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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 21 2017, @09:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-do-your-own-work dept.

The universities watchdog is being asked to pursue websites advertising essay-writing services for students. Universities Minister Jo Johnson said he wanted "tough action" against the spread of plagiarism and the commercial industry it has spawned. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) said hundreds of "essay mills" were charging up to £6,750 for writing a PhD dissertation. Mr Johnson said it could "undermine" the reputation of degrees from the UK.

[...] There were about 17,000 cases a year of "academic offences", it said, but there was no breakdown of how many of these involved students who had used essay writing services. Essay-writing websites often carry disclaimers suggesting the essays being sold should be used only as examples and not passed off as students' own work.

[...] Dame Julia Goodfellow, president of Universities UK, said: "Universities have severe penalties for students found to be submitting work that is not their own. "Such academic misconduct is a breach of an institution's disciplinary regulations and can result in students, in serious cases, being expelled from the university." This has been a longstanding problem - and a decade ago Google announced that it would stop running adverts from essay writing services, but such businesses can still be found through online searches.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 21 2017, @11:04PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @11:04PM (#469921) Journal

    Here we go again with sloppy definitions. Copying, plagiarism, ghostwriting, and stealing are all distinctly different activities. Propaganda equating copying with stealing has caused plenty of trouble. Now they want to put out propaganda equating ghostwriting to plagiarism. However reprehensible it may be to pay someone to ghostwrite your advanced degree, I do not agree with calling it plagiarism to do so. An essential component of plagiarism is that the perpetrator had no permission from the real authors to represent their work as his or her own, and in this case, the perp paid for permission. Plagiarism is always bad. Ghostwriting may or may not be bad.

    The name calling is an attempt to further vilify the activity. What could the motive be? It's good to ask universities some hard questions about what it means to be educated. Having a PhD in a difficult scientific or engineering subject ghostwritten is just not going to work if the student doesn't know squat about the subject. The student has to defend the work in front of a committee of PhDs who do know their stuff, and they will quickly discover whether the student is a fraud trying to fool them with bull. The ghostwriting can only work if the student already knows enough about the subject to understand the ghostwriters' work.

    In a soft subject, there's a greater possibility that a bullshit artist can con the professors. Happens now and again, and it is of course very embarrassing to the discipline and the university. I'm guessing they're the ones who are backing this effort, with venomous prejudice. Must have happened several times recently.

    The line gets blurry. Where is the line between editing and ghostwriting? And, how much quoting is too much? When does that become plagiarism?

    Another problem is the "lone wolf" kind of training that universities demand of graduate students. Grad students are expected to do all the work themselves, to prove that they can. But that is unrealistic outside of school, where collaboration is king. The first thing labs do to freshly minted PhDs that they hire straight out of school is knock out that attitude of jealously guarding the secrets of the universe from thieves and plagiarists. The lab expects sharing of knowledge, knowing that the whole lab will be more productive that way. They're trying to produce research, not demonstrate that applicants are qualified and deserving of advanced degrees.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:11AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:11AM (#469992) Journal

    An essential component of plagiarism is that the perpetrator had no permission from the real authors to represent their work as his or her own, and in this case, the perp paid for permission.

    Actually, no. That's NOT how plagiarism is necessarily defined. It's true that plagiarism often is talked about as "stealing," which would imply taking something without permission. But that's not a REQUIRED component. The term is also more broadly defined as "passing off another's work as your own," and that's frequently how it's defined in university honor codes and such. So, regardless of your own definition of plagiarism, universities generally require students to submit their own "original work" and some even require signed statements to that effect. I could direct you to any number of sources about the standards for "plagiarism" that are common in academia.

    However reprehensible it may be to pay someone to ghostwrite your advanced degree

    I suspect this is a relatively rare request, for some of the reasons you mention. I suspect that most of these "essay cheat" sites are primarily writing shorter papers for miscellaneous requirements that will be less exposed to formal inquiry than a dissertation defense.

    The line gets blurry.

    Not really.

    Where is the line between editing and ghostwriting?

    Well, in the publishing world, some ghostwriters are basically editors, just with slightly more responsibility than your typical copyeditor. Other ghostwriters basically research and write most of a book themselves.

    In any case, I don't think the line is that unclear when it comes to something like a dissertation. It's supposed to be the student's work, which means it is primarily the result of their own thoughts, etc. If a hired editor is basically doing "clean-up" like an academic advisor or someone like that might also do, that seems acceptable. But the summary seems to be talking about people who write a text wholesale, which is an entirely different thing.

    And, how much quoting is too much? When does that become plagiarism?

    Quoting is distinct from plagiarism. Plagiarism, again, by definition involves passing off someone else's work AS YOUR OWN. That means no attribution, or an unclear attribution that doesn't make clear how extensive your quoting/borrowing of material is. If you put stuff in quotation marks and put your source, you are NOT plagiarizing. Of course, if you try to submit a dissertation that's just a strung-together set of long quotations, I doubt that will be acceptable most places., since your "original contribution" to research won't be demonstrated.

    Another problem is the "lone wolf" kind of training that universities demand of graduate students. Grad students are expected to do all the work themselves, to prove that they can. But that is unrealistic outside of school, where collaboration is king.

    I don't know about this -- I've seen plenty of labs where grad students collaborated with each other and/or a supervising faculty member for research and publications. In many fields and places, it's the norm. But yes, most places also do require that at some point you write up your own research summary by yourself to demonstrate that you (by yourself) actually know how and have the ability to do so. Is that really so unreasonable if you are to be awarded an advanced degree?

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by anubi on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:47AM

      by anubi (2828) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:47AM (#470014) Journal

      One of my college professors used to jokingly remark:

      Stealing from ONE source is called "plagiarism". Don't do it.

      Stealing from MANY sources is called "research". That's what we are looking for!

      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:10AM

      by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:10AM (#470038) Homepage Journal

      AthanasiusKircher That's an excellent comment.

      Some high-level European politicians have been embarrassed by retroactive checking of their dissertations - sometimes 30 years in the past. The cases I'm familiar with weren't ghost-writing, but rather extensive, unattributed copying. When your dissertation is basically a paraphrase of some obscure book, well... In any case, this is not a new problem.

      It is also a problem that manifests very differently inside and outside of STEM. In STEM, we have to actually produce things. Experiments, simulations, models, programs, whatever. These then have to actually function. Maybe one could get away with lying about the results - that does happen - but even cursory checking by your advisor would uncover that kind of blatant fraud. I have seen students flog out their assignments on sites like upwork.com (i.e., paying some programmer somewhere to do their homework).

      For non-STEM fields, students are expected to analyze and understand existing sources, and then contribute some original thought to the subject. This is a lot more vague: ghostwriting and plagiarism are a lot easier and harder to detect. I mean, what original thoughts are you going to bring to an analysis of medieval literature? Really? I know a retired guy who plans to supplement his retirement income by ghostwriting in areas like this - it's what he studied for years, after all, so it's all easy for him.

      Dunno what you do about the problem. There's really nothing illegal about the services themselves. It's the students who sign that they did their own work. But if they're halfway careful, it's nearly impossible to catch them cheating.

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.