Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.
This of course, frees up time for the little darlings to do more valuable work:
The student association at Carleton University has decided that any club that is opposed to abortion has no place on campus and would have its funding as a student club cut off.
Carelton,once again demostrates the qualities of Canadian Universities as places of higher learning, thought and reasoned debate. NOT.
I actually recognize the language of the ordering student. One of my managers whose signature has PMP, MBA and all other lapel pins they attach.
Someone should convince a group of Muslims to launch a human rights complaint against the pro-life university groups claiming they are offensive to their religious sensibilities and then sit back and watch leftists heads explode.
Soldiers fight for your freedoms, university students fight to take them away. Including the freedoms of an unborn child.
many apologies… I meant pro-choice not pro-life. I guess you have a ‘preview’ button for a reason. :-p
One of the things I absolutely hated when I was at university was that I was *forced* to pay fees for the creepy left-wing student associations, as well as the creepy left-wing student paper on campus.
I knew someone who had access to the student grades database, and when we looked up the students that ran the student association and the left-wing paper, they well all *failures*. They were barely passing some courses, failing others, and some had been taking their undergraduate degrees for 7 years or more.
At this stage in my life I have a love-hate relationship with universities. There are still pockets of excellence in certain research circles, but for the most part universities have become cesspools of left-wing closed-minded thought.
They also have *far* too many students who really shouldn’t be there. The Bachelor’s degree is worth 1/5 of what it used to be worth.
Many students must be taking partial course loads these days. I had trouble finding enough time for lab assignments, eating, and sleeping, let alone joining some activist “club” while in classes.
Expert Tom 10:38 AM,
The Muslims are for abortion at this point in time.
Muslim babies don’t get aborted.
The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate thesis, every word of which was written by me. I can’t remember the name of my client, but it’s her name on my work. We collaborated for months. As with so many other topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday life.
So, of course, you can imagine my excitement when I received the good news:
“thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now”.
Congradulations!
You’ve just given birth to another Politician/Bank CEO/Union Leader.
Notice the fields in which the essays are being requested. Almost entirely the ‘soft’ touchy-feely subjects. Hell, I could probably write one.
This passage struck me:
“My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn’t get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.”
I have worked with someone like this, and now sometimes do odd jobs for, and it can be both irritating and amusing. Irritating that someone with a purportedly high education (B. Sc.) can be so incredibly incompetent, yet amusing to know that my phone will be ringing whether his business is doing great or if it’s in the crapper.
Shadow Scholar and I are kindred souls, and I think I know one of his former clients.
anybody got the phone number for the carleton student union?
never mind, here it is. now go to SDA.
http://www.cusaonline.com/contact.html
It’s OK, their hereditary government jobs await and intelligence and competence are not relevant.
Carleton … Waterloo … Ottawa.
Notice any pattern emerging here?
Ontario universities.
Hmmm. Now, it’s all starting to make sense.
Hahaha, I wrote several essays and papers for hire in college, I also worked many an old math test for the frat boys, especially on abstract math and calculus, where they got them I never asked, but danggit, it was never for money, always for beer.
I noticed in the 1980’s at our lil college in the math department that the chinese students were cheating the most, these days it’s the ELS Muslim Students. Why just last quarter was having a cold one with a Prof friend (teaches physics) who said he caught 7 Middle-Eastern men all texting during an exam. He turned them all in and took their test papers. Department Head said drop it. Why ? 7 foreign students paying out-of-state tuition, room and board, plus meal ticket was around $50,000 per quarter. We are a small college. It’s all about the money.
The client was obviously oriental.
“I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.”
Too bad he’s American, he could be the next leader of the LPC. Oh, wait…
1) There are waaaaay too many kids in university wasting their time and their parents’ and taxpayers’ money.
2) Time to bring back entrance exams.
3) All student union/student government postitions should be held only on condition of meeting minimum course load and academic standards.
The K in Carleton stands for Quality.
I undertook a lifetime dream of obtaining a University Degree’ as this was not possible when I was young. (Self pity now off)
I learned all there was to learn in two years. A male history teacher retiring at the end of my first semester threw caution to the winds and actually treated male and female students equally.
This was gratifying after watching first year male students remaining silent in any forum where the professor was female. The male professors feigned interest in toeing the PC line or were fearful of job loss. The ignoring and scorn could be felt if a feckless lad did not adhere to the politcally required programme.
My desire to obtain a University Degree, maintaining an “A” average until my term papers started to be not PC, waned. I left after two years when recognition of a lifetime in business provided far more wisdom than was possible in two more years of an Ontario University education. Cheers;
Dante’s story is not surprising to me. Our society has drastically devolved, and this is one of the many examples of how far we have gone.
Dante’s story is the story of just about any professional writer. He gets a gig, and pounds out the requisite word count and gets it done by the deadline.
This guy’s story is the career of any journalist.
Wow! He makes a pretty good living and so does the contract agency – $66,000 for him and $66,0000 for the employer. Prices for “education assistance” sure have increased. It only cost me a dinner at The Keg to get an engineering student to do a few drawings for me so I could focus on getting through organic chemistry and analytical instrumental. I suspect that cheating is and always will be a part of education from HS to PhD, only the degree, brazenness and prices have changed.
In regards to the challenges of Pro-Life clubs, where are the voices of profs and administration? Is there any evidence of leadership from them in the defense of free speech and free assembly, even for those you do not agree with? Obviously our esteemed employees in the higher education system must have had their essays on history and politics written for them. Perhaps the tenured class needs some remedial classes.
TJ @ 10:48says it well. I have two children who graduated and a sister-in-law who currently teaches at a college in Ontario, who can attest to what he says.
The left have either taken over the universities or cowed the administration into giving them and their philosophy free rein.
I’m surprised he had time to ghost write “Dreams From My Father” in between the term papers.
This sort of thing was inevitable when a hoop-jumper’s B.A. became practically manditory for anyone wanting a job even marginally above minimum wage. It is completely stupid and unbelievably cynical; think of the wasted years and the huge debt accrued by students taking degrees in high-school remedial work, at best. “Education” is truely a bubble which needs to be burst. I’ve got my issues with high school, too (some modified version of the admittedly very imperfect British “Eleven Plus” test needs to be implemented, stat.)
(I’m not speaking about the hard sciences, I don’t know the situation in those fields.)
vis-a-vis whatever, here is big-time Ivy-league lawyer Michelle Obama’s Princeton (very la-di-la school, no?) undergrad thesis. Forget the stupid “politics”/incoherent whining, and marvel at the woman’s inability to construct a workable paragraph:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8642.html
Dante’s unscrupulous under-the-table work might paint a picture of unworthy students and what they will do to avoid heavy lifting but that doesn’t excuse him.
Moving on.
If Carleton wishes to take the fascist route and make personal decisions for adults, then do one of the following: defund ALL post-secondary education, prohibit special-interest groups on campus, allow students to opt out of paying fees for services they do not want or list each member of the student union and what they have wasted money on and place it on a huge board for the student body to read.
i scratched various theorems( 100 at least) onto my slide rule….then referred to them during examinations…
onto my ‘slide rule’…my slide rule see….
the Concorde was built with slide rules you know..
they’re called slide rules see…
grok
That is not true. The author of the article specializes in English – that means English-related subjects. For science, math and computers you got other people who write programs/ do exercises for students.
If you go on internet you can find these kinds of “businesses” – they cost some money. If student is poor but also want to graduate he/she uses friends or people whom she/he knows. They will pay this person less then they would have paid “professionals” on the internet. Also they do not usually need an A but can settle on B or C. A pass, to put it differently.
I can assure you that this proceeder is not only popular in Carleton but also at UofT, York or Ryerson.
So no, grok, he is right and you are wrong.
set you free
No, this is happening elsewhere too. This proceder is popular in US universities and in Chinese universities and in Middle East and in Europe. In Chinese universities people use not only on-line help but also tech stuff to pass exams. In Iran and in Middle East, students do not use tech stuff but use “who-you are/who you know” methods otherwise know as “wasta” in arabic. In my view Canadian Universities are “behind” others. And students who cheat here belong mainly to a group of rich people and well to do non-western people (ESL students).
Osumashi Kinyobe
Not really. He probably could not get a career he thought he will get. Others, less educated but with backing from friends or more luck or something got job he should have got. So he does what he is good at. It does not excuse him but the problem is not he, but the students’ culture and some fault should be also laid on the teachers.
I suspect ella is right. All the more reason to keep foreigners and stupid domestic people out of the Academy. Foreign Medical degrees have already become a joke.
Ella, I do not dispute that a niche was there for him to exploit. One could argue who is worse- the provider of the illicit or he who wants it- all day. I will say that though he fills an illicit need, that doesn’t excuse it. I’ve said it before, however.
Black Mamba, my mother was a Commonwealth-educated nurse whose training and experience was deemed inadequate by thoughtless Canadian nurses who couldn’t properly swaddle or feed a newborn. She had to correct the nurses when my younger siblings were born. I’m not saying there aren’t any quacks out there, just that sometimes some of the quacks are Canadian.
Osumashi Kinyobe, I absolutely don’t doubt it. I’m referring to the degree mills they have going in India and the Caribbean etc. – as far as I know those are of fairly recent vintage. I believe the Humanities departments of most Universities in the western world are basically just degree mills at this point too.
I know several profs in Halifax who complain that many foreign students – Saudis make up a lot of them – come in with the attitude that, daddy having paid the tuition, they’ve bought a degree (why they want the apparently worthless things I couldn’t tell you).
I see, Black Mamba.
I’ve seen that attitude, as well. Daddy is some big-shot and that entitles them to everything. It entitles them to stick it, actually.
Ella:
What does “proceder” mean?
KevinB
I am extremely sorry. I made mistake. It should be a “business”