I was watching an episode of Leave It To Beaver, and Beaver badgered his father into getting him a typewriter. And even after Ward told Beaver he was too young and he always gave up on things too soon, like the Clarinet, (not to mention Ward threw in a ping-pong table that he got for Ward AND Wally, they no longer use), Beaver found out he couldn’t instantly type, so he wanted to quit.
Eddie comes over and wants to borrow money from Wally who tells him to (well we’ll be polite and say…" “Look elswehere for funds.” Then Wally leaves Eddie and Beaver in the room while he takes a phone call from that tease “Mary Ellen.”
Eddie sees Beaver struggling and since the needs money says he’ll type the paper for Beaver if he’ll pay him. “Isn’t that cheating?” Asks Beaver. Eddie says “No, I"m just copying what you wrote down.”
Of course in the end it comes out that Beaver didn’t type his own paper and Ward, the teacher and everyone else says "It’s cheating.’
The episode resolves with Eddie offering to type more papers from Beaver but with Beaver saying “No,” and adding he’ll learn to type on his own if it takes a million years.
So the question is, “Is typing someone else’s paper cheating?”
I made a bunch of money in high school doing this. I took typing in 9th grade and no one else did, most took it in 11th grade, so I managed to type people’s papers at $5 - $10 a pop for two years.
It’s up to the teacher. If the teacher explicitly says type it yourself, of course it’s cheating. If the student is allowed to turn in a handwritten assignment but chooses to pay to get it typed instead, that’s not cheating.
I would only consider it cheating if it was for a typing class – you know, the point of the assignment (even if it’s only part of the point) is whether or not you can type. I can see it being considered lying too, if he was asked if he typed it himself and he said yes. But that’s lying not cheating.
Reading the episode recap the way you wrote it, I don’t get why they would say he cheated. Well, at least not academically cheated. I suppose you could argue that he’s cheating himself by not doing the manual part of the work – like Tom Sawyer “cheated” on whitewashing the fence. It doesn’t sound like everyone had to type the paper?
I used to make money this way in high school too. And the hardest part was not fixing things they had wrong! Now that would have been cheating. <G>
I guess it would depend if typing the paper yourself was a part of the assignment.
Otherwise, back in the old days lots of people had others type final papers (back before word processing) simply because it took forever to do it correctly and neatly. Anyone old enough to remember using “white out”? Ever try to make changes when you were using carbon paper copies as well? Now that was a pain in the ass.
Today, with spell check and grammar check and all sort of other “checks”, it is a lot easier for the novice to bang a paper out and then go through and correct the errors. Plus, you normally don’t have to kill a forest of trees to get the final paper looking decent.
I have a confession to make. My mother did all my typing. My brother’s too. She was a trained secretary and could type very fast. I did all the work and stood by since she would have a hard time with my handwriting. I don’t remember any teacher saying it had to be typed by us. They just didn’t want to grade a bunch of papers they couldn’t read. Of course this was before we had computers in the house. I graduated high school in 85.
Of course its not cheating. I used to type papers for people, in the early days of computers and word processing. (MicroSoft "Word "for DOS, anyone while most people were learning WordPerfect?)
I used to charge $1/page for straight typing, and I actually got an extra 3 dollars to run the whole document through the spellecheck) Which I would do anyway because of my own typos.
For some reason I always seemed to be typing Economics papers and Theology. I loved the search and replace function so I wasn’t typing St. Thomas Aquinas, or St Augustine over and over.
Every once in a while I would have someone not able to pay for services. I wouldn’t release the paper without some type of deposit. Around end of term time I would end up with things like a Walkman, small boomboxes, alcohol, as payment. Sometimes they would be reclaimed and sometimes not.
I want to expand on this point. Depending on the grade level, the process of producing a paper may be just as much of the point of the paper as the writing itself. According to the Virginia Department of Education (warning: PDF), students should be able to “Produce documents demonstrating the ability to edit, reformat, and integrate various software tools.” beginning around third grade and “Independently use technology tools to create and communicate for individual and/or collaborative projects.” starting around sixth grade. I’m sure other states have similar standards as Virginia. A teacher may assign a paper all about a major organ (I had to write about the liver in third grade) and also be looking to see if the student is about to produce a type written document as well. The assignment explanation might just state that the paper has to be typed, but the teacher may be using the paper as an assessment of typing skills as well. If that were the case, and I doubt it was in Beaver’s situation, then typing would be cheating. In any case, if a student is not going to be typing her or his paper, I would expect that she or he ask the teacher about it before hand.
Yes, I remember using “White Out”, and erasers and eraser shields too. Eraser shields were pieces of very thin metal with various sizes and shapes of holes in them. The typist placed them on the paper, erased the mistake with a special typing eraser, and then tried to realign the paper in the typewriter. My father used to check letters and such by holding them up to the light. A place that had been erased or had White Out on it would either show too much light through, or not enough, and if the letter had to be a perfect copy, he’d have his secretary do it over.
I remember getting a typewriter with a correction ribbon in it. This was Great Stuff. That ribbon would take the ink right up off the paper.
I really, really APPRECIATE computers with word processing capabilities.
This may be true today. Being able to demonstrate the use of software to complete your assignment is important. Everyone in this thread is talking about the ancient time before computers. I was lucky enough to have an IBM Selectric at home. My mother got it from the library she worked at when they got new typewriters. My older siblings had to made due with a non-electric typewriter. If I had typed my own papers it would have taken me longer to type them then it would have to write them. I have backspaced about twenty times just writing this. That would have been a lot of whiteout. If I had a computer I would have had no problem doing my own typing.
Oh, sorry. I took the present tense verb in the original question to mean we were discussing something that might happen in the present, such as typing a paper on a computer.
I still believe that my first post holds weight though. If a teacher asked a student to turn in a paper type written, the teacher my have also been assessing the students ability to produce a finished product, potentially an important life skill in the eyes of the teacher.
My kids do their first research paper in third grade. Neither one touch types. So we have a deal…they type one sentence, I type the next. They are pretty short papers, but a nine year old hunt and pecking through even a short paper is torture.
(They can type it or write neatly. My daughter isn’t the neatest writer.)
I don’t think it’s cheating, provided you’re not doing anything more than transferring handwritten stuff to MS Word and/or providing spelling/grammar corrections.
Actually writing someone’s assignment from scratch for them isn’t OK, and I think most people understand that. Taking someone’s poorly spelt, grammatically awful, and handwritten assignment and typing that out for them whilst correcting the spelling mistakes and appalling grammar is fine, IMHO, as long as you’re not doing the actual research or creatively writing anything for them.
I can only speak from my own experience. I received no training in typing before they started requiring that papers be typed (or after). The first typing class that was available was an elective which I didn’t take sometime in high school. When we were required to type a report it was not to test our skill at typing. They never taught that. It was more to make it legible for the teacher. Later in some English classes we went over things like formats and bibliographies. I learned how to follow the template without typing it. Now things are much different. My daughters are 7 and 9 and are being taught to use programs on the computer. They have already typed some assignments. The tools are different so the teaching methods are different. I didn’t have one teacher who cared who typed the paper as long as the words were your own.
The situation described in the OP doesn’t make sense to me. Surely Beaver wasn’t in high school yet, and at the time I never heard of a typing course even being offered before high school. I can’t imagine anyone would expect someone of Beaver’s age to be proficient at typing. And as mentioned above, hiring a typist was a common thing in that era.
So you have someone who clearly has not been taught to type (as evidenced by Beaver’s not having a clue how hard it would be) being castigated for not being able to type, by someone who - not being a typing teacher - really has no interest in or authority over whether or not he can type. It doesn’t add up.
I agree with Gart T. The fact that Beaver needs to badger his father to even get a typewriter says to me that a typewritten final copy isn’t required. And in that case, the teacher shouldn’t be grading him based on it being typewritten.
Back in those days, I imagine showing the Beaver flagrantly cheating in a real way would have really offended the moral sensibilities of…the same people that would have been offended by seeing married couples sleep in the same bed on such tv shows. I’d just view it as one of those contrived for TV scenarios, and clearly not genuine cheating.
I don’t think it’s cheating if the typist copies the written work word-for-word and doesn’t correct or change anything. Leave all the misspelling and gramatical errors in there.
When I am ask to type something for someone else as is, it makes me crazy to have to type it with misspellings, gramatical errors, and what I call “sloppy writting.” Bad writing is foregivable as not everyone is a good writer. Sloppy writing makes me crazy.
For some courses, correcting the spelling and grammar mistakes is OK. For other courses, part of the assignment is to use correct grammar and spelling, so then it’s not OK. I don’t think that typing up (using either typewriter or computer) someone else’s homework is cheating in any way, unless the teacher wants the student to type or handwrite his own work.
You might want to check into enrolling in a keyboarding class. I used to use the hunt and peck method until I was forced into a high school typing class and learned to touch-type. My typing isn’t perfect, but it’s much, much better now that I touch-type. When I was in high school, I believe my top speed was something like 30 wpm. Now that I type regularly, it’s much higher than that. Since you’re a regular poster on this board, you would pick up speed very quickly too. Also, the computer programs that teach typing are actually pretty good at building up speed and accuracy. You’re a police officer, right? Don’t you have to do a lot of paperwork? A keyboarding class could very well pay off for you, especially if you’re encouraged to take any sort of courses to improve your skills.