When I was a teaching assistant in university in Singapore here I knew a guy that ran the same sort of business, albeit for coding assignments instead of essays. He was making a couple of thousand a month - showed me the bank records and everything.
I'll admit, only reason why I didn't sign up was because I was already swamped and sorta lazy - we're talking about like a hundred bucks for something as trite as the first assignment for CS101. Apparently the most generous clients were Chinese students with more money than drive.
Wow, the students have a lot of money! And they arent spending it wisely. Whats the point of education if somebody else does it for you? Just the diploma?
Yeah but all those wasted years in school, wasted time for professors, wasted energy to keep the the school building warm or cold depending on the season, there must be a more efficient way to do things.. There should be a school bypass mode for the manager types who need the diploma but aren't interested in learning anything
Unfortunately that's not the way human society works.
> There should be a school bypass mode for the manager types
There used to be. These people could start at a company doing unskilled labor and work their way up to management. But that has pretty much stopped happening in the past 40-50 years. See this relevant HN post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231579
> institutions should focus on learning why students cheat in the first place.
The students didn't create the system. I suggest the institutions look into their pedagogy that motivates cheating with abstract assignments unrelated to students' lives.
Project-based learning helps solve it.
As a side note, I wouldn't call the Kenyans' work cheating. They didn't enroll in an institution with an honor code like the students did. They're working for pay.
Students cheat because they're paying tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper that becomes more valuable as their grades increase. Or even, if they don't pass, they might as well just be pissing tens of thousands of dollars away into the wind.
College seems to be mostly focused on passing tests and getting grades and you've got like 3 months per semester to learn an entire subject well enough to pass said tests, not to mention your entire future is riding on this.
I didn't cheat in school but I knew people who were constantly stressed about their grades and wouldn't have hesitated to cheat if they weren't worried about getting caught.
Eh. I teach introduction to web development at the college level. All of the assignments are project-based (each week the students build a web page starting out with just html, then adding css, then adding JS, then AJAX, then some simple server-side code, etc.).
They are clearly not interested in the subject. Why are they there? Are they just taking this class because they are pursuing the money in IT or is it peer pressure? The problem can possibly be solved if the root cause is studied
> Why are they there? Are they just taking this class because they are pursuing the money
Yes. Having a piece of paper makes you more qualified when competing against thousands of people. Of course you can do other things to make yourself stand out by showing off your projects you've worked on, but that's a lot harder than gaming the system to get good grades.
As it stands now, a college degree is just a qualifier that tells companies "this person is willing to play the game that current society has established, and will make a better employee than those that aren't willing"
You know your class better than I do, but the main guy I learned project-based learning from, Chris Lehmann, differentiates between a project, which is open-ended and no one knows where it will lead, but starts with the student creating it, and a recipe, where you know the result. He talks about these things in his TEDx talks http://joshuaspodek.com/inspiration-in-education. I hope I'm not asking too directly, but are you assigning projects or recipes?
the biology courses were all sit down and listen to a lecture and write a test.
the art courses were very hands on and I had to initiate what I wanted to do within the confines of the assignment. And most importantly there was critique.
I think what makes a project a project is the ability for it to be critiqued by your peers and the instructor. It’s also much more engaging than sitting down and being quiet and watching an instructor say words for an hour or so.
I graduated with both degrees, but remember wishing more of my biology classmates had the experience of being in classes where there was the element of critique.
how do you grade? If my professor was grading based on picking a random PR/commit and asking me to talk through the problem and changes, I don't think i could pull off cheating
You raise an interesting question about the Kenyans' work, whether it is cheating. I normally wouldn't ask people what they intend to do with work they've commissioned from me, unless I suspect they intend to do harm with it, but that still leaves a lot of grey area.
If someone asks me to write a 10 page paper on the causes of the civil war... I'd suspect that it was for cheating. Then again, what if someone asked me to write, say, a sample python notebook showing how to run a k-means clustering on some data and do a color coded scatter plot of the various points and groups. I dunno, there's a chance it's an assignment, there's a chance they were told to do it for their job, there's a chance they just need some tech work done. In this case, I'd certainly feel fine doing the work without sticking my nose into what it's for.
Yeah, how much of an ethical obligation do you have to act on your suspicions? It's an interesting question... Anyway, whatever the case case, this is more of an abstract interest to me, we could probably find something to debate here, but in terms of how I feel about it, nah, this is hardly like some Death Star schematic, my feelings of judgyness toward the Kenyans are pretty close to zero here.
One of the main benefits of being educated and one of the defining qualities to being considered educated is the ability to think in the abstract. What you suggest in your first paragraph is apt for vocational training.
There are plenty of reasons why people cheat, but I'd say one big motivation is when grades and test scores decide who wins and loses in a zero sum game.
Medical school is a good example - there are a fixed number of med school slots, and slots at the top schools are more valuable. Law is similar, but more skewed, it's easier to get into a low ranked accredited law school than an accredited med school, but you do still generally need to attend an ABA accredited school, and spots at top schools are far more likely to lead to high paying jobs. Another interesting factor is that attrition rates at top law and med schools are typically below 0.5% (not a typo - yes, that's one half of one percent). As a result, just getting in is critical. No, you can't succeed in med school if your grades and test scores are an artifice and you have no understanding, but I think the whole thing is set up for low attrition rates, so a B student who cheats and ends up A grades will be fine at an elite med school. I think this is also why high achieving students are (no cite, this is what I've read) no less likely to cheat than low students. You might think, why would someone with a 3.7 in pre-med cheat? it's because things are wildly competitive, and the selectivity is actually higher than what is needed to establish basic competence, people are essentially outcompeting each other for limited spots in a cartel.
Interestingly, programmer jobs generally is less like this. If I learn to program, that doesn't mean someone else doesn't get to, if I get a degree in CS, that doesn't mean one of a finite number of spots can no longer go to someone else. I suppose we do all compete with each other as workers in some sense, and top schools do give an advantage, but we don't place a hard cap on the number of CS grads or programmers who can be employed, there's no formal accrediting body that can act as gatekeeper, and there's no credential with high barriers to entry but a vanishingly low attrition rate once you get through. If you cheat on your data structures and algorithms test, google is still going to make you find all matching subtrees in a binary tree at a whiteboard in your interview (I have this sneaking suspicion that the whiteboard exam at google may be an unnecessary exam, and that people who fall a bit short of this would probably be absolutely fine once at the company, so it may be more of a med-school style situation, even if there's no government-backed gatekeeper). If you go the startup route, well then, nobody's going to care one way or the other if you got an A in data structures instead of a B or even a C+ (they might note the degree, I suppose, but even that would be secondary).
If the value of an education is what you've learned, rather than the measurement of learning, then cheating will be far less prevalent. If the measurement is more important, then yeah, there's a huge incentive. And let's face it, platitudes like "you're only cheating yourself" are silly when turning a B into an A means you get a coveted spot on a track to earning $375k on a 40 hour workweek as a dermatologist. People often cheat because it often does work, and often does pay.
Then, of course, there's the extremely insidious situation where some degree of cheating is so common and tolerated that not cheating places you at a severe disadvantage. I read that students at one university rioted when they discovered they were going to e prevented from cheating on an exam. This seems bizarre and appalling (and it is, appalling, in a general sense), but it makes more sense when you realize that a culture that broadly permits cheating, but then clamps down at a subset of test sites, has in fact placed the non-cheating students at an insurmountable disadvantage. I think this may also be the case for some highly competitive sports - I have nothing to do with cycling, but much of what I read during the Lance Armstrong scandal suggested that people who refuse to cheat have essentially conceded and chosen not to be elite pro cyclists. In many ways, to me, what was so damaging about the story (re Armstrong) wasn't the cheating per se (though that's bad), it's how viciously he went after people who reported or questioned his cheating.
People from US/UK also outsource their day jobs too. I used to know a guy who bought a flat doing this in India and also got invited to his client's wedding. :-)
It can be easy to spot this kind of thing. I recall a student paper that was very well written, although almost every paragraph contained a sentence or two of terribly garbled English. This was a foreign student with weak English skills, so it was pretty clear that the majority of the paper had been written or at least edited by someone else who was a skilled writer.
This was not a case of copying something from a source, because I avoid asking the same question twice, or asking a question for which a websearch can turn up anything useful.
It's not as easy as you think. I am from Kenya and we speak and write good English. with the aid of Grammarly premium, all grammatical mistakes are easily spotted and corrected.
Hold a three question interview with the claimed author. Ensure that only two questions are based on the paper's claims, eg, So, Professor Newton, is rate of fall linearly or exponentially related to mass?
Depends on what mass you’re talking about. Double the mass of a bowling ball and you won’t notice anything different. Double the mass of the earth, on the other hand, and objects are going to accelerate toward it much more quickly!
That's the joke/trick, it's basically begging the question. You can out a cheater by asking a question of the form:
Which is true, (A and A->B) or (A and A->C)?
A cheater will fret over whether B or C is true, while someone who did the work will probably immediately identify that A is false and that the question is misleadingly worded.
g is not a constant. It’s the measured acceleration at sea level on earth. Travel into orbit or to another planet and g will be different. The proper equation is:
F = GmM/r^2
Where m and M are the masses of the object and earth respectively, G is Newton’s universal gravitational constant, and r is the distance between the centre of masses of the object and earth. So why is there no mass in your little g? Because the force is directly proportional to the mass of the object (holding earth’s mass constant and the distance from it constant).
You don't just go away and write a PhD dissertation in isolation, it grows slowly over three or more years with intimate private discussion with your advisor, and intermediate peer-reviewed publications that you have to present and defend in-person.
I can't understand how you could conceivably out-source that to someone else?
I imagine for something like a diploma mill (or not too far removed), where a dissertation may be required to get the degree but there is little genuine advising or research taking place.
I heard a story from an outraged faculty member at a legitimate university concerning the PhD process in the school of education at said university (not EdD, but PhD). Apparently, none or almost none of the education faculty had themselves received a PhD (most had M.S.Ed), yet they were awarding large numbers of PhDs to students each year. Furthermore, the students were apparently doing "group dissertations", which I'm still not sure of how to interpret (I trust the person who told me of this, and I don't think it was hearsay). The point of this anecdote is to suggest that even at good universities, there may be situations where students are able to get away with doing less than would typically be expected of a good PhD program.
There are advisers at universities here in Poland who are basically happy for you to write your PhD on your own (with zero supervision), as long as it meets the required quality standard (which can be rather low). This way, he fills his quota of mentees without devoting work to it.
I can say from firsthand experience (albeit a data set of 1) that is happens in the US at the Ph.D level program in a rather well known school with a sculpture of the founder whose shoe is as frequently rubbed for good luck as it is defiled by drunken frat boys.
Same as how middle managers can explain work product to their superiors -- they didn't personally create it, but they have grown familiar over time as an intermediary.
I still don't get how that would work. When your advisor asks you in person how you think some technique that they've only just explained to you applies to your work, what do you do? Text your Kenyan ghost-writer under the table?
I've never done an oral defense, but surely there is a difference between someone expected to be an intermediary to higher ups who know nothing, and an oral defense where subject matter experts attempt to stump you with tricky questions
The client could be perfectly capable of doing an oral defence, and to have done all the research that is described in the thesis, just not that great at putting it down in a formal way.
There are some really bad PhD programs out there. It could be they were outsourcing only the writing of the dissertation itself, dumping a bunch of papers and expecting the ghost writer to turn it into a coherent story.
There's plenty of people who can understand specialized subject matter in great detail, well enough to edit a dissertation, but can't write very well in the first place. Ethical or not these people probably benefit greatly from outsourcing the initial draft of most of their writing.
Imagine if cheating rates for each university were somehow measured and published independently so that a cheat rank was as well known as the usual rankings. Then, to avoid a poor ranking, universities would have to pay their staff to actually assess their students instead of taking the shortcuts they are.
Universities don't touch international students because they are cash cows. The local students though will be penalized and expelled for random matches to make the 'zero tolerance' policy look good.
Actually assessing students could mean, you know, testing them orally instead of handing them assignments. Or at least letting them have a written exam in front of you.
This is true. The best scheme is the formal written exam, because oral exams can have issues with bias.
Assignments can be useful for learning, as a way to keep students on-track. In my undergraduate days, assignments were optional, and scores on them were ignored if the exam had a higher score. That struck me as a good approach, but nowadays I think it would lead professors to create easy final exams, to avoid the low scores that lead to student complaints and problems at tenure time.
Why is there poverty and lack of opportunities if there are lots of highly educated folks? I always believed education is the key to prosperity of a nation.
Unfortunately that is one of big myths that has kept a lot of Africa from developing. Western nations have focused too much on education. But what you end up with are highly educated people who simply move out of the country at first opportunity.
Capital and quality government is the key to development. Things like registering a business, getting permits e.g. cannot be too difficult.
Rich countries tend to be rich in large part due to capital. Capital existing in the form of extensive road and rail road networks. Quality harbors for ships. Power stations and power grids. All these things are very capital intensive and poor countries tend to have big problems with this.
Hard to run a business efficiently when you get power only parts of the day if at all, and there are no road connecting you to customers or markets.
The west has focused on improving education and health care and so that has perhaps been quite ahead of the standard of the infrastructure.
There's poverty because there isn't enough income, and there's lack of opportunity because there isn't enough capital? Education isn't magic and cannot substitute for a lack of money, and it only flourishes in a peaceful society with strong civic institutions.
Kenya was hit fairly hard by British colonialism, then (as so often) was a one-party state under a strongman for a long time, and is now dealing with a small Islamist insurgency. It's in the middle rank of African countries; it doesn't have the resource wealth of Nigeria, Angola or South Africa, but it's not a violent basket case like Somalia or Eritrea.
> There's poverty because there isn't enough income, and there's lack of opportunity because there isn't enough capital? Education isn't magic and cannot substitute for a lack of money
Why does it even matter where the money is today? Why can't they just provide their services over the Internet to get the money? They are doing this already as this very post suggests and should expand to other fields, less questionable fields in particular.
> it doesn't have the resource wealth of Nigeria, Angola or South Africa
Doesn't it? I suspect almost every country (in Africa especially) has a wealth of some resource, they just don't know it's there and don't have the technology to mine it. Perhaps the smart educated folks may discover it occasionally.
> Doesn't it? I suspect almost every country (in Africa especially) has a wealth of some resource, they just don't know it's there and don't have the technology to mine it. Perhaps the smart educated folks may discover it occasionally.
The problem is quality government. I live in Norway which is big on resources too and work with people who are geologists and do surveying. Norway is insanely expensive to do mining compared to Africa in terms of labor costs, environmental protection laws etc.
However many mining companies would still pick Norway over Africa. Why? Very stable high quality government. Mining requires large investments for years. You don't want to lose those investments because of civil war, or some dictator takes power, or a populists nationalize mine without compensation.
And even if an African country gets a mine, they run the risk of it not helping the country develop much. Because:
1) A western company may extract most of the wealth. In principle that could happen in Norway too, but Norwegian government will tax these companies far more. A western company can often squeeze poor African governments to get very low tax deals. Or they simply bribe officials.
2) Government corruption. There may be a lot of wealth, but it may end up in the pockets of corrupt officials who use it to buy foreign luxury products hence it benefits the local economy very little.
My point is that developing a country is a very complex task, because they tend to have a whole cocktail of problems that reinforce each other.
Often many approaches to solving these problems make matters worse. Zero tolerance towards corruption e.g. tends to make things worse. That allows corruption charges to be used selectively to imprison political opponents.
> There may be a lot of wealth, but it may end up in the pockets of corrupt officials who use it to buy foreign luxury products
That's what came into my mind an hour ago: it probably is easy to inhibit corruption in developing countries if every developed country would ban their citizens from purchasing luxury and making huge investments abroad. E.g. if a Kenyan or a Russian citizen (let alone an official/politician) wants to buy a humble middle-class living or start a small business in the EU/US/UK/etc - that's Ok but as soon as they try to buy a luxury penthouse, a castle or otherwise invest money which exceeds their country richest city median annual wage by an order or magnitude or more - this transaction should be blocked and investigated.
That's a bit "run before you can walk"; most places are only just putting in the required beneficial owner rules in order to know that an e.g. Cayman Islands limited company isn't a front for someone on the US proscribed persons list, let alone that they're taking bribes in Kenya.
There is a tremendous paper that takes advantage of the fact that a lot of debt is public in its amount but not owners to quantify the "missing trillions". The global sums of "amount owed to me" and "amount owed by me" should sum to zero, but there's a huge gap. That's money owed (bonds) to the invisible rich.
I don't think you can solve these problems with a stick. Quite the contrary I think that is part of the problem.
The more laws and rules you enact, the more laws and rules you see people ignore and break. This just undermines totally respect for law and order.
I believe in what economist Hernando de Soto has said about laws: Laws are discovered not made.
You need to align laws with what is actually acceptable in your country at the moment. You cannot escape into a rosy Utopia where your underdeveloped country is going to somehow emulate a rich well developed democracy over night, by enacting the same laws.
How a country works, and its laws are two different things. On paper Russia is an amazing democracy. In practice not so much.
I see developing trust and confidence in the laws of the land is the most important thing you can do. For that to happen I think you simply need to legalize a lot of the crimes everybody does.
Once you get people to actually respect and follow the laws you have, you gradually start tightening those laws. You gradually try to nudge people towards better behavior.
Transparency is more important than strict laws IMHO. If e.g. a particular government official takes a $5 bribe for every application, then make it public and legal. Post a note that says you pay him or her $5 for the application.
You know that fees where originally illegal bribes?
You need infrastructure. You need petrol/oil to power the machines to build the roads so you can build the electricity to be able to build the internet connectivity that you need.
The nations are wealthy but if the profits are siphoned off by both corruption and the international companies that own the mines, then the citizens don't see any of that money trickle down to them.
In these countries the educated leave very quickly unless they're employed by any of the above.
A lot of folks in third world nations focus on academics to escape corrupt and dysfunctional governments. Also working hard at academics ensures you have a better chance of getting a job and providing for yourself somehow. There is no social support as a safety line.
The first time I heard about a concept called "unemployment insurance", I was utterly flabbergasted! I thought it was a joke!
Kenya is actually fairly rich and democratic. There is definitely opportinity there. If I had to bet by gut-feel, I'd say prosperity on the African continent will start from there.
There is always a huge and easy-to-implement potential for stagnation and regular regressions, let alone for hard and long work before actual progress happens. Look at Russia - it also is fairly rich and democratic (as compared many other countries, although hardly an example of democracy in itself) yet you can hardly observe much prosperity (but for a small selection of people) starting there. African prosperity may start in Kenya but this will probably take at least 100 years.
The nature of corruption probably matters. Corruption is quite high in China e.g. yet it still develops very quickly. Some quite rich countries like Italy are quite corrupt but still kind of manage.
I suspect the devil is in the details. Certain forms of corruption is likely more corrosive than others.
It depends on deliverables and execution. No one truly cares if someone's family took a small cut of the project expenses, if the project was executed and delivered according to spec on time.
In China, failing execution would result in head-chopping. Problem in most third-world nations is drinking down all the money and delivering little-to-nothing.
With poor governance, there can only be opportunities for corruption and theft of government resources and not for improving the lives of citizens.
In Kenya, those in government steal and invest that money in real estate, building malls and posh estates that don't help the normal citizens in any way. If those were invested in startups then the story would be different
I'm an American and I have done this many times. The money is much better than the vast majority of other freelance writing jobs, and the work is more rewarding than pumping out low effort blog spam. Better to just use craigslist, etc. to find clients in my experience though. I can typically charge as much, if not more than the paper mill sites, and no one is taking a cut.
I'll admit, only reason why I didn't sign up was because I was already swamped and sorta lazy - we're talking about like a hundred bucks for something as trite as the first assignment for CS101. Apparently the most generous clients were Chinese students with more money than drive.