<p>Nicole12, I saw students like that in college. They can choose their classes to select those with out-of-class assignments and papers and to avoid those with in-class final exams.</p>
<p>You guys are absolutely delusional if you somehow think kids at ‘upper tier’ schools wouldn’t hire such writers, or that such writers would command such a giant figure to be worthwhile. I taught for years at an Ivy. Sure there are some brilliant writers and minds, and sure every parent of a kid at that school would swear their kid is an amazing writer…but there are PLENTY of kids at top tier schools that can simply memorize well and regurgitate. They can’t integrate and apply ideas, extend them in meaningful ways, or even necessarily work at an abstract level. </p>
<p>I realize this runs very counter to the mythology generated from all the admissions frenzy and giant price tags, but believe me, you have NO IDEA how absolutely ordinary students (and faculty!) can be at even the “top” schools. Please stop putting them on a pedestal.</p>
<p>I don’t see anything wrong with helping with editing. That is very different than writing the paper. Of course I helped my husband on his dissertation. How? I spell checked for him and I, as a non-scientist, would point out parts that didn’t seem to follow. I didn’t understand really his writing but could tell whether an argument followed. I do similar things with my older two who are both taking college classes. THere is no way I could write a philosophy paper but I can try to understand one. For my daughter, it is mostly help with spell checking again (got the non-spelling gene from dh) and also occasional hints like need to add example here or this part can be cut. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to write anyone’s paper for them. Like a previous poster said. my kids aren’t any of the three categories that use this service.</p>
<p>As for faculty figuring it out…lots of ideas here for solutions. But those solutions do not provide proof. If I can not find the alternative source of work, I can not prove it was not done by the student. So what if their in-class writing is not of the same calibre of a term paper? They could argue- perhaps honestly- that they can not write under pressure. So what if they flub their Q & A- it only proves they can’t think on their feet. It would surely make me MORE suspicious but I can’t penalize or expel a student on the basis of suspicion-- I need much stronger evidence than that. </p>
<p>As for in class writing. Well that is all fine and good, but it would not work. First, it takes up valuable class time when they could be learning something instead (a midterm written assignment is one thing, but regular assignments just to avoid cheating seems entirely wasteful…this isn’t highschool). Moreover, an out of class paper requires a level of research, analysis and depth that an in class assignment can not. They are entirely apples and oranges. </p>
<p>Someone asked about exams. Well how do you give an exam common to the whole class when each student researched and wrote on a specialized topic?</p>
<p>Editing is a slippery slope. One person’s version of editing is fixing grammar…another’s is reconstructing a paper. It very much depends on the scope, the nature of the project (is this an English paper or a history paper?), and most of all, the rules of the game. </p>
<p>I’m all for editing provided students have asked permission and/or provided detailed information regarding how they were assisted by someone else and/or the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable are made clear to the whole class. Otherwise some students do not seek out editing help, because they feel its cheating; whereas others do, and their grade is more favorable.</p>
<p>Well, my S is an English-as-second-language student, and you might still be able to know it from his accent, but not from his writing. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad he’s at Williams. Maybe I’ll ask him to ghost-write some of my posts. :)</p>
<p>^^ Yeah, you son’s pretty good. I hired him for some of my more insightful posts over on the (now defunct) election and politics subforum ;)</p>
<p>^^^^Oh, I didn’t know it had been closed. I can’t say I disagree with the decision. Every time I read those threads I ended up feeling uncomfortable; the animosity was very high, and it’s not like you will ever win someone over to your political (or religious) point of view.</p>
<p>I trust my S received adequate compensation for his literary efforts? :)</p>
<p>^^ You have to be careful not to let your ghost writer ghost write the checks :)</p>
<p>The only thing that surprised me was author’s last example, when the gal couldn’t write a coherent e-mail to save her life. I find it hard to believe that she didn’t have to e-mail her profs along the way.</p>
<p>In grad school, many people would hire a secretary to type their papers. In some cases, the secretary would edit entire paper. Also, many wives not only did the typing, but went to library, researched the topic, etc. Not to b sexist, another gal, several years ahead of me in a program, could not finish dissertation. She married a wealthy man, and miraculously, 3 months later, the paper was completed.</p>
<p>If I was still teaching, I’d make sure exams were a mixture of in-class and papers. Way back, I did have a student write first paragraph with many mispellings, then shift to NYT prose. Her professor/friend came to defend her at the hearing. I had no way to research where she had copied bulk of paper, so asked her to come with her sources. This was an obvious case, but I would not have been suspicious if a friend or pro had written the paper in the voice of an 18 year old.</p>
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<p>Most of those top tier schools could fill their class with all full pay and well qualified students.</p>
<p>I hate to say this, but at work I have someone who would draft formal emails for me to send out. I tell her my what I want in the email, she would write it almost 90% complete for me.</p>
<p>This story is priceless! I’m getting over a cold and when I laugh I cough uncontrollably. My “coughing” muscles are so sore just from this piece!</p>
<p>What’s amazing to me is just how educated the author must be having written all those theses! It seems like a great business for someone who loves learning for it’s own sake without the recognition. </p>
<p>It reminds me of a film I saw about 25 years ago, I think it was called Joshua Then and Now, where the character breaks into this rich wine connoisseur’s house in the middle of the night, goes into his wine cellar, and steams off all of the labels of his collection. The insurance won’t pay because the wine wasn’t stolen. At one point Joshua asks, what’s really valuable the wine or the labels. </p>
<p>Here you have all of these people paying for the education (the wine), and the author of this piece is paid a fortune to obtain his education by people who want the degrees (or the labels). There goes that coughing again, LOL!</p>
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<p>May not be 100% relevant, but in real life we don´t always write our own memos or published papers. </p>
<p>How relevant is your comment?</p>
<p>I’ve worked with a couple of students on their application essays. (For free, of course.) As far as I’m concerned, I was doing what their teachers over the years should have done but didn’t: teach them to write. My “editing” consisted of an intensive one-on-one tutorial in structure and diction aimed at distilling the essence of what they wished to say and conveying it effectively. I’m not going to rewrite the paper for the kid, I’m going to show the kid where it is weak and ineffective, and show how to make better choices. The choices remain theirs.</p>
<p>The comments from the classroom teachers that I’ve seen on such papers were pathetically inadequate, perfunctory, even stupid. There is no way the kid would learn to write well from them. The comparison with the kind of editing and feedback I gave the technical writers who worked for me is shocking.</p>
<p>My hope is that the kid learns enough from me to be able to be a better writer in the future by asking him/herself the same kind of questions that I asked. I find this so enjoyable that I wonder whether I should hire myself out as a writing tutor… it really would be satisfying.</p>
<p>My own kid would never allow me to even look at any of his classwork, much less edit it for him, of course. :)</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t think that this kind of term paper company is anything new. I recall rumors that they existed in the Boston area back in the 70s. They reportedly guaranteed a B at any 4-yr institution in the area (including Harvard) except Wellesley, where they guaranteed a C. 
As a senior, I recall being approached by a wealthy Iranian MBA student at MIT who was looking for someone to help write his thesis. (The research and so on would presumably be his.)</p>
<p>In grad school you don’t write your papers/thesis alone, your professors make many changes and by the time it appears in a journal, reviewers and editors contribute some or more, regardless you are a native speaker or an ESL student. But, you have to defend every word of it.</p>
<p>I think there was a movie about this staring Rodney Dangerfield!</p>
<p>I think there is a difference between the situation where one gets help to improve or correct one’s work, and may explicitly acknowledge the source (professors, family members, reviewers anonymous or otherwise), vs the situation where one is presenting someone else’s work wholesale as one’s own.</p>
<p>There is also a difference between the situation where one affixes one’s signature to authenticate authorship (as in assignments, papers, applications essays, theses), vs the situation where one affixes ones signature (on an email, a document, or a contract clearly written by lawyers) to signal ownership of responsibility.</p>
<p>Well put, 4th floor, particularly your latter distinction.</p>
<p>Let’s put a twist on this…suspending morality for a moment, and simply accepting the story presented…who is the fool here? The student going into the work force with a degree they didn’t earn and is possibly deficient in skills? The professors and administrators that took work that wasn’t the students along the way? OR the ghost writer that has probably done enough work to earn multiple degrees, and yet is earning $66,000 sitting in a home office?</p>
<p>I would argue the third. Obviously it takes far more than writing papers to complete a degree, however he obviously has some aptitude if his story is to be believed. If his efforts had been placed in continuing education I think his earning potential would be far beyond $66k. This is not a small sum, and not all people want to be tied to an office. I understand this. Many of the students he has carried along are making exponentially more.</p>
<p>Have any of you ever worked with someone you suspected of cheating in college? I had a boss once who was really stupid and really ambitious. I wondered at the time if he’d cheated his way to the degrees he claimed he had, or if he just lied about them.</p>