Monday, May 16, 2011

This discussion's for hire

"Q: I need someone to answer my week 3, 4 and 5 ANT 101 Ashland university class. They need to answer discussion and do replies to 2 fellow students. I will pay 40.00 per week for answers and replies. I will email you my password and login if you can do this. MUST BE NEW ANSWERS and must be able to site text"



Student of Fortune says it's about helping students find tutoring. Right.

15 comments:

  1. Would this amount to more than I'm being paid to TEACH a class this summer? Hmmm....

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  2. I had a look at their "Academic Honesty" policy, which is good for a chuckle.

    I see this particular 'student' (though 'student' surely implies 'person bent on learning something', so perhaps not) has posted 11 questions. He seems to be having a lot of trouble grasping cultural anthropology. He could have posted his own answers to the discussion questions in the time it took him to post them on the website.

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  3. WELCOME TO MY HELL.

    All of my classes are currently posted, in various forms, on Students of Fortune. I am finding more and more of my current students using the already-posted piss-poor essays at a whopping $25 per assignment. And that means that in some cases someone would rather pay $25 than write 250 words of opinion concerning the material.

    Oh my god, #LIFEFAIL

    I have rewritten my entire courses and within days of the replacement, the new versions are up and for sale on this KILL ME NOW site.

    I've already gotten 12 students KICKED OUT of my university (an amazing feat, if you've read anything about my previous struggles with plagiarism) for their repeated uses of this work or (in 2 cases) for being the entrepreneurs who sell the slop they call "grade A assignments."

    I'm having to redo my whole course now that makes them "show their work" through note-taking exercises that I now require in order for them to submit the actual assignment.

    When did it get this damn hard to get people interested in their education???

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  4. Post your own answers at Student of Fortune. Not perfect answers but pretty good answers. Even include a few minor mistakes, enough to give yourself a B-. Let your class know that you posted answers there. Or maybe you didn't. Then skewer the plagiarists who copied your answers from the site.

    Oh yeah. Keep your cut of the money. You earned it by doing the work, after all.

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  5. Yikes! I didn't know about this one. Does searching for course number, instructor's name, and/or university name usually turn up any assignments related to a particular course? If so, this seems to be relatively (though not entirely) undiscovered by students at my university. I'm sure it's only a matter of time, though, so I'll keep it in mind when creating discussion prompts.

    I guess it's better to know than not know, but this is discouraging. My usual goal of creating assignments that are harder to cheat on than to just do is looking less and less like a reliable strategy.

    I guess I'll have to fall back on another old reliable thought: that when push comes to shove, I'm not really responsible for preventing them from depriving themselves of an education. Or, in Beaker Ben's immortal words, "don't care more about their educations than they do."

    In more cheerful news, a book my father wrote some time ago still seems to be in relatively widespread use as a textbook. Of course, it's not at all clear that students are actually reading it. Too bad; it's a good book.

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  6. I would pay a hacker to shut this fucking site down - drown them in DDOS attacks, load their server with malware, if necessary find out who is running it and kidnap them, drive them out to the desert in a car trunk and force them to dig their own graves.

    SMASH THE SCAM!

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  7. Beaker....

    You might have just blown my fracken mind. Dare I...?

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  8. One of the assignments is an autobiography. This is killing me: "my preferred Ethnic/Racial status would be African American. You can make any thing up really, as long as it is reasonable and not unorthdox. Please no plagiarism!!"

    After looking at a few of the assignment sheets so helpfully posted, I have a list of students, professors and universities. I've just submitted my last batch of grades...I'm thinking my summer project will be e-mails to the deans of these places.

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  9. Oh, Barb, if you do it, we shall laud you as a hero!

    Except, now you'd be outing yourself because you'd have to go public to be taken seriously by those deans.

    Maybe....

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  10. AAAAAAUUUUGGGHHHH.

    Sorry. I'm a little wound up.

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  11. "AAAAAAUUUUGGGHHHH."
    - BlackDog

    Good. Now take that anguish and rage and meet me onthe corner of Broad St. and Columbia in Philadelphia, PA in four days. You bring the shovels, I'll bring the ski masks, gloves, my AK and my windowless van AND LETS GO FORCE SOME PEOPLE TO DIG THEIR OWN GRAVES!!

    ["Corona" by the Minutemen starts playing]

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  12. The distribution of questions by discipline is interesting, too. For example, was anyone else surprised by the fact that there are more questions about business (510) outstrips even math (377)? Law (99) gets an honorable mention in the Should've Known category, and the award for most depressing goes to healthcare (also 99). Happily, architecture appears to be relatively untainted, so while we may suffer at the hands of incompetent doctors, whom we can't sue because our lawyers are equally inept, at least our houses won't collapse.

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  13. P.S. BlackDog, you can't miss the van; it's primer black with the legend "Joe's Crematorium: You Kill `Em, We Grill `Em" on the sides. I'll be in a furry hat.

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  14. Holy shit. This is truly fucking sad.

    Strel, I have an SKS.

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  15. Academic Monkey: the alternative is spreading a rumour that professors answer these questions just to catch students out, and voila! Big deterrent.

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