However, this article claims that a Manchester University study shows that half of students are willing to cheat - primarily through plagiarism and buying essays from the internet. Supposedly the paid-for essay sector is worth £200 million.
I think I'm pretty good at catching cheats, because I'm good at spotting language that doesn't come naturally to, say, a first-year undergraduate. There's been a rash of plagiarism this year - one student's essay claimed that she was an expert at 'intersectional theory', which is a) not relevant to the subject and b) news to me. Then again, I obviously don't know what I've missed when marking.
The problem is that students are paying a lot of money to get a qualification. In a consumer capitalist situation, the educational values are forgotten in pursuit of a certificate. The goal isn't learning, it's winning, and too many students are willing to use any means necessary.
The Manchester study questioned 90 second and third year students at three universities. It found they would be prepared to pay more than £300 for essays gaining a first class mark, £217 for a 2:1 and £164 for a 2:2 piece of work. Longer dissertations can cost up to £2,500. Some offer a cash back guarantee if the student is not awarded a certain degree classification.
"What is quite striking is that it appears that students did not see this form of behaviour as unethical," said Mr Rigby. "There was very little stigma attached to it. One student told me how he was working in the library next to someone who openly got out his credit card and paid for an essay off the internet.
"One could argue that in the modern university, the student is treated as, and increasingly identifies as, a consumer demanding 'value for money'. Perhaps subcontracting some of the work is seen as just an other rational choice by many informed consumers on campus."
Let's be clear: university work isn't the Kobayashi Maru test - it's possible to succeed, but the grade isn't the important bit, it's the intellectual growth. If you cheat, you cheat yourself and your colleagues. Have I ever cheated? No - I felt bad enough when an unseen poetry criticism essay was on a poem I'd read before. Also, my undergraduate education was much more personalised. We hand-wrote essays and gave them to a tutor whom we saw in very small groups, and discussed the face-to-face. I guess the analogy is with shoplifting or tax evasion: you wouldn't con a little old lady but you might not feel so bad ripping off a massive multinational. I wouldn't have tried to deceive the teachers I knew well and respected, but The Hegemon can feel like an impersonal machine. (That's not an excuse, by the way, it's an institutional failure).
Still, when I get sacked, I can make a living writing essays for you.
4 comments:
We've had this discussion before, and it's a tricky one. I came to university to get a degree which would hopefully enhance my chances of getting a better job than the rubbishy one I was in.
In this respect, for me, the outcome is more important than the journey. I don't cheat, in the sense that I wouldn't pay for essays (dont have the money) and wouldnt ask a friend to write one for me, nor would I plagiarise others. But I do use shortcuts - I've used wiki, I've gone to the uni library and picked up the nearest relevant book rather than hunt for the best one available, I've fiddled with word counts.
Maybe that makes me a bad person, I dunno.
Everybody's cut corners Ewar, and wanting a better job is a perfectly respectable motivation. Your shortcuts definitely don't make you a bad person, although Wikipedia is not a very good source. I certainly don't remember flogging myself to death in pursuit of the noble ideal of Education when I was an undergrad (or postgrad, come to think of it), though I now wish I had.
I went to university, and stayed there, because I liked the idea of reading books all day. It's not worked out quite like that (I buy books all day, and do admin) but it beats working just to pay the bills.
I would love some tutors at Dark Place to stop saying that wiki is a bad place to go if half of their power point presentations are 'copy-paste'! We had laptop once on the lecture and were able to tell what the next slide will say! I'm not saying that I'm saint and probably did many wrong decisions during uni, but if I think about university career would prefer to be inspirational not copied!
I'm very disappointed that one of my colleagues has copied from Wikipedia - though it's always possible that Wikipedia's source is academic and therefore right, and your lecturer was simply also right about everything!
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