I'm a procrastinator. A terrible procrastinator. I'm probably one of the best people at procrastinating that I'll ever meet...and I'll probably meet very few other people who have the problem I do because I'll wait until tomorrow to start looking.
The irony in this is that my best papers were all written at the last minute. For my sophomore English Lit class, I waited until the weekend before to write a 10 page paper on racism and Shakespeare's Tempest. My sources? The Tempest, a paragraph from the complete Cliff's Notes (the one with the notes written on the sides of the page next to the actual play), and one line from a half-page commentary on racism and great literature. For this wonderful work of writing I earned a B+.
I wrote my 10 page paper on the plausibility of a subordinate Space Corps to the Air Force (mirroring the command, logistical, and financial relationship the USMC has to the Navy) 2 hours before class started for the day. I got another B+ on that one.
For my senior thesis, the one on Daoist/Confucian and Christian influences on Chinese and European imperialism (mentioned in "Part 1: Thoughts on God") I started at midnight and finished, all 25 pages and 15 slides later, at 7am. That one earned me a solid A.
While I may put off writing until the last minute, often paying homage to the adage that "If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute", I have never, ever, EVER, plagiarized a paper. If I had I wouldn't have graduated with a 2.3.
A (former) friend of mine was the second most powerful student on campus during senior year. Our school had an intolerance policy for cheating, suspected cheating, and suspected suspected cheating that bordered on religious zeal. Virtually everything done there was individual effort; and, sadly, many students received lower grades than they could have earned because they were too afraid to ask more knowledgeable students for help. This friend of mine, on his senior thesis, plagiarized ~80% of his paper. After four years of living under the academic ethic code he chose to ignore it, and leadership chose to look the other way. He was allowed to graduate late, and that was that.
People make mistakes. People get in over their heads. People miss deadlines. People are human. People who lie about authorship, people who cheat themselves out of education and their teachers out of requested work, and people who steal credit are people I owe no respect too. I don't care why you did it- if you pay someone else to write your paper, you have no honor.
This is why I disagree with Mr. "Ed Dante", professional shadow writer.
The problem isn't in the emphasis of evaluation over education. Evaluation pushes people to educate themselves, to learn to perform under pressure, and to prepare for demand responsive situations. Education, to a degree, is subjective. Evaluating education based on pre-set criteria is objective. This is why classes have tests, papers, quizzes, exams, and finals. The more is evaluated, the more as student will be forced to learn and prepare themselves for the field they have chosen to study.
I don't think in this instance "the system" has failed anybody. I think parents have failed their children and students have failed themselves.
Before anyone rushes to the defense of the obviously poor, disadvantaged students, put yourselves in the teachers' shoes. Imagine dedicating your time, if not your life, to teaching younger generations a subject you care about. Now see if you're comfortable knowing someone else is being paid so a student can fake his or her way to a degree.
Or a nursing license.
Or a chaplaincy.
Or into pharmaceutical research.
Or into the military.
Or any other of dozens of fields this shadow author is given money to plagiarize for.
If you yourself are a teacher, or you know someone who is, ask yourself this: if this man and others like him have never worked in or with the field that cheating graduates are going into, are you comfortable not knowing whether your students are truly worth of the degree they've "earned"?
"Thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now."
