I’d offer to tutor him through the paper, but not write it. For one thing, he’ll get caught, and that is how I’d position it “I can’t write his paper for him, even if I change my style, any decent prof is going to see the difference between his previous work and this - and I’d hate for him to fail.” Tell him Lit profs in particular are harsh on suspected plagiarism to the point where some will make student do an oral defense of their paper if they suspect cheating. There have been some enlightening threads on the Dope from college professors on the topic.
There is a chance that the reason you need to write the paper is he hasn’t done the work - i.e. he hasn’t read the Fantasy that will allow him to argue the thesis over the quarter. In which case you’ll need to spoon feed him the information he writes - but I’d still try and draw it out as his ideas, even if you needed to hold him by the hand and guide him to the ideas. Him writing his ideas might come off as a passable paper.
Another reason I’d do it this way is that I work with Engineers and I was a Liberal Arts major. The point made above, that he needs to have the ability to analyze, is very true. Getting walked through the composition of one Lit paper isn’t going to teach it, but its a start.
And the final reason is that it isn’t fair to others to cheat. I graduated with honors - the only other person in my major who graduated with honors was someone I did a project with during one of my last semesters. While I wouldn’t say he cheated, his mode of operation was to insert himself into a good group and then not do any of the work - and I discovered talking to other students that this was the way he worked. It bugged me to see him pull an A in a class where he didn’t bother to do 50% of the work. (Granted he still managed to pull off the grades in courses where there weren’t group projects - but then, by having us do all the work on the big project for that course, he had 20 extra hours of study time that the other two of us didn’t have because we were researching and writing a paper.)
Hilarity N. Suze. . . an educator here, just wanted to pop in and say. . . WTF? A college term paper is not a job that can be outsourced or a ghost-written book, it’s not a product to be sold; it’s supposed to be a project and process from which learning comes about, God forbid. I don’t give a rat’s ass if your incompetent celeb or whoever you wrote for didn’t learn how to write or research, but it is my job to try to get my students some practice writing and have them go through the process. Would you be thrilled to know that every other person in (I assume) your MFA program had purchased every work they turned in to earn the degree, and then you had to go to cocktail parties where strangers expressed surprise at what terrible writers your program produces? Colleges are always being mocked about how their graduates can’t write worth a damn-- thanks for helping. You’ve contributed to the anti-intellectual “this is just school / academics/ ethics and not real life” outsourcing-careful-thought movement in the country that encourages a majority of our people to embrace being morons.
Kids, if you don’t want to have to take the horrible terrible humanities classes and be forced to come up with a coherent thought on something, enroll in Typing and Accounting Institute or Pure-Studio-Art-School or get your welding certificate or whatever the particular credentials is that you need for said job: if you enter a LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE or University, for God’s sake cowboy up and deal with it!
Hmm… Good favor with the boss, extra cash in my pocket, for writing a paper for another person on a subject that they not only do not care about(and hence, will not remember or take any meaningful lessons from), but isn’t even related in any way to their major.
I find myself feeling all :dubious: over this for an entirely different reason than the other outraged posters.
I’m talking about “honor among thieves.”
If you’re accepting money to provide work that you know will be plagiarized by others – with your foreknowledge and acquiescence – the least you can do is stay BOUGHT.
You’re coming off like Captain Renault in Casablanca:
“I’m shocked - SHOCKED! - to discover evidence of plagiarism in this class!”
“Excuse me, Hilarity… here’s your fee for those papers you ghosted.”
Hmm, well, I was in an environment where I submitted a bang-up, well-written, well-researched paper on Finnegans Wake, with about a hundred footnotes. I got an A+ and my prof liked it so well that he put his name on it and published it in a journal, and that was just par for the course. That may have had some effect on my ethics at the time.
I guess this is something that varies depending on the school and field, as I’ve heard similar horror stories before. Everywhere I’ve been, it’s pretty much unthinkable to cheat, and it really would get you kicked out pretty much instantly if someone had proof that you cheated, so I guess I’m fairly naive about how widespread academic dishonesty really is in postgraduate settings.
If you’d come across one of your papers in a class you taught, would you have turned yourself in for writing the paper? If not, how would you tell the administration that you knew the kid cheated without implicating yourself? I’m not really getting how that would work.
Actually, I agree. I learned a lot of stuff writing those papers, and the people who had paid to learn that stuff, did not. I thought it was kind of a stupid thing to do. But some of us had Selectrics to pay off.
My ghostwriting was for a best-selling author who, if a celebrity, is a celebrity because of the books (but not really a celebrity).
Not an MFA, and everybody else I knew of in the program did their own work. And a lot of them also did other people’s work, the same way I did.
Let’s face it, those assignments I got from the athletic department? They were for football players. I can just see one of them at a job interview, years later. “Oh, you were a right tackle for the University of Oklahoma? So, how are your writing skills?” Come on, lots of those guys couldn’t even talk. They are going to out-earn me every step of the way, because nobody really cares about excellent spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. And that’s all I’ve got.
I don’t think its too hard to understand. Dopers tend to be a smart bunch…as a smart bunch we’ve probably been on the “intended casualty” side of cheating - the curve bumped up a bit because of a ringer paper. This distrust a prof gains overtime affecting you - even though you are putting in the work. Or just the unfairness of spending three Saturdays in the library while someone else buys their grade. I don’t think its goodness as much as its the resentment of past unfairness.
It’s not all goodness. With the experiments I’m working on right now, it’s hard enough to get good, reliable data without adding the extra consideration that someone is faking it. Research scandals are huge problems, because everyone depends on everyone else’s data for their experiments. If you make shit up, you’re screwing up the work of possibly hundreds of people who are doing things based on your research. Thus, in every science class I’ve taken from college through grad school, cheating was harshly penalized and the profs drove this point home over and over again. We had mandatory ethics training, we read case studies that outlined gray areas, and it was something everyone took seriously. It wasn’t a matter of “you need to be good” so much as “you’re screwing up the entire system if you do this, and we don’t even want to have people who do it anywhere near the program.” YMMV, of course.
It’s true - all types of people post here : self - righteous finger pointers among the types. Bet most don’t smoke weed since it’s illegal, no one drives above the speed limit - ever, and no one jaywalks either.
Some people would live check to check forever if they waited for the time to take classes. Perhaps it’s easier for some than others to work it out.
Coaching, while something he loved, also paid some bills. The classes were to help make his earning power a little greater. He’s finished now.
Wife, kid and mortgage are inspirational to some. He didn’t see the value of a graduate degree before having a family. I’m glad he made the effort. They’re doing very well today.
edit: I read the opinions of the group before I posted the original story so I knew that my post might provoke a response. It may have been wiser to chime in in agreement with the majority or skipped posting altogether and I can understand disagreement with my position, but don’t really understand the rudeness in tone of the “all types” comment.
I think it also depends on how you view cheating itself. jali seems to view it more like jaywalking, where I view it more on the level of stealing. Most people agree that stealing is wrong, except in dire circumstances, while few people feel that way about jaywalking. I’m working within a system that is utterly reliant upon the vast majority of the people in the industry exhibiting a high level of academic honesty; without it, the entire system breaks down. If cheating is allowed in undergrad programs, cheaters get higher grades, selecting for them in grad programs and increasing the pressure on non-cheaters. If the industry is then populated with people who cheat, the entire system of academic biomedical research breaks down. Academic integrity is vital for peer review, disclosure of conflicts of interest, not exposing the public to potentially useless or harmful therapies, providing the stepping stones for further research, and for grant application and review. Therefore, in my mind, it is absolutely vital that cultures of cheating be discouraged, even at low levels of education. Someone who views academics more as a piece of paper than a series of building blocks, the highest levels of which are reliant upon the integrity of the participants, is going to have a very different view.
I didn’t mean (completely) to be rude, either, but I wanted to opine that from the wicked Nosferatu side of the equation (the people assigning the papers) that. . . well, just that there’s a point to all of it. If one class paper is pointless and something that be farmed out, why don’t we just sell degrees and not bother making people take courses? The idea on this end is that school is an experience during which something happens, rather than a degree one purchases (Or why didn’t your coach friend simply get one of those degrees for real life experience that I get offers for in my spam folder?) And if the university system as a whole has decided that lib arts classes are something that engineering students should experience, might there not be a reason for that? If this makes me a jackbooted thug that will never touch the foul weeeed (interesting extension of the argument there), then, well, whatever, I’ll cop to it as long as you admit that you’re anti-intellectual.