November 20, 2010

A Rare Moment of Utter Demoralization

I'm currently carrying A's and B's in all my classes. As I type this, I've got on my plate: 2 term papers, a couple of hundred pages of readings, two tests and a makeup quiz next week, exams in 21 days and my work schedule has suddenly become quite hectic (which is actually a bit of a relief). I'm working my butt off and have been for years....

....which is why I pretty much collapsed and sucked my toes for a while upon reading this.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.


Read it all.

I'm busting my ass on these papers and this bimbo is texting her subcontracted-paper-writer crap like this....

"did u get the sorce I send

please where you are now?

Desprit to pass spring projict"



Yeah...well I'm dispirited too bitch...because of your shi...
oh wait...
you were trying to say desperate...but you learned your spelling from 4-chan.

Even more disturbing is this video. (via)

Watch it.

As some of you likely have inferred, I've been pursuing a degree for some time, an inordinately long time to be quite frank. Ignoring for a moment a series of really bad decisions and screw-ups I made 18 to 20 years ago and some questionable choices in more recent years, I've had to drop out of school mid-semester because of:

Severe work schedule changes (5 times)
Being hospitalized/ injured (twice )
Reserve mobilization (once)
The destruction of my house during midterms (once)
The need to care for sick relatives (thrice)

All but once for no reimbursement. At one point I was not even allowed to drop the courses I could no longer attend...with predictable results for my GPA.

I haven't been able to attend every year because of the sheer cost. After the disastrous financial results of the abominable choices I made in my youth, I have no intention of going into debt for school again.

Additionally, changing graduation requirements over the last decade have meant that I've had transfer credits that were previously approved no longer count, freshman courses that I had tested out of be retroactively required, the number of courses required for graduation seems at times to be fungible and the 'College of Bullshit' seems to keep getting more of their courses required.

The staff of the College of Bullshit counseling a student

Still, as infuriating as some of these things have been, I've stuck with it and am now about one year from graduation.

I have never cheated.

Which makes this thing all he more demoralizing, much more so than any of the above FUBAR events have been.

What
is
the
fucking
point?

There seems to be remarkably little recognition amongst my fellow students of the gravity of the situation. One girl felt that paper writing services were bad 'because it was hard to find any for free and in order to compete one would have to pay for them'.

Yes the worst thing about cheating is that in some cases it requires one to pay for something one gets on the internet.

My head hurts.

This semester, my exams, at least are largely immune to this as most of them are essay heavy.
However, the papers I have to do are not cakewalks.
...and all the while I can be pretty sure that several of my fellow students are contracting theirs out while I travel about looking for references while working at UPS in November/December.

Given the widespread nature of the problem, I have to wonder what my degree, that I've already spent >$40,000 on, will be worth when I finally have it.

As I said it's just demoralizing.

Damn.

Update:
Not academic but quite related...Colleen Doran has been "Griggsed".

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:17 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 663 words, total size 6 kb.

1

One goal of going to school is to get a credential. People who cheat get those, too.

The other goal is to gain knowledge and skills which will serve you later in life. You're getting those, but the people who cheat are not.

It will catch up with them, sooner or later. Ultimately it's themselves they're cheating.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sat Nov 20 20:18:25 2010 (+rSRq)

2 What Steve said.  I've run into so many people around here going to school for the credentials and not the experience of being able rub shoulders with people interested in the same things you are and are further down the road a bit.  I feel really sorry for that excellent teacher in the video who was so disappointed by the cheaters.  The fact is, based on what I have been seeing, character and attitude are becoming more important than credentials and a resume full of fluff.

Posted by: John Carlton at Sun Nov 21 19:15:38 2010 (mKHVN)

3 One  problem has been administrators not acting.  One university prof had a software program some years back that would nail students who where plagerizing off the the web. So he started flunking students who did it.  Administration got all upset because they were losing the tution money and cooled the prof off.

Posted by: toadold at Mon Nov 22 02:37:39 2010 (aErmb)

4 College professors are being shut down for using anti-plagiarism software?  Back when I was judging National History Day papers, the people with actual credentials - the high school and junior high school teachers & working docents & historians - were buzzing about the need for and potential of these applications.  Of course, the incentives at the 7-12 level are aligned strongly against cheating in creative areas where plagiarism is a useful strategy, because the funding and bureaucratic pressures are on standardized testing, not papers & essay exams.

So most of the "favored" cheating at that level would be in gaming the multiple-choice tests, I guess?  I don't know, I was long out of the system by the time No Child Left Behind scrambled everything.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Mon Nov 22 14:00:35 2010 (jwKxK)

5 I learned long ago not to accept a degree as evidence of knowledge in a job interview (and I've been interviewer far more often now than interviewee).

Sadly, I've also learned not to accept ten years of employment in the relevant field as evidence of knowledge either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Nov 28 23:55:37 2010 (PiXy!)

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