Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by adolph » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #34

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.

Uh, the “American” rockets to the moon were built by Germans, former Nazis picked up by Operation Paperclip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Some were even accused of crimes against humanity after they were done with rocket work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph

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

#72

Post by omarhaneef » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

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…

As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was depressing.

The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do the work.

Let me explain.

When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright, smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any of them could do the job. And yet we had to pick maybe 10-30 from the school for that summer. (Keep in mind we recruited from many schools for many different positions).

So you have 1000 resumes and they all seem smart and interesting and you have to pick 10. What do you do?

The GPA is a great way to numerically and “objectively” make a cut. Then when you see a typo and maybe you can exclude that one and so on.

The reason you have to rely on these non predictive elements is exactly because everyone signals well on the predictive elements.

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

#73

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #72

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…

As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was depressing. The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do the work. Let me explain. When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright, smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any of…

So why not try random instead?

It sounds like a great opportunity for an experiment. Say you have 20 slots, pick 10 using the GPA/nitpick method, and 10 at random, and then compare the results 5 or 10 years later.

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

#74

Post by clairity » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 8:09 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73

omarhaneef wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was depressing. The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do the work. Let me explain. When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright, smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any of…

So why not try random instead? It sounds like a great opportunity for an experiment. Say you have 20 slots, pick 10 using the GPA/nitpick method, and 10 at random, and then compare the results 5 or 10 years later.

yup, once you've whittled down to qualified candidates, you've exhausted your (relatively) objective methods anyway, so random is your best choice then.

i made this same point recently using the nba for illustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848444

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

#75

Post by rajacombinator » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #34

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.

Actually yes. Students are responding naturally to incentives in this situation. Those who are willing to cheat to get ahead will probably have an advantage in life.

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

#76

Post by rajacombinator » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #72

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…

As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was depressing. The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do the work. Let me explain. When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright, smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any of…

Do you think your view was common in any way? GPA is a deeply flawed metric but I don’t think most people have any awareness of this.

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

#77

Post by cbanek » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 8:23 PM UTC

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…

In my time in school for Engineering (UIUC), I think the "gaming the system" was mostly with the group projects. Many high level classes such as processor design made people form into groups of 2, 3, or 4 people to do a project. Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade.

None of this is of course considered cheating, but a number of people skate past projects all the time. I do agree though, that once it gets to job interviews, those people typically fare less well.

Of course in engineering, some people would still try to focus on the easiest classes to fulfill the requirements and maximize their GPA, but GPA only seemed to really matter if you were going to grad school. Other than that, anything 3.0+ is good enough to get an interview for an internship.

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

#78

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

Since they technically retain copyright of those papers the overseas people should be able to claim their status as co-author after the paper has been published. And throw in a complimentary scholarship as well.

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

#79

Post by sharadov » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #62

yardie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. When I studied engineering I saw almost the same culture. Firms were looking for the same students with similar GPAs and sadly I was not one of them. I distinctly remember going to the campus job fair and having my resume repeatedly being put into the "maybe" pile. My academic work wasn't amazing but my extracurriculars were a few engineering p…

When I was recruiting interns for CS at Apple, a good project trumped just about any GPA north of 1.0 If I could see you solve problems with code in a got repo with history, and you can solve a problem live for me on a laptop or whiteboard, I don’t need to approximate your ability through coursework because I have more directly measured it. This gets fuzzier for non-entry level qualities, but they don’t really teach…

That's exactly what I would do, trumps grades any day.

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

#80

Post by nitwit005 » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

cco wrote: post #47

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…

You've never had to read and understand some data, analyze it, and then communicate your results via written word in your career? I'm totally willing to grant you that the majority of careers do not require this skill but most white collar work does. Agreed that essays are overused but I'm just surprised to hear you downplay them so much.

The handful of times I've been asked to analyze something, the result has been a list or graph with some accompanying description.

I had a coworker who had a reputation for long emails. It was clear, based on hallway comments, that no one was reading them. People don't appear to have much tolerance for essays unless there's good reason for it.