The man who writes your papers

Sulkdodds

Sulkdodds

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Ever seen those sites that offer custom essays for a price? One such writer tells his tale.

Ed Dante said:
've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that.
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http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

Now I'm sure none of you upstanding gents have ever used such a service. But would you? And would you consider doing this man's job?
 
Would I use such a service? Hell no.

Would I do that for a job? Hell yes. I bet you could learn tons of awesome shit doing that.
 
That was probably one of the more interesting things I've read all year.
 
Read about half of it so far. Very fascinating. Makes me proud to never have cheated on my papers. I could never do his job though. I like writing for pleasure so the mandatory stuff is tiresome, this sounds like a very special type of hell.
 
Excellent article.

The whole time I was thinking "I'd love to see a movie about this guy"
 
Cheating on papers that you do at home? That's for pussies. I cheated on exams with the teacher literally just a meter away from me.
 
(1) I don't cheat.
(2) I doubt he could write an engineering paper.

And people that cheat during exams piss me off. If you cheat on an exam and I saw you, I would report you. In fact, I actually did report an incident last year where this guy and girl were clearly passing each other notes during their exam while I stood there and watched them do it. (Oddly, he is still here this year.)

It wouldn't be this way if not for an incident where I was a grader/exam proctor for a class of lousy cheating little brats, four years ago. I was told to watch for cheating, but not given clear indications of what I was supposed to look for, so I assumed I was only supposed to look for them bringing in external notes. So I missed everything. The year afterwards, I found out they were passing notes to each other. And occasionally after that, I would start to hear people gloat about it. Pissed me off to no end. Now, no more mercy. If you cheat like that, screw you.
 
dfc05 said:
(1) I don't cheat.
(2) I doubt he could write an engineering paper.

And people that cheat during exams piss me off. If you cheat on an exam and I saw you, I would report you. In fact, I actually did report an incident last year where this guy and girl were clearly passing each other notes during their exam while I stood there and watched them do it. (Oddly, he is still here this year.)

It wouldn't be this way if not for an incident where I was a grader/exam proctor for a class of lousy cheating little brats, four years ago. I was told to watch for cheating, but not given clear indications of what I was supposed to look for, so I assumed I was only supposed to look for them bringing in external notes. So I missed everything. The year afterwards, I found out they were passing notes to each other. And occasionally after that, I would start to hear people gloat about it. Pissed me off to no end. Now, no more mercy. If you cheat like that, screw you.
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Completely agreed. The last thing I want is some person who cheats on exams to be my doctor or the engineer who designs my car.
 
dfc05 said:
so I assumed I was only supposed to look for them bringing in external notes. So I missed everything. The year afterwards, I found out they were passing notes to each other. And occasionally after that, I would start to hear people gloat about it. Pissed me off to no end. Now, no more mercy. If you cheat like that, screw you.
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So basically, you hate cheaters because you were absolutely awful at catching them? That's kind of funny.
 
If I was him and if it were possible to do this without having revealed my identity or getting sued, I'd reveal the names of all the cheaters and the works they turned in.
 
And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school.
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Ha! Ain't that the truth.
 
ZT said:
So basically, you hate cheaters because you were absolutely awful at catching them? That's kind of funny.
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No, actually I tend to hate myself for not catching them, because I really should've. That is seriously one of my biggest regrets and why I'm such a prude about it now.

I hate them because (1) they had the nerve and idiocy to brag about it afterwards; (2) gave the entire department a bad reputation (the year after I graded, they got caught, and then the pissy biomedical engineers branded us all as cheaters); and (3) generally screwed up the lives of the other students in their class (after getting caught, their entire class had to retake an exam, except the second time around the prof made all the questions insanely difficult). Apparently that just wasn't enough, so the next year they did it AGAIN in another class.

I can guarantee you, I wasn't the only one who hated them.
 
During highschool, I once sold an essay I wrote to a friend for £5 (that's 500 penny-sweets!). I did nothing but change a few words, and add his name to the assignment.
Marks came back, and he scored quite a bit higher than I did.

Excellent article, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I have, thankfully, never cheated myself during education. It probably explains my terrible marks.
 
dfc05 said:
(3) generally screwed up the lives of the other students in their class (after getting caught, their entire class had to retake an exam,
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Uhm, what? That's pretty unethical.
 
Basically there were enough that had cheated that the prof couldn't be sure of all the people who hadn't, so everyone had to retake. I heard he was really angry about it, even though he was typically a really nice, chill dude. I'd had his class before and he would always say phrases like "for giggles." He was also the prof who would give us problems like "Calculate the heat transfer through the 3 layers of a turducken while it's cooking in the oven" or "You are a riot police officer spraying a water cannon at students holding trash can lids as a shield. Calculate the force on the shield." Once I brought in a bottle of tea, and before class I was looking at it thinking, "I wonder if this looks like beer. I wonder if someone could sneak beer into class in a tea bottle." I sit down and he takes just one glance at my bottle of tea and says, "Beer?" One of the few classes in my major I actually enjoyed a little.

And then those ungrateful brats just had to go screw it up the next year :p.
 
Interesting read. There's no amount of money that could get me to do his job.
 
Great read, very interesting.

I've only ever cheated if the test or whatever has been a mock test. Even then, it barely happened, maybe a couple of times through secondary school, never during college or university. If any work, be it essay or test, was going towards my final grade I did all the work by myself. I may have got help on projects, but I've gave credit and referenced everything that wasn't mine.

I don't see the point in cheating on stuff that will go towards a final grade. At the end of the day, you may get a job in that field based on that grade, and if you can't do what they want you to do it's going to be pretty embarrassing for yourself and it's not going to make your employer happy.

I don't think I could do something like this. Just wouldn't feel right.

I can't believe that business student let the guy do her entire thesis. What the hell is she going to do once she gets a job in the field? And how did her tutor not notice it wasn't her work when she can barely write English?
 
The closest thing I've done to cheating in an exam is draw one of those trigonometry triangle things (Placing Sin, Cos and Tan inside a triangle, their position and direction related to each other signifying whether it needed addition, division, multiplication etc.) so I can remember the specifics of equations that didn't end up on the test anyway.

Closest thing for an essay was using Wikipedia in high school before it was cool and hip.
 
I did a lot of programming into my TI-83+, but I had to know the material pretty well in order to program it in TI-Basic, so in the end I probably didn't need the programs.
 
Krynn72 said:
Would I do that for a job? Hell yes.
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Are you kidding? $66,000 a year for working on 20 assignments at the same time, turning out 20-40 pages a day? No thanks, I'd try becoming a pop star before I'd send myself through that sort of hell. Even if one loved writing and research, there is no way this could actually be fun, this guy must have zero free time.
 
I wonder if he actually even likes it. Maybe it was all he thought he could do since College failed him.
 
I was thinking "man, what a great job..." until I realised that it would basically mean an overnight essay crisis every damn day. We've all done all nighters to get something finished but I never want to do it more than once a week.

Vegeta897 said:
Excellent article.

The whole time I was thinking "I'd love to see a movie about this guy"
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It'd work better as a book, where you could read extracts from the papers he writes and the emails he receives. :p
 
I was sorely tempted to use one of these services in my final year of uni. Stress was getting the better of me and I simply didn't have the stamina to get my dissertation done. I went as far as checking out a few essay-selling websites and working out the potential price. It was nothing more than a flight of fancy in the end, though, due to risk, cost, and most of all the worry that they'd put my name to a shitty paper. What also crossed my mind was that it must be a hellish job which I'd never even be tempted by. In the end I submitted nothing.

As for cheating, bollocks to it. I have no problem with cheats as long as they can find a way to do it which doesn't drag other students down. School is war! If society is based on acquisitiveness and self-interest, as it is, then it follows that school, as the proving ground for society, doesn't have to be some idealised, meritocratic bastion of honest endeavour. And it isn't, with its glorified memory tests and exercises in anal regurgitation. I say all that as one of only two people in my year who graduated first class and someone who never cheated.
 
It would be nice to have the best people for the job. Cheaters dilute the market with shitheads that don't know how to do shit and make it shitty for the rest of us.
 
DEATHMASTER said:
It would be nice to have the best people for the job. Cheaters dilute the market with shitheads that don't know how to do shit and make it shitty for the rest of us.
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The same's often said about people with 'book smarts', that grades make it too simple for employers to select candidates whose academical approach doesn't necessarily make them any better at a certain job (depending on the job).

And what job are we talking about, anyway? A sneaky peep at someone else's trigonometry paper hardly makes a person dangerously underqualified for the retail, telesales and admin jobs that most of us tend to end up in. Conversely, plenty of frauds and criminally negligent people end up as qualified teachers, doctors and scientists, but I find it hard to believe that all of them or even most of them got where they were just by turning in a stolen dissertation. The difference that cheating makes is not worth the huff and puff in my book.
 
It's for things like that 75 pager that make me wonder. I mean I wouldn't be caught dead doing something like that in 6 days. **** that with a hammer. But that means I probably don't belong in that field. People who cheat on something that important should be turned in. I could care less about some less relevant class like Trig, if they have to cheat on something like that, they won't get very far with their limited knowledge.
 
PhDs who are in university to do research would rather injest shit than teach undergrads. When they see a 75 page paper they probably read 10% of it. That's how these students get away with it, and I'd say it's contributing significantly to the West's oversaturation of BAs.
 
ZT said:
Uhm, what? That's pretty unethical.
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No, something like that happened to me too.

In one of my classes, the professor decided to hand out student evaluations on the same day as the final exams (professors are supposed to leave the room while students fill out evaluations). We would fill them out, place them in a folder, and then start our final exam. I don't know if it occurred to our professor that people tend to do things they aren't supposed to do during an exam when a professor isn't present, like look things up in the textbook.

He then sent us email, stating that the department had suspicions of cheating going on and a new final had to be administered. Luckily, it was in open-book format so we could just do the final at home and email it back to him.
 
more power to him

as long as dopers want dope, a market will exist. I would do it if offered enough, but I'm not gonna go out of my way or anything. I Grammar Nazi friends' papers for free regularly... and don't even bother to use capitals on HL2.net :-]
 
He was bluffing, obviously. (Well maybe not obvious if your Speech skill is <90)
 
The "forensic evidence" thing was pretty silly. As I said before, cheaters suck -- but also, profs really shouldn't use "test banks" instead of putting in the proper effort to write their own questions? You have to be in a pretty noobish class to get generic questions like that. Also, most of my profs provide their old exams for us to use to study before the test....

For the kids who I'd graded who went on to cheat twice more -- the 3rd time they did it, their TA had posted the exam on the course website ahead of time (not publicly distributing the link, but I guess the directory was visible) and some kids got it. Somebody else found out and reported them.

Also, I know for certain that people copied previous and current students' lab reports all the time. I've had to refuse to give mine to people a couple of times (because I actually put in tons of work on mine and so typically had the highest grades and my TAs would be like "this is the best lab report I have ever read for this class" and I'd be like, "that's probably because I did actual work on mine"). The most ridiculous thing was coming in to new student orientation -- the student they had there to answer our questions told us, "Oh yeah, you should get a copy of someone's old lab report and copy it. That's the only way you can actually get through lab courses." I probably gave her a "wtf bitch" glare.


On a lighter note, regarding bimodal distributions, we had one of those in organic chemistry -- the typical distribution, and one that was lower than typical :p. My prof was actually so angry about this that he used the entire lecture period to tell us how disappointed he was that we didn't study enough.
 
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