April 6, 2009
The Internet: Making It Easier to Cheat?
Yesterday, I received an email in which a business owner heaped some praise on me – telling me I was talented, experienced, and educated (okay, I’ll agree with that) – then asked me to send her my resume, writing samples, and references. I was being considered for a writer’s position (a position for which I never applied), helping students write and edit their school papers. Not only was I under consideration, but I could make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t the first time it has happened. Students have personally asked me to help them cheat. The cherry on the sundae occurred when I was asked to write a student’s PhD dissertation. A dissertation! Thanks, but I’ll write my own dissertation for my own credit and toward my own doctorate.
My immediate question is: Why would I help students cheat? To give students the grades that I worked my butt off for while working on my B.A., my M.A., and now my MPW? Yeah, that’s going to happen. The problem is: There are writers out there who will help students cheat. I’m trying to figure out the reasoning from both sides.
Students, Cheating, and the Internet
I don’t understand, as a current and former student, why students feel the need to cheat. If you’re not interested in school, why are you there? We had a discussion in one of my classes a few weeks ago, and a fellow student mentioned that CNN ran a story some time ago discussing the very problem. Students apparently claimed that they had so much pressure to do well, and they just didn’t have the time. They had to get the good grades. Boo hoo. As an undergraduate, I took 18 credits a semester, worked part-time, and had an internship. I graduated half a point from summa cum laude while on a full scholarship.
I know moms with full-time jobs who are holding down a full load of courses, all doing well and getting good grades without cheating. I know students who juggle both full-time jobs and school and don’t cheat.
Such excuses don’t cut it.
But, the topic of the blog post is: Does the internet make it easier to cheat? Having earned my B.A. in 1996, I left college when the internet was just starting to gain popularity. I’m sure students cheated back then, but was it as easy to find someone – a paper mill, for example – to write papers for them? Do paper mills and desperate writers, advertising their services on the internet, make it easier for students to cheat?
It’s not only the paper mills and writers that advertise their services. Go to a freelance site like Elance.com, and you’ll find plenty of job postings from students – from high school to doctoral – asking for bids from members to write their school papers.
From the writers’ point of view, I’ve read commentary from writers who claim that they are doing nothing wrong in writing papers for students: They are simply making money. I think the ethics behind that is a conversation for another time, but it is something interesting to think about.
Ultimately, my question is, as a consumer, would I really want to go to a doctor who cheated his way to and maybe even through medical school? How about a lawyer? Or, an accountant? A teacher?
Unscrupulous Moneymakers
It’s not only students who are willing to cheat and writers who are willing to help them. (Do a Google search and you’ll find countless paper mills out there, ready to assist their “clients” in getting better grades. Ironically enough, there have been writers who have accused such paper mills of failing to pay them for the work that they’ve done.)
There are plenty of people cheating on the internet every day. One of the newest and most prevalent problems is so-called “entrepreneurs” who take authors’ text – whether articles, blog posts, ebooks, books, or other content – and rewrite it to make it their own then sell it to make money.
Some of these so-called entrepreneurs won’t even bother rewriting the content at all, simply changing the byline to their own name, which is an outright violation of copyright law.
Still, there are other so-called entrepreneurs who create information products, without checking to ensure the information they are selling is correct, all with the goal of making a quick buck.
Does the internet make it easier to cheat?
From the experiences I’ve had as a freelancer and just from reading writing and other forums, I truly do believe that the internet makes cheating easier and maybe even more acceptable. Those who steal writers’ content, for example, may never have to face the consequences of what they’ve done: After all, the internet is vast and it’s hard to keep track of the copyright violations, although programs like Copyscape help. Students, who can have their papers customized by paper mills, may also never get caught, unless the paper mill writer plagiarizes. (That doesn’t mean that some day when that student is on the job that he or she won’t be caught not knowing what he or she is doing or knows.)
If the internet does, in fact, make it easier to cheat, what can be done to stop the problem? Or, is cheating simply a consquence of such a fast and convenient technology?
