Get your Master's Thesis für just 2k$!

[Bungee]

The saddest thing is, he just refers to the US Educational System, when really it's the same in all of the western hermisphere:

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

[Tebonas]

Well, I for one laughed at the fact that the article started with a faked paper on business ethics.

[K9]

Oh dear.

[Khaldun]

Folks have pointed out that the dude is:

a) pitching a book

and

b) claims to have written so many pages as a ghost, he would have had to write something like 10-12 hours a day every day of the week for years.

So I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. On the other hand, there are unquestionably people like him out there doing this kind of work, and it's not so much to their discredit as an indication of how utterly broken and corrupt a lot of professional graduate programs in universities actually are.

[01101010]

Having suffered through a never-ending thesis which lead to a never-ending publication in an academic journal, I can fully understand why this guy does what he claims to do... I can't even imagine trying to do what I did as an ESL student. It's easy to look up essays online to see if a student pulled it off a site, much more difficult with "custom" written papers uniquely and privately written. Growing industry? I can see it. Hell if I enjoyed writing, I would flirt with the idea myself.

[Lantyssa]

It flirts with a lot of my problems about education.  We focus on the wrong things, we treat it as a production line instead of an important life skill, and we don't take enough interest in our students to be able to tell their work from that of another, nor do we have enough educators to allow for anything better.  All in a system where it becomes increasingly important to have higher education, yet we routinely underfund and belittle it.

I find the job itself interesting.  It's something I could easily see myself doing if the thought of helping people cheat didn't infuriate me.  That there is a need for it saddens me, and that students go to such lengths depresses me.

[01101010]

It flirts with a lot of my problems about education.  We focus on the wrong things, we treat it as a production line instead of an important life skill, and we don't take enough interest in our students to be able to tell their work from that of another, nor do we have enough educators to allow for anything better.  All in a system where it becomes increasingly important to have higher education, yet we routinely underfund and belittle it.

I find the job itself interesting.  It's something I could easily see myself doing if the thought of helping people cheat didn't infuriate me.  That there is a need for it saddens me, and that students go to such lengths depresses me.

This projects up the ladder as well. As I got closer in my PhD program I saw that to succeed (i.e., attain the golden ticket of tenure), one had to basically crank out top tiered research journal articles as fast as possible. The production of academic knowledge so to speak moved from think tanks to production lines. Add to that the fact of getting your research even considered or looked at in a top tier journal was completely political and about who's knob to polish and when. In our monthly graduate committee meetings, this topic was brought up and the debate and banter went on for a full hour before it became apparent that the research and actual progression of knowledge was secondary to who was in your proverbial corner to get something published. I am not sure if it works quite the same in the physical sciences, but in the social sciences, it's all about name dropping and fellatio. And I say all this with utter disappointment btw.

[Yoru]

Folks have pointed out that the dude is:

a) pitching a book

and

b) claims to have written so many pages as a ghost, he would have had to write something like 10-12 hours a day every day of the week for years.

So I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. On the other hand, there are unquestionably people like him out there doing this kind of work, and it's not so much to their discredit as an indication of how utterly broken and corrupt a lot of professional graduate programs in universities actually are.

The claim of 5000 pages in a year seems to work out if you do some math. Assume he's working 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and you need to average under 3 pages per hour to reach that level. It's not unbelievable on the face of it, although that is a rather intense amount of writing - and he does claim to average 4-5 pages per hour, which would provide the administrative time necessary to handle clients.

If true, it's an interesting insight into the lengths to which we've industrialized the educational model. It mirrors, somewhat, my own experiences in university in my larger courses - they were largely there to ensure you were exposed to the material and validate that you could regurgitate it. Actual learning took place on your own or in independent study/research groups and small focused classes. I was lucky enough to have the latter two available at my institution.

[Nebu]

Considering all of the MS and PhD committees I've served on, none of this surprises me.  Graduate education from schools below the top 10 (or even 25) in the US is generally a joke in many fields.  It's more about slave labor for faculty attempting to bring indirects into universities than about education.  

Postsecondary education, much like health care, has become a service industry.  


Edit: I apologize if I just got this sent to Politics.

[Lantyssa]

The claim of 5000 pages in a year seems to work out if you do some math. Assume he's working 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and you need to average under 3 pages per hour to reach that level. It's not unbelievable on the face of it, although that is a rather intense amount of writing - and he does claim to average 4-5 pages per hour, which would provide the administrative time necessary to handle clients.

For my pchem lab I had to write a ten page paper every week, for two semesters.  Then again for advanced analytical.  Once you know how to take a simple sentence and add fluff to make it a paragraph, writing several pages an hour is not hard.  It also obfuscates the tiny amount of real information, and a TA grading papers isn't going to care as long as you're not blatantly wrong.

Since the guy knows how to research and organize before he starts writing, and then cranks it out, that kind of production schedule does not surprise me at all.  And if it's topics he's written for before, which is highly likely for some subjects, it becomes that much easier.

[Khaldun]

This guy, by the way, is also a big reminder to me of a very similar racket: it's becoming increasingly clear that quite a few faculty at universities, including tenured faculty, "double-dip" by working for online for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. Most of which offer courses of lower quality than community colleges at vastly higher rates, which very rarely have any meaningful value in the job market. There's a pretty fine line between making money writing papers for students and making money supervising valueless online courses. In fact, a really smart operator could probably make money at both ends of that deal: supervise the course and have a second identity where you charge the students for papers you write to be turned into yourself. None of the for-profits would know or care if someone was doing that, honestly. Just as many of the less selective brick-and-mortar universities don't really want to do anything that would get in the way of funnelling the largest number of cattle through the slaughter pens, and hence, don't do some of the simple things you could do to make cheating more difficult. (Customize exams, use other assessment instruments besides exams, smaller classes, don't use a standardized textbook, etc.)

[Chimpy]

There is a great Frontline episode about the for-profit college system.

[Soln]

Well, I for one laughed at the fact that the article started with a faked paper on business ethics.

And in other news, the "capstone" course in the faculty of Management at the University of Central Florida, which is a 4th year undergrad course on business strategy, had 3/4 of its class admit to cheating.  


Let me bake this in: this course (I took 2 similar for an MBA) is about *competition*.  Strategy, planning and how to measure success.  So you know, statistics, dealing with ambiguity and the like.  

The students in that course got a hold of the answers to the question bank and took the competitive decision to cheat, while knowing that untold dozens of other people in their class would do the same.  The result is in the video, where the prof made the decision (I think it was a bluff) that if the cheaters acknowledged themselves no futher action would be taken against them.  In the meanwhile, everyone in the 400 (?) strong class has to re-sit the midterm.  So 100 odd people who didn't cheat have to re-sit the exam.  

It's utterly mind boggling -- a course about competition, about the problems of risk, about the problems of how difficult it is to measure risk, along with EVERYTHING going on the world economy today, this still happens.  It's not quite as bad as cheating on a business ethics course, but becuase it's about strategic competition it's still mindblowingly ironic.

[Khaldun]

The ridiculously lazy professor used the test provided by the textbook publisher (after saying he designed his own tests). The test which was available quite easily online. At some point, you can't blame a kid who eats a cookie that's placed on the plate in front of him, no matter how he knows he's not supposed to eat a cookie.

Plus, look at the whole thing with fraudulent paperwork around mortgages and much else in our current economy. Learning to cheat is an important part of mad bizness skills these days!

[Nebu]

The ridiculously lazy professor used the test provided by the textbook publisher (after saying he designed his own tests). The test which was available quite easily online. At some point, you can't blame a kid who eats a cookie that's placed on the plate in front of him, no matter how he knows he's not supposed to eat a cookie.

1) I agree that the professor was lazy in using a canned exam.  I blame his institution.  Professors are encouraged to spend less and less time on teaching as it interferes with your time to beg for money and write papers.  As a professor at a state university, there is ZERO incentive to be a good educator beyond your own personal ethics. 

2) You can (and should) always blame people for following the wrong path.  I don't care how easy it is to follow the wrong path.  That doesn't make it any more right.  Cheating will always be the coward's way out.  

[Thrawn]

I think I would feel less bad cheating on a general that is just "required" and has nothing to do with my degree then a class that is relevent and teaching me thigns I will need to know in my industry...but maybe I just have weak ethics. 

[01101010]

1) I agree that the professor was lazy in using a canned exam.  I blame his institution.  Professors are encouraged to spend less and less time on teaching as it interferes with your time to beg for money and write papers.  As a professor at a state university, there is ZERO incentive to be a good educator beyond your own personal ethics. 

Precisely why I opted out of the PhD program. I absolutely loved teaching my class at the "U" and would have loved teaching a full course load had it not come with the added baggage of having to crank out the research at an ungodly rate. My class gave me first rate reviews even though I had the lowest GPA of any of the graduate student taught classes because, as a few told me, it was the only class they actually learned something in. Of course it didn't hurt that all my exams were custom made by me, every semester - though that had a lot to do with my teaching style tending to the discussion side relating real world stuff that mattered to the students to the theoretical part of the book stuff. It's very disheartening to know that is the way college should be, but isn't and will not be for quite awhile. It also wraps back into the OP... if profs don't give a shit what the students work is about (and many have no clue about their students) then the kids most likely won't give a shit about learning from an absent teacher. I was a TA and did the majority of the grading for the prof I was "assisting" and even had one prof ask me about a student, who she was, her grade, her topic of interests, who had scheduled to meet with said prof about the class materials presented. Needless to say, he deferred the student to me to "take care of it" while he made some excuse he had a conflict.

[Morat20]

Having suffered through a never-ending thesis which lead to a never-ending publication in an academic journal, I can fully understand why this guy does what he claims to do... I can't even imagine trying to do what I did as an ESL student. It's easy to look up essays online to see if a student pulled it off a site, much more difficult with "custom" written papers uniquely and privately written. Growing industry? I can see it. Hell if I enjoyed writing, I would flirt with the idea myself.

Shit, I still haven't broken my thesis apart to publicize. (Then again, my general view is "I've satisified my curiousity on this particular subject. Hmm. Now let's do it again, with what I've learned." Rewriting it to publish is just work, dammit. I did the fun bit already).

I cannot imagine my thesis advisor falling for that sort of scam, simply because the man was relentless about weekly meetings, constant circulations of drafts, discussions on concepts and results, and generally being heavily invested in every stage of the process. To actually hire someone to write it for me, I'd have to have had him write it dozens of times, as a cycle of drafts.

Not to mention the domain knowledge so he'd know what to write about, or how I'd handle presenting it to an audience (full of other grad students, all asking pointed questions -- on everything from process to results) if I didn't actually write it.

And UHCL isn't exactly a top-10 school for graduate degrees. :)

[Nebu]

And UHCL isn't exactly a top-10 school for graduate degrees. :)

There is one universal truth about graduate degrees: You get out of them what you put into them.  

[Trippy]

Well, I for one laughed at the fact that the article started with a faked paper on business ethics.

And in other news, the "capstone" course in the faculty of Management at the University of Central Florida, which is a 4th year undergrad course on business strategy, had 3/4 of its class admit to cheating.  

Where did you get that 3/4 number from? From what I've read it's ~1/3 that cheated.

[Khaldun]

Any time you have considerable contact with a student, it is usually screamingly obvious when they're turning in written work that they could not possibly have done themselves. Where plagiarism and ghosting are prevalent modes of completing assignments, it's almost always a sign that faculty do not have close connection to or knowledge of the students for which they're allegedly responsible.

Occasionally it's a sign that the faculty member is also a plagiarist or cheat. In certain fields (medical research that involves pharmaceuticals) it's becoming increasingly clear that substantial numbers of researchers and professors routinely submit work that has been done for them by pharma-paid ghostwriters.

[Khaldun]

Well, I for one laughed at the fact that the article started with a faked paper on business ethics.

And in other news, the "capstone" course in the faculty of Management at the University of Central Florida, which is a 4th year undergrad course on business strategy, had 3/4 of its class admit to cheating.  

Where did you get that 3/4 number from? From what I've read it's ~1/3 that cheated.

That's what I've seen (and what the professor says in the video that's circulating): about 200 out of 600.

[Lianka]

Well, I for one laughed at the fact that the article started with a faked paper on business ethics.

And in other news, the "capstone" course in the faculty of Management at the University of Central Florida, which is a 4th year undergrad course on business strategy, had 3/4 of its class admit to cheating.  

Where did you get that 3/4 number from? From what I've read it's ~1/3 that cheated.

That's what I've seen (and what the professor says in the video that's circulating): about 200 out of 600.

In today's world, you should get credit for just trying math, not for getting it right!  Or so a classmate of mine who anonymously asked that our math homework be credited for completeness and not correctness thinks! 

[Soln]

I think in my haste I conflated 4th year with 3/4 -- I haven't had a chance to watch the last 3-4mins of that video.  

[Polysorbate80]

I'm thinking I should have charged my classmates more for the papers I wrote for them.  I could have a whole different career today!



Actually, I wouldn't.  I'd only do papers I knew they could write themselves, but were too legitimately swamped to deal with.

And I'm still offended at that one prof that gave me a "B" :P

[Lightstalker]

Occasionally it's a sign that the faculty member is also a plagiarist or cheat. In certain fields (medical research that involves pharmaceuticals) it's becoming increasingly clear that substantial numbers of researchers and professors routinely submit work that has been done for them by pharma-paid ghostwriters.

Over the range of academic institution:

• So, on the low end paper mills and plagiarism result in just another meaningless degree that is exploitive to the owner and uninteresting to everyone else (not really a surprise given that we're starting with a low end institution).
• In the mid-range the specific results and conclusions are provided by personally self-interested parties.  This isn't actually that unlike the “publish to eat model” of most research staff the world over (e.g. so long as volume is a viable substitute for original or useful content). 
• And on the high end labs sit on each other's results in peer review until they can get their own version of the paper published. 

We aren't interested in original work at all; the closest is an interest in the credit for it at the highest level.  Yes, wildly overgeneralized caricature.  But if Vannevar Bush’s problem of the future was relevance, our problem of the future is veracity.

We have too many colleges, professors and students with no good reason to produce most of them.  Is it any surprise that we’re not really all that interested in how they are produced?  The real test of a thesis isn’t the cost of writing it, but the opportunity cost of enduring the entire educational process.  $2,000 is a pittance compared to years of deferred income.

[Khaldun]

My thought would be that if we concentrated more on what & how faculty teach and less on research productivity, we might get a lot closer to universities being genuinely value-added.

If you want some insight to the damage that the incentive to overproduce research findings is doing quite beyond plagiarism, this piece in the Atlantic Monthly on John Ioannidis' research on the trustworthiness of medical research is fairly interesting: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

[01101010]

My thought would be that if we concentrated more on what & how faculty teach and less on research productivity, we might get a lot closer to universities being genuinely value-added.

Won't happen as long as the research brings in the money hats for the university. Tuition just can't compare with it. But hey, if you figure out the magic key to unlock a school where professors get paid to teach and not write for each other then give me a call. I'd be happy as a clam just to teach and get paid enough to break.

[KallDrexx]

And in other news, the "capstone" course in the faculty of Management at the University of Central Florida, which is a 4th year undergrad course on business strategy, had 3/4 of its class admit to cheating.  

Hah.

That story is funny because I had his class my senior year of college in 2007.  The funny thing was that he was on the news here talking about how disappointed he was that students would do this.

That's funny for two reasons.  First is because Capstone is the last class you take at UCF in the school of Business (you can't get into it without filling out an intent to graduate form that says you are graduating that semester).  It's also funny because everyone tries to get him for Capstone class, because he is universally known as being the easiest professor for it.  In Capstone, you have to write an 11 page industry analysis, he's the only teacher that let's you use bullet points (because business managers don't give a shit about an 11 page fluff paper, they want bullet points that get them the facts quickly).   Also he gave students take home quizzes, while other teachers had them take them as pop-quizzes

So last semester seniors, who signed up for him specifically because he's known to be easy, cheated and they are shocked.

Though to be honest, the tests in that class were ridiculous anyways, and the idea that anyone needed to cheat on them is laughable.  I don't remember anyone in my class getting a bad grade on them because it was that stupid of a test.

[Lantyssa]

A close friend was a dual major with business as one of them.  He constantly lamented about the people in those classes.  It doesn't surprise me they needed to cheat to get a passing grade.

[Jimbo]

I hate writing...sometimes I wish I could buy my papers and be done, or at least do the research, throw out my ideas and let someone else do the stupid spit and polish of it.

I am the type that doesn't give a shit about how much fluff you cram into it, give me small amount of facts and show me how I can make my patients better quicker, and for God's sake don't drone on because I will fall asleep on your ass.

Is there any colleges that don't use a research paper as the way to measure how much you can learn from a class?

[Rasix]

My master's program allowed you to do a project or paper.  I chose the project.

[Nebu]

I sometimes wish I had studied something other than science just to see how they do things.  Chemistry is such a grueling graduate experience. 

[01101010]

I hate writing...sometimes I wish I could buy my papers and be done, or at least do the research, throw out my ideas and let someone else do the stupid spit and polish of it.

I am the type that doesn't give a shit about how much fluff you cram into it, give me small amount of facts and show me how I can make my patients better quicker, and for God's sake don't drone on because I will fall asleep on your ass.

Is there any colleges that don't use a research paper as the way to measure how much you can learn from a class?

Well I had to defend my thesis at LSU which turned out to be 10% about my paper and 90% about how much shit I learned in the last two years there. I was told it was a mini-oral exam. For the doctorate, its an 8 hour oral exam for each of two areas, theory and methods, or at least was when I was there 99-02. At the U of Miami, it was four comprehensive exams, 8 hours each covering methods/stats, theory, your major focus, and your minor focus, which they allowed for a four hour keyboard banging session. They used to do just the major focus exam and the other two but decided after my first year there to go with 4 to make their dept more legit in the eyes of national academia. It did not sit well with us servants. I left after some huge controversy about the exams and am glad I did. Took my buddy who started with me another 3 years to get outta there.

[Lantyssa]

I sometimes wish I had studied something other than science just to see how they do things.  Chemistry is such a grueling graduate experience. 

Yeah, it is.  I know I made the right choice, but I do sometimes wish I had managed to finish.