Are you going to be listed as a co-writer? The point of assigning written assignments is to evaluate a number of things, not the least of which is the student’s ability to effectively communicate ideas in a reasonable approximation to English (assuming this isn’t an English class, in which case that’s the bulk of it).
We aren’t merely training people singularly in one type of class, and sending them off to another without any expectation that knowledge will be transferred from one to other. That is to say that yes, it might be a maths class, but that doesn’t mean that a student is free to forgo the knowledge picked up elsewhere, or have someone do that part of them because it isn’t what’s taught in a maths class.
Depending on the level of the class and its size, many professors and instructors become reasonably good at differentiating various students’ writing styles. If I get one turned in that substantially different from something else they’ve written, I’m going to think either this person has made a tremendous leap forward, or cheated. If I found out and could verify that someone had actually rewritten their work (as in a complete edit), I’d fail them and make a note in their permanent record.
It’s generally expected that students will solicit some help. Some help doesn’t translate into a complete revision of the work and a rewriting of it so as to make the assignment appear substantially better than what the student is capable of on his own. Going through something and showing its weaknesses is one thing. Actually rewriting those weaknesses for the student is another.
Apparently whether it’s acceptable or not depends on the country.
In Spain I know there’s tutors who specialize in teaching people how to write reports: they won’t redo it for you, but they’ll go over it with you and tell you what do you need to redo and why. Of course, this means you can’t try to hire them 12 hours before the report is due.
In the US I can imagine people would totally freak out.
In Scotland I’ve seen ads for “reports typed, we fix spelling and grammar” on the same corkboards were they had ads for tutoring or students clubs: some were directly beside or across the hall from a classroom’s door.
I think it depends a lot on what is supposed to be part of the grade. Also, for someone who’s dyslexic it’s more ethical than for someone who’s got a bad case of cba.
I know that if I was teaching and one of my students suddenly went from “can’t spell for shite, subjects never mathches the verb, doesn’t know the passive voice from Adam” I’d use an oral evaluation to figure out how much was a typing service, how much a writing tutor and how much ghostwriting. The first one, I don’t like much; the second one is great; the third one… oh boy you’re SO fried.
I don’t see a problem with that. As others have noted, that falls within the range of things a writing tutor would legitimately do.
From your OP, it wasn’t clear exactly what you were proposing to do. It sounded like you might be taking a student’s research, notes, and rough draft and producing a final paper for them.
Are you saying the student would have a paper with all the corrections added, and all they would have to do is type in your suggestions?
IANA Professor, but if I was I would consider this way on the wrong side of the line.
The key difference is whether you’re just pointing out problems (fine and dandy) or supplying the solutions (not cool at all).
As an example, commenting “These two clauses aren’t parallel” is fine, because the student still needs to figure out for themself how to fix it, which means they have to understand what the problem is.
But commenting “This sentence is incorrect, change it to <new sentence>” is not academically cool, because the student has probably not learned anything.
Finally, on the third hand, doing the first (just pointing out the problem), then going over some examples of incorrect and correct parallel clauses in other sentences (not from the report) is in fact teaching (tutoring) and is fine.
When I had just graduated from university, I had a jobless summer and did some odd jobs. For one of them, a computer science graduate student asked me to revise his PhD thesis for him. I know nothing about computer science, so obviously I didn’t add content, but I did revise exactly as the OP says, for “grammar, spelling and style”. (To be clear about what I mean with “style”, the grad student tended to phrase all his sentences in the same way, e.g. “The way to do X is Y.” So I tried to write in suggestions as to how he could change the wording around and make it more interesting to read.)
I was paid for my trouble, but I don’t know if I got acknowledgments of any kind. I had no idea this could be unethical to do. I thought it was ok because in the end the thesis is judged for the original research it contains. Since it wasn’t for a writing class, I hope what I did was ok. (Not that I’m going to get in trouble, just trying to soothe my conscience.)
In fairness, this isn’t really your problem. It’s the student’s job to know what’s permissible at his institution. I know some departments have fairly lax oversight: for instance, I had a colleague at a fairly well known institution in the Northeast US who was shocked that the statistical analysis on a fellow student’s dissertation was “outsourced” to a consultant. She could explain the variables, what was being measured, etc. but had no interaction with the data. He thought this was sketchy, but it was approved by her ad hoc committee.
I believe things are quite different for graduate dissertations. For one thing, it’s much harder for someone to overstep the boundaries, because the knowledge is so incredibly specialized. Unlike an undergraduate paper when the question, which has usually been asked and answered a thousand times before, is just a pretense to make the student construct and argument and present it clearly, for a doctorate it really is all about the research.
For another thing, with hundreds of pages that have been worked on for years it’s impossible for one person to catch all the mistakes. It’s only natural that something that will be read by several people and housed permanently in the university will be read by an outside proofreader.
The person should have acknowledged you, though. I have proofread a few scientific articles written by ESL speakers, and they’ve always put me in the footnotes. Not for reasons of academic honesty so much as it’s nice to thank people, whether they were paid or not.