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The Shadow Scholar

chronicle.com

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Re: The Shadow Scholar

#61

Post by jimbokun »

oz wrote: post #41
azanar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is bullshit. And you certainly did your part in helping the world that direction. You were willing to undersell yourself in allowing people to pass off your work and knowledge and skills as your own, and then you wonder why everyone around you seems to be so amazingly stupid. They're stupid because you provided them absolutely no incentive not to be. You made ignorance cheap, and as a result, it is precisel…

I'm not going to play dumb and act like I didn't realize what I was doing. I did it partly for the money, and partly for the sake of helping someone who would probably not have a chance to improve their life (via education). We remain good friends to this day - she called just before I read your comment. " They're stupid because you provided them absolutely no incentive not to be." There are some people who, irrespec…

"There are some people who, irrespective of the work they put in, who will never be able to learn somethings."

Yes, and we waste untold billions of dollars and years of people's lives supposedly "learning" things they could not care about less and will never be able to apply, due to the fact they will not actually learn those things. All this due to corporations demanding a piece of paper certifying the acquisition of certain kinds of knowledge, knowing full well that they piece of paper means no such thing.

In short, you were doing your small part to perpetuate an insane, wasteful, corrupt system.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#62

Post by jimbokun »

zecho wrote: post #48
henrikschroder wrote: post #34

Why is there such a large focus on writing long essays in US education? When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing…

I was a double major in Communications and American Studies in my first go-around at an undergrad degree. It's not so much the fact that essays are necessarily the problem, but the expectation of length as the ultimate point of the exercise--from professors and students--that causes confusion. As a writer, I hate filling prose with word soup just to fill space, but early in college I often ended up writing in 15 word…

In one of the first writing classes I took in college, the professor said on the first day "You have just spent your high school years finding ways to add words and fill more pages. In this class, you will learn to take them out."

The length of every assignment was exactly 1 page.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#63

Post by yters »

azanar wrote: post #43
grellas wrote: post #30

Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is? I vividly remember the slackers of my generation (college/law school in the 1970s). They took the basket-weaving classes on the cynical assumption that it was a short-cut to getting an "easy A." They padded their papers with junk - that is, whenever they couldn't avoid having to do a paper. Th…

Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?...I have never understood this mind-set. There is a certain degree of faith needed to want to make progress toward some distant and difficult goal. If you don't believe the rewards are going to be there when you complete the journey, there is really no point in even starting down. The two rewa…

That's why educational institutes were originally religious. The further away they get from religion the less people think the abstract knowledge is actually practical.

See John Newman.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#64

Post by yters »

CoreDumpling wrote: post #10

While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top. What's scary is how far the lazy rich kid will be able to go with this, with a promising career in management. I wouldn't wan…

Managing effectively is more about people skills than education.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#65

Post by hardy263 »

forensic wrote: post #53
skybrian wrote: post #52

Hmm, I suppose one way to go would be to require students to use a version-controlled word processor for their writing, and submit the version history. It could still be faked, but the difficulty of creating a good fake would make the economics less favorable. If it's badly faked, then the version history would provide evidence that's more likely to hold up than a teacher's suspicion about the student's writing.

So the shadow scholar submits his version history. And then?

A 75 page paper usually takes longer than 48 hours for normal students to write. If the version history for the paper is submitted, but all the commits are within a very short time frame, then either the student stayed up all night to write it, or they paid someone else to stay up all night to write it. And if you ask them about what the wrote on on something they took all night to write, they should know it fairly well. But if they paid someone else to do it, they wouldn't know anything that's on the paper.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#66

Post by stcredzero »

groaner wrote: post #12
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.

Maybe the "shadow scholars" that do know math are too busy with their even better-paid assignments

I think that opportunists with those abilities went to work for Wall Street. Some people call them quants. I suspect it's much more lucrative than any crumb gathering around academia.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#67

Post by stcredzero »

jimbokun wrote: post #60
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…

"Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph." I almost find this more depressing than the rampant cheating in which this author engages.

"Politician's Patter"

http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politici...

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#68

Post by gwern »

hardy263 wrote: post #65
forensic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the shadow scholar submits his version history. And then?

A 75 page paper usually takes longer than 48 hours for normal students to write. If the version history for the paper is submitted, but all the commits are within a very short time frame, then either the student stayed up all night to write it, or they paid someone else to stay up all night to write it. And if you ask them about what the wrote on on something they took all night to write, they should know it fairly w…

So then this big company hires a programmer to write a tool to randomize entries over a week or a month or whatever, and our shadow scholar has 1 additional step when he finishes up.

Basically, this idea is DRM in another guise, and terrible for all the same reasons. If you don't trust the student that much, then simply abandon take-home work in general.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#69

Post by gwern »

kenjackson wrote: post #37
Alex3917 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not really sure how that follows. Was there some established link between GRE scores and ethics? I suspect it has as much to do with the following requirements: 1) A degree that is take-home essay heavy. 2) Very vocational -- the goal being the degree, not the learning. I'd expect business and law schools to be high on the list too, although maybe the dynamic is somewhat different for professional schools.

Suggested link is lack of brains, not lack of scruples - remember the shadow scholar's list of reasons includes 1 group that is simply too stupid to handle the work.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#70

Post by billswift »

henrikschroder wrote: post #34

Why is there such a large focus on writing long essays in US education? When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing…

Most college classes don't require much writing, which is one reason most people write so poorly. If you want to become a good, or even reasonably competent, writer you need to practice. That is one thing that all of the books on self-education emphasize - get practice writing, especially write lots of short papers.
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