by GnarfGnarf »

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

Will the students who purchased these essays go on to build bridges, rockets to the moon, cure cancer? Hah...

Interestingly, there is probably little or no supply of German, Dutch, Scandinavian bootleg essay mills.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#35

Post by imesh »

dehrmann wrote: post #23
lettergram wrote: post #2

One 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…

> Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them How does this play out after school? These students obviously have no passion for programming and are probably just there for the money after school. But once they get that job--and I'm not even sure they can land that FAANG job they want; you're not going to cram your way to being a competent whiteboard coder--do they just hope they'll just…

In my experience, those guys end up as IT workers at highschool, hospitals,offices in non tech companies, etc.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#36

Post by SeanBoocock »

MegaButts wrote: post #31
6thaccount2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering is a bit different. I found that most of the classes had professors that switched up the problems significantly every year to where old tests didn't help much. Memorization is useless when there are a nearly infinite amount of different circuit problems that can go on the test. You have to actually understand the material and how to apply it in diverse situations. You also typically find that most require…

I'm guessing it varies a lot by school. I went to a top engineering school as an undergrad and cheating was rampant - probably something like 1/3 of the graduating class participated in cheating to some extent. I then went to another top engineering school as a graduate student and I never saw anyone cheat.

Yeah I think so. I was shocked to discover that over a 1/3rd of the computer science classes I TA'd as a grad student were cheating, repeatedly, on homework assignments and tests. I had come from a culture as an undergrad (and graduate student at another university) where cheating even once was a potential expellable offense. At the very least you would fail the class. In the comp sci classes I TA'd the professor would fail the students for the assignments but no more, even after multiple offenses.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#37

Post by Spooky23 »

dehrmann wrote: post #23
lettergram wrote: post #2

One 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…

> Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them How does this play out after school? These students obviously have no passion for programming and are probably just there for the money after school. But once they get that job--and I'm not even sure they can land that FAANG job they want; you're not going to cram your way to being a competent whiteboard coder--do they just hope they'll just…

You adapt. Most tech jobs aren’t very technical.

Usually these folks are savvy, come in and latch on to someone’s work and pivot quickly into a more abstract role or management role. Sometimes they are even good at those roles.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#38

Post by Spooky23 »

wallflower wrote: post #21

Fraternities and sororities have kept libraries of old graded exams and essays for decades. How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year? This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.

It screws everyone out of the know because it screws up the curve.

Re: Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

#39

Post by HillaryBriss »

wallflower wrote: post #21

Fraternities and sororities have kept libraries of old graded exams and essays for decades. How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year? This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.

don't today's students simply photograph the exams while they're taking them?
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