Which is Worse?

[Valka D'Ur]

Lucy, what I did was type for students who either didn't know how to type (I started my business LONG before everybody and their pet goldfish had a computer; my first few years were done on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter), didn't have a typewriter/computer, didn't have time, or after spending weeks working on a 20-30 page paper, they were just so sick and tired of it, they didn't WANT to type the damn thing. I see nothing dishonest about that.

Some people had no idea how to write a paper. If they had a simple misunderstanding about something, I'd explain it. If they had more serious problems, I would tell them to consult their instructor, or attend one of the seminars offered in the library for students who needed to brush up on their writing skills. I sometimes recommended good reference books (ie. Harbrace College Handbook - the BEST reference book I've ever seen for using correct grammar). I offered nothing they couldn't already get from any of the free tutoring services available to them.

As for my clients having an advantage the others in their class didn't... under the circumstances, I'll take that as a backhanded compliment (even though I'm sure that's not how you intended it). The fact is, I relied heavily on word-of-mouth advertising and recommendations, and ended up with most of a whole class of nursing students as regular clients. Considering that most of them spent 4 years at the college, that was a nice bit of income for me, they got my best efforts, I learned a lot from them, and I was able to calm their jitters about some assignments. One notorious assignment tended to drive them to distraction, since it was so weird. They would phone me and tell me they had this really crazy essay they had to write, it wasn't like any of the others... I'd just ask them, "Is it the Rosemary Rizzo Parse assignment? Don't worry; I've typed over 20 of those already - they don't scare me anymore." The client's reaction was invariably one of relief, since the requirements of that assignment were ungodly exacting and picky.

There were a couple of people who said they felt funny about coming to a typist - like they were buying a grade. I told them it was up to them if they wanted me to type it or not - if they wanted me to leave any spelling mistakes in, I'd even do that - even though it would go against my professional instincts. I typed THEIR words. THEIR work, based on THEIR research. Some of the time I had NO idea what they were talking about in their assignments, since I hadn't taken any of those classes and didn't understand the subject matter.

Did I help them? Yes, a bit. After all, I didn't want a classmate of one of my clients seeing their paper, asking who typed it, and then commenting, "She didn't do a very good job, did she?" After all, I had my professional pride and a desire to get repeat business. But if they screwed up an assignment by leaving something out (like a thesis statement), I let them hang for it. And I felt not a shred of guilt for it, either.

 

[LucyDuke]

I'm speaking very specifically about where I used boldface. It's not accurate to say that you "only typed WHAT THE STUDENT WROTE" when you made corrections. I wouldn't personally feel comfortable re-presenting errors like misspellings either, so I understand why you'd do it, but it's a more significant improvement than just the cosmetic shift from handwritten to typed.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Oooo-kay... whatever. Some instructors didn't actually care about spelling, while others were quite particular about everything. One nursing instructor actually took a ruler and physically measured the margins on students' term papers. Other instructors were just happy if the thing was typed.

The thing is, I came up with a set of rules for myself that I followed, as long as those didn't conflict with the requirements set by the instructors. I had to know several different formats for doing papers (MLA, American Psychological Association, etc. plus several modified formats for each). For the "I don't care either way" situations, I have to confess - I picked the format that would stretch the paper as many pages as possible, as long as it didn't go over the maximum set by the instructor (since I charged by the page).

Some of the students asked me why I actually cared what grade they got. Well, as I said - professional pride was a big part of it. If I could get a reputation among the English students or nursing students as a typist whose work was more likely to make a good impression on the instructor, I was more than willing to do whatever it took to make that happen. Of course, if the student turned in a poorly-researched piece of crap (as a few did), there wasn't anything I could do about it - or wanted to, in all honesty. Another part of it was the "doing unto others" thing - I tried to help people the way I wished somebody had helped me when I was in their shoes. The last part was simple: One instructor would brag that he NEVER gave out As. Well, one of my clients GOT an A in that course. The student told me about it and said the difference was the attention to detail in every aspect of the paper. In any other course, the paper would have deserved an A anyway... but having gone through the frustration of losing an entire letter grade myself because of TWO misplaced punctuation marks in the bibliography of one of my Shakespeare essays, I never wanted a client to suffer a penalty because of my carelessness - or their own, if it was a simple thing to fix.

But there is NOBODY among my client list who can say that I actually wrote their papers for them.

 

[Hygro]

At my school we are encouraged to get our work edited by our peers so long as the content is ours and the actual implementation of the edits are ours as well.

The OP's work is very victimizing: as stated you are letting richer kids gain an advantage in placement over the harder working, more meritorious kids. That's pretty bad. Your friend's behavior is bad too, who the hell does that kind of thing and thinks it's okay?

 

[galdre]

Academic cheating is worse than stealing a cheap camera

 

[say1988]

I'm speaking very specifically about where I used boldface. It's not accurate to say that you "only typed WHAT THE STUDENT WROTE" when you made corrections. I wouldn't personally feel comfortable re-presenting errors like misspellings either, so I understand why you'd do it, but it's a more significant improvement than just the cosmetic shift from handwritten to typed.

Everywhere I have ever seen encourages editing. To the extend that my school provides (limited) editing services for students. The ideas, research, composition, etc are the important things. Not editing.

 

[Quackers]

At my school we are encouraged to get our work edited by our peers so long as the content is ours and the actual implementation of the edits are ours as well.

Uhmm,,what? That doesn't sound ok. Collusion between students?

 

[Zelig]

Seriously, you've been complicit in academic cheating and plagiarism (even if you're taking money for it, it's still other people passing off your words as theirs)? Totally dishonest, totally disgusting, and ethically reprehensible. Your "clients" deserve to be expelled (yes, I'm serious). So do you, if you attend the same place they do. What's the going rate on helping to victimize the students who DO THEIR OWN WORK?

Your girlfriend should turn herself in to the police. You're right; she's a thief.

Agreed with this post.

Neither of those actions are comparable to pirating music.

Uhmm,,what? That doesn't sound ok. Collusion between students?

What Hygro and say1988 are saying is normal... you need an editor/reviewer for anything of quality you're writing, be it school papers, computer code, or stuff to be published.

The service Valka was providing wasn't even to this level - you can have someone read over your stuff for syntax, but you really should have someone who knows the material as well as you (ie. intimately) read through it carefully as well.

 

[downtown]

If you don't think either of these are bad, your moral compass is screwed up.

I think facilitating cheating is worse than shoplifting, but they're both crummy things to do.

 

[Quackers]

Agreed with this post.

Neither of those actions are comparable to pirating music.



What Hygro and say1988 are saying is normal... you need an editor/reviewer for anything of quality you're writing, be it school papers, computer code, or stuff to be published.

No, what Hygro is saying is, its acceptable for another student to read your paper and offer you another thought or idea to add to your essay. Thats the end of an individual piece of work and the start of a group piece.

 

[Zelig]

No, what Hygro is saying is, its acceptable for another student to read your paper and offer you another thought or idea to add to your essay. Thats the end of an individual piece of work and the start of a group piece.

Well yeah, that's the point of an editor, otherwise they're just a glorified spell checker.

An extra thought or idea isn't really a big deal, for a typical university essay, you're going to need to look up the actual source of the idea, read through it, and cite that anyway.

 

[Quackers]

Strange use of the word "editor". I use it in the Valka sense, for spelling, grammar and flow. What your "editor" does is affect the content of the paper which turns it from an individual piece to a group piece.

Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The service Valka was providing wasn't even to this level - you can have someone read over your stuff for syntax, but you really should have someone who knows the material as well as you (ie. intimately) read through it carefully as well.

Thank you, Zelig. And there were times when I was very familiar with the material, having taken the course myself previously, or simply knowing the subject. I caught a really BAD mistake in an anthropology take-home exam, and although it would have been a relatively easy fix for me to do... it just wouldn't have been the right thing to do. So I phoned the student, told him I'd spotted a bad mistake - one that contradicted his entire thesis statement for that part of the assignment. I ended up reading his words to him over the phone several times, while he thought it over, tried to catch the mistake, and once he did, tried to figure out how to fix it. Finally he did make a decision on what to do about it. He dictated his revision to me, and that's what I typed.

So was it the right thing for me to tell the student about his error in the first place? I suppose a purist would say no - I should have just let him take the reduction in marks. However, this was a normally very smart student who wasn't given to dumb mistakes. I'm glad I was able to contact him in time to get the whole thing figured out, or I would have had to leave the error in. And that could have cost him dearly on his exam.

BTW, it's the sort of mistake that somebody who had NOT majored in anthropology wouldn't have noticed. So yes, it does help for students to give a colleague their paper and ask for a read-through, just to see if it's coherent and reasonable. Another thing I advised my clients to do was to give their paper to a friend who wasn't taking that class and have them read it. If the person could understand it reasonable well, it was probably a reasonably good paper, since the topic had been explained well enough for someone else not familiar with it to understand.

 

[Hygro]

Uhmm,,what? That doesn't sound ok. Collusion between students?

collusion! teamwork! learning to edit other people's stuff and learning how to receive edits! learning to be a better writer! collusion and cheating! what are you talking about?


edit: as Zelig said, someone giving you an idea or a restructure suggestion isn't doing your work for you, they aren't taking away from your learning. They are adding to it. You still have to learn the material, you have to make the judgment if they are right--and given the nature of colleges you should all be on the level of knowing when your editor is actually being less adept than you are. You still have to source and cite. You are still doing more edit work than they are. It's a valuable educational experience from both ends, I'm not sure why it should be discouraged?

 

[Quackers]

So a hypothetical:

You read your friends essay and you say to him, "yo dude! (this is how i imagine californiacs speak ) you are missing out a crucial point brah! it's critical to the whole essay bro!". Said friend revises his essay to include your point and instead of getting a C he gets an A.

Are you doing anything wrong?

 

[Hygro]

No, because you can't achieve a crucial, critical re-write without actually learning and diligently citing the material. Your friend might talk to you but he's not doing any of the work. (check my edit)

 

[Quackers]

I agree with you, you will have to cite and understand the point before you made it. But initially you failed to even think it was an important point, you ignored it, forgotten about it. Without outside intereference you would of not included it and been graded accordingly.

You may as well get the lecturer to write out every single theory and event which is crucial to the essay and as long as you dillegently reseach and cite it you will get the top grade everytime.

 

[nc-1701]

Wow... I'm actually surprised so many of you judged me as strongly as you did, helped me look at it from a different angle. I suppose it's a lot worse than I had managed to convince myself it was.

A few bits of additional info, my main business is straight math tutoring I help people with whatever math they want and teach them how to do it for $20 an hour, I know I've done people's take home work in this format but I never ask where it came from and I believe most of it is legitimate homework. But I don't ask where it came from I just explain step by step how to do whatever problem they come to me with. This is at least 90% of the work I get. Occasionally I get people who just want the work done for them and have no interest in learning the material and they ask me how much to do their work all for them, these are usually older people and often people in the army taking online classes, usually from private schools. I charge them around $40-$50 an hour they give me cash and logins for online classes and I take the test from a public computer.

I always justified this by saying these people probably wouldn't make it to graduate and since they were doing online classes with nothing to prevent this cheating it would be stupid for anyone to give a degree coming from such a school any credit. Which btw you shouldn't, online school is very easy to beat with cheating like this.


Thanks for the responses though, you're actually making me rethink the ethics of ever doing that. Even though it has helped me a great deal with supporting myself through school.

 

[LucyDuke]

Everywhere I have ever seen encourages editing. To the extend that my school provides (limited) editing services for students. The ideas, research, composition, etc are the important things. Not editing.

Editing is totally a good thing.

Thanks for the responses though, you're actually making me rethink the ethics of ever doing that.

 

[Zelig]

So a hypothetical:

You read your friends essay and you say to him, "yo dude! (this is how i imagine californiacs speak ) you are missing out a crucial point brah! it's critical to the whole essay bro!". Said friend revises his essay to include your point and instead of getting a C he gets an A.

Are you doing anything wrong?

If you want to avoid this, you have students write in-class essays, you don't give them the chance to do any editing.

You may as well get the lecturer to write out every single theory and event which is crucial to the essay and as long as you dillegently reseach and cite it you will get the top grade everytime.

You're giving people way too much credit if you expect that.