Plagiarism and essay mills
The new school year is just starting, and as I decide what tasks to give my students, I can’t help but think about their potential to use essay mills.
Essay mills are companies whose sole purpose is to generate essays for high school and college students (in exchange for a fee, of course). Sure, essay mills claim that the papers are meant just to help the students write their own original papers, but with names such as echeat.com, it’s pretty clear what their real purpose is.
Professors in general are very worried about essay mills and their impact on learning, but not knowing exactly what essay mills or the quality of their output, it is hard to know how worried we should be. So together with Aline Grüneisen, I decided to check it out. We ordered a typical college term paper from four different essay mills, and as the topic of the paper we chose… (surprise!) Cheating.
Here is the description of the task that we gave the four essay mills:
“When and why do people cheat? Consider the social circumstances involved in dishonesty, and provide a thoughtful response to the topic of cheating. Address various forms of cheating (personal, at work, etc.) and how each of these can be rationalized by a social culture of cheating.”
We requested a term paper for a university level social psychology class, 12 pages long, using 15 sources (cited and referenced in a bibliography), APA style, to be completed in the next 2 weeks. A pretty basic and conventional request. The essay mills charged us in advance between $150 to $216 per paper.
Two weeks later, what we got would best be described as gibberish. A few of the papers attempt to mimic APA style, but none achieve it without glaring errors. Citations are sloppy, and the reference lists abominable – including outdated and unknown sources, many of which are online news stories, editorial posts or blogs, and some that are simply broken links. In terms of the quality of the writing itself, the authors of all four papers seemed to have very little grasp of the English language, or even how to format an essay. Paragraphs jump bluntly from one topic to another, and often fall into the form of a list, counting off various forms of cheating or providing a long stream of examples that are never explained or connected to the “theses” of the paper. Here are some selected sentences from the four papers:
“Cheating by healers. Healing is different. There is harmless healing, when healers-cheaters and wizards offer omens, lapels, damage to withdraw, the husband-wife back and stuff. We read in the newspaper and just smile. But these days fewer people believe in wizards.”
“If the large allowance of study undertook on scholar betraying is any suggestion of academia and professors’ powerful yearn to decrease scholar betraying, it appeared expected these mind-set would component into the creation of their school room guidelines.”
“By trusting blindfold only in stable love, loyalty, responsibility and honesty the partners assimilate with the credulous and naïve persons of the past.“
“Women have a much greater necessity to feel special.”
“The future generation must learn for historical mistakes and develop the sense of pride and responsibility for its actions.”
At this point we were rather relieved, figuring that the day is not here where students can submit papers from essay mills and get good grades for them. Moreover, we concluded that if students did try to buy a paper from an essay mill, just like us, they would feel that they have wasted their money and won’t try it again.
But the story does not end here. We submitted the four essays to WriteCheck.com, a website that inspects papers for plagiarism and found that two of the papers were 35-39% copied from existing works. We decided to take action with the two largely plagiarized papers, and contacted the essay mills requesting our money back. Despite the solid proof that we provided, the companies insisted that they did not plagiarize. One company even tried to threaten us by saying that they will get in touch with the dean at Duke to alert them to the fact that we submitted work that is not ours (just imagine being a student who had used the paper for a class!).
The bottom line? I think that the technological revolution has not yet solved students’ problems. They still have no other option but to actually work on their papers (or maybe get help in the old fashioned way and copy from friends). But I do worry about the existence of essay mills and the signal that they send to our students. As for our refund, we are still waiting…
My latest book, The Upside of Irrationality, explores some positive and some negative ways that irrationality plays out in our lives.
Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to be worried about the impact of essay mills on learning? Cheating and plagiarism carry the threat of failure or even expulsion of a student. All students know this, but it seems to me that this expulsion is not mainly for the student’s benefit as much as the university guarding the value of its diplomas. I mean, if a student doesn’t wish to learn anything, it’s really his loss alone, but if a University gives such a person a diploma, they’d look pretty foolish. That’s why plagiarism is such a big deal even for undergraduates, isn’t it?
On the other hand, if you are interested in student learning, it seems cheating and plagiarism should be tolerated to some extent. I’d think that turning in such a bad paper would be an exceptional learning experience for the student. Alternatively, a student could theoretically turn in an exceptional paper from an essay mill, or he could just pay $250 to his smart friend, and there’d really be no way to catch him. If this were the case, is this student much worse off? He’d be learning a valuable life lesson that unfortunately cheating often pays. Of course, Dr. Ariely, I’d defer to you in the case that some study has been done on the subject of plagiarism and its effects on the student’s learning.
Joe,
It may be that having and vigorously enforcing an anti-plagiarism policy helps protect a school’s reputation, but that doesn’t make it disingenuous for a school to come down hard against plagiarizers. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to maintain your reputation, which is not to say that every means to this end is justified. Fighting a practice that the entire academic community consideres to be bad if not immoral is not only perfectly legitimate, it’s downright laudable. This is precisely why a school can garner respect from being tough on plagiarism in the first place.
As for permitting a little bit of cheating so that students can gain from the experience, what “learning” do you expect them to get out of it? Students are certainly getting none of the valuable knowledge that the professor was trying to teach. If the lesson there is that cheating is bad, students can learn exactly the same thing with much less pain by reading the student code of conduct, and adhering to it. There certainly is value in an experience being caught cheating (a point that Dr. Ariely mentions in his post), but no student in his right mind would say that it’s worth the trouble.
It is certainly the case that not being caught cheating leaves a student worse off, despite your rhetorical question. First of all, he gains nothing that the professor was trying to teach him. Second, the lesson that cheating often pays is has negative value, and can be learned with much lower risk e.g. by observing others, particularly, those in the news.
allyourcode, I don’t understand what you’re saying.
You misstated my original assertion so badly that I’m not sure how to respond. My point was that Dr. Ariely expressed concern about Essay Mills from the clearly presumed point of view that they degrade learning for the student but I doubt that he has any basis for his presumption. For an undergraduate student that I believe he is talking about, Universities come down on cheating and plagiarism so hard mostly for their own reputation. That’s why expressing concern about Essay Mills affecting learning is disingenuous.
Dr. Ariely’s own research shows over and over that the obvious answer is not always the correct answer. You say that cheating without being caught is “certainly” worse for the student and give the reasons that “he gains nothing that the professor was trying to teach him” and that cheating often has a “negative value”. That makes intuitive sense, but what gives you that certainty? I don’t feel that I’m going too far to suggest that you also have no data to back up your certainty. After all, he could have actually learned everything that the professor was trying to teach him, but decided not to write the essay himself.
Let me present you with a counter-example. There’s a brilliant undergraduate student who decides to take 30 credit hours in a single semester. He comes to class every day and he studies and he knows all of the material inside and out. But, then one of his teachers gets essay happy and starts assigning essays left and right. He’s now in a predicament wherein he completely understands the coursework but he does not have time to finish all of the essays, and he pays his friend to write one of them for him. He doesn’t get caught, and you still assert that he’s “certainly” worse off because of this?
No, you cannot assert that because it makes no sense. My point is that you have no data either way and your response is heavily clouded by hidden irrational assumptions. Why make those assumptions when you could simply devise a scientific study?
Very interesting article! I wonder if the papers you quoted were written by people for whom English is a second language. The wording was very choppy and awkward.
I have to admit, I relish the thought of someone trying to cheat and then getting cheated themselves.
Cheating is theft. That’s why it’s a “big deal” for undergraduates and universities and that’s why it should not be tolerated at all, at any level, in any form. Period.
Actually I would think that most people who have marked university-level undergrad essays would have received gibberish only too similar to what you’ve quoted!
I guess that is what final exams are for, and why “continuous assessment” as we call it in the UK – grades based on term papers alone – is risky.
It looks like the essay you got was written by some cheap laborer in China or India, which was then fed through Google translate. This wouldn’t surprise me at all. All you need is some entrepreneurial black marketer to setup a labor network to churn these things out. It’s rather a shame that these people don’t apply their talents doing honest business, because they are clearly pretty smart (the ones who setup the network/black market).
Another example of this kind of labor network, which I learned about yesterday (and which you may be interested in investigating) is the market for CAPTCHA solving. Turns out, you can pay a company $1 to solve 1,000 CAPTCHA’s for you. At that scale, you’d have to assume the solutions are for some nefarious purpose such as sending out spam on Twitter, Gmail, or blogs (not this one though, of course). That talk reminded me of another post on this blog about password selection, because it relates to information security, and the cost that security measures create for legitimate users as well as hackers.
Anyway, the business model for these networks is based on farming out the work to parts of the world with cheap labor and Internet access (e.g. China, and India, and to a lesser extent eastern Europe, and Africa), where workers get paid as little as 50 cents to solve 1k CAPTCHA’s. The same sort of online labor network could be used to churn out crappy essays. In such cases, it’s more than likely that the business is actually run out of Russia, and that you’ll never see a refund.
What you said. I just commented much to the same, but you beat me to it!
As a physics teacher who never had to grade essays, I may be out on a limb here, but I have always thought that those who ask for essays from their students should be able to know their students’ writing abilities well enough to make the essay mills a non-problem. Perhaps an in-class composition could be used as a reference for comparison with the big paper. Awareness of the composition as a reference could influence a student’s decision to buy a paper. If this sounds like more work for the instructor, it could be the cost of better knowledge of one’s students.
Seems like a good idea, but it might be impractical if you have hundreds of students in your class and you have TA’s doing much of the grading. On the other hand, you might be able to write a program that learns people’s styles from the reference essays. Then, you can have the program give future papers a “likeness” score to red flag likely cases of “this was written by someone else”, which you could then vet yourself.
sidney schuster: this is a good idea. While I’ve used one-page opening assignments as needs assessments and as a writing sample, I hadn’t though of it as a deterrent to cheating. But I hadn’t thought of getting them to do it in class.
You’d think this approach to previewing writing ability would be a deterrant, but it’s not for many students, who think they can fool their professors. I’ve seen it many times from my students who do submit plagiarized work after sitting a writing exam where cheating would rely on memorization. Never underestimate the VERY small minority who seek to gain by doing the least work. It will eventually catch up with them.
As a sometime instructor, the worst part of receiving gibberish like this is grading it conscientiously and trying to coach the student to write better.
I wouldn’t try. I’d just fail the cheat.
Why should students write what they believe their professors won’t read?
Assigning an essay to be turned in as a finished product, with no re-work or revision is a useless exercise for everyone.
Want to cut down on cheating? Assignment due at the end of 2nd week: a short proposal (2-3 paragraphs) for a 15-20 page paper, giving topic and general intent, describing its relevance to the course subject, why the student is interested in it, and what kinds of source material is available. Review with each student, and then assign a 2 page mini-version of the paper, giving general order of what the examples and arguments will be. Review, re-assign until it’s coherent. Only then, after that, assign the 15-20 pager.
Return the first version of the 15-pager with notes for revision. The revised versions should be much better than anything you’d have received from the usual way. And can’t possibly have come from an essay mill.
Now you’re about halfway through the semester, assign another 15-20 pager, starting again with the 2-3 paragraph version, only make it due at the end of that same week. Students should know what to expect and what they’re doing now. Go through the same process, but give them half the time.
Now you know what their writing is like, and they know they’re not just dumping their papers into a black hole or cursory comments. Bet you don’t get *any* essay-mill stuff at that point.
Students are trying to make the best investment of their time, right? If they don’t understand the value (to them) of the work involved in writing the paper, they won’t put the time in. If you’re not willing to teach them that value, then what are you teaching them?
I guess the difference in approach may also reflect the perspective of the instructor about “why ask people to write at all”…. You and I see writing as a way of encouraging _and_ assessing student thinking, and therefore cheating/plagiarism is punished because it short-circuits both processes. An earlier commenter seems to think that cheating is punished because it reflects badly on the institution, which I feel is really secondary to why professors procecute cheating offenses.
When I was a T.A., I caught one really glaring example of plagiarism. The student’s paper read like an M.A. student trying to dumb himself down instead of a legitimate first-year undergrad, the paper didn’t answer the question posed, referenced sources we hadn’t discussed in class, didn’t cite its sources, etc. The worst part: the student had submitted it early “for feedback.” Now that takes chutzpah! I gave it back to him with the recommendation that he might want to rethink the entire thing, and then he had the gall to ask for an extension!
It wasn’t quite the gibberish you got, Dan, but it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t the student’s own writing.
I’ve mostly graded computer science work – computer programs for the most part. Most people who plagiarise do so because they are desperate – either not understanding the material, or simply having run out of time – or because they’re lazy. In neither situation are they likely to do a particularly good job of plagiarism – the examples I’ve seen have been pretty obvious.
If you copy something in full, its pretty easy to get caught – if you try to modify things or patchtogether material from various sources, it is usually going to look pretty fishy.
If the prices are generally as high as the ones cited in your sample, how can college students afford to pay for term papers? Isn’t $150 worth just doing it yourself? I know I never had that much money to spare as an undergrad.
This illustrates one of the great reasons plagiarism is wrong: those with more resources will “do better” by virtue of being able to buy higher quality work compared to those who can’t afford it and have to “resort” to doing the work themselves.
150$ is not a high price when you consider the supply side – thats about 10$ per page. Would you be willing to write a page for 10$?
I would strongly recommend that you try this again with a more common assignment. I’m guessing that the more uncommon the topic, the more likely they are to have a good base of previously-written material to choose from, leading to shoddier work. For instance, if you asked for a high school level essay on Macbeth, I bet you’d be more likely to get a nice, polished essay from them.
If so, the implication for educators would be to continue to vary the assignments given–provide a moving target that’s harder to hit.
For <$250, I really cannot see getting a very good essay with these requirements. I cannot imagine someone qualified to write a strong essay would invest sufficient time to do so for such a low rate. It reminds me of a con-man who offers to "fix" a chimney for $500 when appropriate materials alone would cost $5,000.
$5k for an undergrad paper? Where can I subscribe to *that* website!?
Am I the only one why really, really want to be in the office of the dean at Duke when that sloppy sweatshop calls?
All you need to do is start the semester with by having the students do a writing sample in class that they turn in. Let them know that you will refer to these as they submit papers, which makes it really easy to spot plagiarism. Also let them know that working on papers will help them develop skills they will need in the work place and the paying for paper will put them at risk for failure now and in the future.
Given that most college students work relatively low income jobs, I would assume paying another college student the same amount of money paid to the mills would yield better results. If I were looking to cheat, I would simply pay a poor student who had an interest in the field, particularly at Duke where most students are intelligent and very capable. But then again, that’s assuming the cheating student had the funds to pay the poor student, which I would assume he or she would if that person were able to solicit the services of the mill.
It’s like the question was translated into Chinese (or any other foreign language), sent to the writers, written in Chinese and then google-translated back into English. It’s like a an expensive game of academic Telephone!
I’m quite amused by the comments from people who think all the problems are solved by gathering an in-class writing sample from the students for comparison. As a sometime TA, this doesn’t help at all. These kind of assignments are good for early-diagnosing of writing problems in the hopes that students will improve, but that’s about it. For one thing, they tell you absolutely nothing about a student’s ability to cite research. The only information they contain is writing style, which tends to differ greatly according to time and pressure. Many students will write better, more complex arguments given the time, along with significantly better grammar and spelling as they allow friends or university writing centres to edit their work. Of course, some students also do significantly worse as they succumb to the pressures of a larger assignment. All this is to say that using an in-class writing assignment for comparison presupposes a student’s inability to improve and fails to take account of different writing conditions. The only situation where it might help would be if a student is obviously borderline illiterate (most college students aren’t) turns in a very well-written paper. Even then, what are you supposed to do? If the paper mills have obviously plagiarized (as two of them did here), then you have something actionable, but I would find it extremely problematic to assign a failing grade (or remove a student from my course) for doing better than I thought he/she should, and I suspect that the university administration would be reluctant to act given such inconclusive evidence. Perhaps the benefit is that the process could highlight a couple papers to submit to sites like WriteCheck, but that’s about it. This seems like an awful lot of work on the part of the TAs (let’s not kid ourselves, the professors are unlikely to do it), for potentially very little pay-off.
My ex-husband, lately deceased, coerced me into writing a paper for him in the late 60s. I always got an A on my papers so he figured it would be easy for me. I was horrified but acquiesced.
I knew nothing about the topic and whipped it out since I was very busy trying to do a good job in college myself. He/ we got a C+. He was furious!
This reminds why I majored in an area that did not require essays.
Engineers hate them.
I used to work for a company like that, we did more technical work though. I only took the job because nobody was hiring in industry. I worked on mostly editing papers after the students provided the first draft, sometimes adding content. It was crazy how bad those first drafts were, the grading profs or TA’s had to know the final submission was paid for. I felt a little bad for helping the kids cheat but 9 months of being unemployed after 5 years of grad school made me desperate. The money was nice, I would get a few hundred for editing 15 pages.
I suspect you got an especially high dose of gibberish because the assignment was a one-off topic in a field with lots of specialized jargon. I suspect if you had asked for an essay on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the effects of sleep deprivation on memory, you would have gotten work that was far more readable, far better sourced, and approximately 100% plagiarized.
For $250, the best you can probaly expect is something on a standard topic that is 95% canned, or something on a non-standard topic that is complete gibberish, a bunch of crap that sounds like it might kinda sorta relate to the topic somehow, but does not come within a million milies of actually saying anything.
Long ago in Harpers, there was an article written by someone who worked for a company that produced these kinds of papers on demand. Based on that article, I would suspect that the current going rate is much higher than the amount you paid.
The students that I teach couldn’t afford this option, but they probably know about more savvy options for lower prices. There are, I know, current equivalents to the files sororities and fraternities used to keep back in the day before the internet. What they can figure out now, I suspect, is extraordinary.
Students happily share information on how they create fake ids. I wonder if they would be willing to share information on how they do end runs around assignments?
Angela
I’ve found that the best way to assess students’ writing, is to just have them write in class. They can do the reading, annotations, and gather sources outside of class, but the essay is created the old fashioned way — pencil and blue book. Aaaand….BEGIN!
-ESL Prof in CA
Julie – Based on the average cost/class at most US colleges, I’d be furious, if a professor wasted those classes having me write. 2-3 exams/semester are fine, beyond that professors should be teaching – that’s what the students deserve for their money.
Those of you concerned that the college is “only” defending its reputation by going after cheaters neglect the very obvious consideration that the value of every student’s degree depends entirely on the college’s… REPUTATION. So it is in every student’s interest, unless he or she does not actually plan to earn a degree, that the college do everything possible to protect and increase its reputation, which will increase the value of each graduate’s degree.
DUH.
I must agree with a couple of observations in these responses. It seems that these examples were farmed out to another country, translated by Babel Fish or some other online/electronic translator, and then sent to the purchaser. I think it’s funny that even cheating on essays is potentially being outsourced.
I believe you have uncovered an opportunity for an American based essay mill to make a small fortune. The upside being their opportunity to employ some academically capable students to grind out said essays. (Perhaps the grad students that assist student athletes at some universities.)
“By trusting blindfold only in stable love, loyalty, responsibility and honesty the partners assimilate with the credulous and naïve persons of the past.”
How beautiful. It is like strange poetry.
Let the cheaters get burned. One less idiot to deal with in the workforce.
An essay mill (or paper mill) is a ghostwriting service that sells essays and other homework writing to university and college students. Since plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty or academic fraud, universities and colleges may investigate papers suspected to be from an essay mill by using Internet plagiarism detection software, which compares essays against a database of known essay mill essays and by orally testing students on the contents of their papers.
In relation to this, you may want to visit our online English academy is bases in Cebu City, Philippines. It is an institution with competent, effective, and efficient ESL teachers well-equipped to provide easy and fun way of learning English at a minimum amount of time per session.
Check out the article entitled The Term Paper Artist, in which writer Nick Mamatas describes his experience working for an essay mill.
“I think that the technological revolution has not yet solved students’ problems”.
Do you mean “teachers problems” ?
Because the problem of the student should be to learn how to promote his own intelligence, his autonomy and different skills as research skills, synthesis, etc, instead of giving answers to closed questions asked by the teacher. If your student has to do a research by his own, or with a friend, and then to present it to you orally, and explain and justify his arguments, essay mill will be of no interest. If he’s got to do his essay in class, essay mill won’t be a problem neither. In both cases you will help him to build his own knowledge and develop interesting skills threw evaluation., and because of it.
In other terms, are essays done at home a good exercise ?
Plus the fact that “cut and paste” is a very interesting exercise (if the sources are given of course). It’s a question of synthesis and construction. It’s precisely what numerous teachers do when they prepare their own lessons. Isn’t it ?
I’m pretty sure that “the technological revolution” is not just technological, but cultural, and has consequences on one intelligence, and school has to learn how to use it, include it in the educational process instead of seeing it as a problem.
your idea to assigning task to student. This is a good step to make your student self dependent. You can instol Rice mill plant for your school.
your idea to assigning task to student. This is a good step to make your student self dependent. You can instol Rice mill plant for your school.
Hey this was a great post. As the fall semester progresses and more papers are due, more students will be looking for shortcuts like this. Hopefully students realize that it is better to do their own work. I updated my blog and referenced this article because it was so good. Thanks! http://www.custudentloans.org/student/beware-of-plagirism-write-your-own-papers
It is very uncommon, in our society today, for cheating to be viewed with any sort of positive annotation. However, I will have to agree with Joe S on the matter. Someone told me recently, ”If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.” This combination of words was shocking and very unexpected to me. But, it makes sense if you put some thought into it. Yes, some students will use plagiarism as a way to get out of their schoolwork. Yet, I feel the majority of students do care about their education and grades. For example, many colleges offer scholarships dependent on the maintenance of a given grade point level. If a student has two options, to turn in nothing and lose a scholarship, or cheat and get the necessary grade, any student in their right mind gets the grade any way possible. As a result, the student maintains his scholarship and is able to continue education. My point is that cheating and plagiarism are not always derived from their stereotypical roots. They will always be a part of the educational system, regardless of what we try to stop it, and in a sense, that’s ok.
Very interesting research! In the beginning you state that you are concerned about the learning of your students. I very much agree. I think essay mills are nothing more than a symptom of the real problem. Too me, the real question is: Why is an essay not seen as a learning opportunity?
This recent article might throw a wrench into the theory that these essay mills aren’t good enough: http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/
I would recommend trying again and not using an online service. Word gets around about legitimate sources of papers, and certainly they may not be interested in your publicizing them.
Maybe you just didn’t spend enough money on the essays. Quality has its price.
Have you read “The Shadow Scholar” that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Ed? Find it and read it. There are pros out there writing a lot of “student writing.”
Great discussion. Certainly, a portion of the problem falls on the shoulders of students and these essay-mills. What about the universities themselves? I would have loved Dan to have the essay-mill “get in touch” with the Duke administration to see what their response would have been. Cheating is never good, but as Dan, and others have pointed out in detail, dishonesty is driven in large part by forces of relativity. Should the honest student who observes cheating behavior around them go unpunished, and in many cases being rewarded, continue down the path of honesty? Obviously yes, but at what risk to the student? On the one hand, by not plagiarizing, a student can take pride in knowing that they have a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the topic at hand. However, on the other hand, with the financial burden of college so high, coupled with the scarce number of jobs available for graduates, many students may extract causality between honesty and placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Knowing that your GPA is an honest one, is an admirable objective for many students, and this should remain the case. However, the invisible hand of the job market, which is demanding high GPA’s among other attributes is clearly nudging students in an alternate direction. Additionally, colleges and universities addicted to the tuition dollars, appear to have adopted increasingly lax standards regarding academic dishonesty. We can blame the essay-mills all we want, but they are simply filling a market need that should not exist. Until educators, schools, and society at-large adopt a more serious approach toward this problem (Dan has come up with many great suggestions on this front), that market need, will continue to grow, and in my view society will be worse-off because of it. I am starting to research the effects of time-scarcity on cheating. Not sure if Dan has covered that variable, although I suspect he may have. Dan…. Thanks for all you do. As an educator, your work has helped me immensely. Thank you for that!
-andy
It would be interesting in hearing what kind of uniqueness you expect from your students on any given subject.
I mean, can thousands of students year after year really come up with unique essays on pretty basic subjects ?
If 35% match on some program you really don’t know who or how it’s programmed equals cheating what ratio of uniquness do you expect ? 100%, 90% ?
Nothing is new under the sun, isn’t all learning sort of plagirising someones previous work ?
My fact of the matter is that many students have economic and personal pressures coming from multiple and counter-opposing places. The fear instinct that took an early lifetime to develop has situated itself inside the grade structure. If teachers and professors cared about writing STYLE, they would do like many older universities and find a way to end tuitive extortion and actually progress students’ form and content into confidentsln niledge. Part of life is incessant plagiarism, and part of that is being raped by the institution. Some Teachers, i’m sure, have enough trouble with satisfying the demands of the university and the student classroom simultaneously. If i were a teacher, i’d laugh at such outsourcable grammar. There’s nothing wrong with being so wrong, and it’s a healthy writing excersize to gibberize.
And if anyone could convincingly offer a logical argument to why a few cheating students make the classroom unfair for the legit students, i’d love to hear that process.
I mean I guess there’s some validity there in the opposition, but our education should be a pokemon forum and not an authoritarian barn-burning. If by everyone not cheating, you feel you can make an already corrupt society more legit, then by all means, continue that thought for me, but some are inclined to the romance of the cheat before the actual process is underway, so you better validate the righteousness with respect to the just reasoning behind defiling society’s constraints by criminal behavior.