Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Lord Save Us.



19 comments:

  1. I am sharing this video as absolutely widely as I can, in the hope that this asshole's prof sees it and nails him to the goddam fucking WALL.

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  2. Can anyone tell what university he goes to? Email it to all the faculty there.

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  3. nobody tip him off - whatladder's comment was priceless - I almost pissed my pants when I read that

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  4. It looks like an ad to me, doesn't it to anyone else? Some kind of spammy thing. The "kid" looks 38.

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  5. Go look at the "related videos" that come up - there are tons of these

    there are also "to catch a predator" videos on his favorites

    maybe it's just a sting to get all the plagiarists to show up to copy homework from Matt Lauer

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  6. @Wombat, supreme, supreme connection. "To catch a plagiarizer..."

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  7. My reaction was the same as Terry's: he looks too old to be an actual undergrad. I'm guessing that the hat covers more hair loss than is common in 22-year-olds. I think he's an "internet entrepreneur" instead -- and boy does he dance around the question of whether the student he portrays used the "researcher's" actual words or not.

    This, of course, is why those of us in composition require students to hand in multiple stages of research papers (and are very, very suspicious of last-minute subject changes).

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  8. But the opening line -- "I finally got my paper back, after lots and lots of frustration" [which I translate as "after more than 48 hours"] -- lends a note of verisimilitude.

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  9. Yep, feels like viral marketing to me.

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  10. I think you guys would find this little pamphlet from "BestEssays.com," a "custom essay writing" service, to be even more jaw-dropping:

    http://www.bestessays.com/images/materials/articles/Plagiarism_How_Not_To.pdf

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  11. I'll be sharing this with my students too--just so they know that I know.

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  12. @Schmitty: Amazing. The only hint the author neglected to mention is that, if one speaks English as a first language, it would be smart to hire a "professional essay writing service" of which the same can be said. Best Essays would appear to be an appropriate choice for someone whose native language does not make the count vs. noncount noun distinction crucial to using articles correctly in English -- which would include a number of Asian languages, so its potential client base, at least at my university, would be substantial. Idiom also matters; the reference to a "tutor" would limit the market much more, since most of my students speak/write American rather than British English.

    Or, of course, they could write their own papers. I'm actually pretty good about paying attention to organization, argument, etc. even in papers that have the articles, prepositions, and/or tenses mostly wrong. And I must say, contrary to what the Shadow Scholar and others claim, I haven't noticed a higher incidence of plagiarism among my ESL students.

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  13. Find this "man", shoot him.

    Find this online outfit, burn their meatspace office to the ground, hit the ghostwriter(s) on the head with a claw hammer repeatedly, use same bloody hammer to smash their server.

    Problem solved.

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  14. Somebody else mentioned New Brunswick...part of my formative years, including three rather unsuccessful semesters of initial graduate study.

    Saw the Rutgers hat/ In the words of John Gorka:
    "I'm from New Jersey...I don't expect too much..."

    Without the time to do so, I looked at his youtune channel. He shills also for some other stuff too (a service to elevate press releases in Google news visibility, a "pay to take surveys" site, a site builder site).

    All share the same quality of inviting physical abuse. But it's OK: no jury would convict you for smacking him if they had to watch one of these during the trial.

    Can't really figure out what the driver is though...maybe he's just an entrepreneur with his fingers in a series of shady web ventures.

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  15. I showed it to my afternoon class--they laughed at him. I heard one of my students say (not-so-sotto-voce) "That guy's a douche."

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  16. Rutgers.

    Also, his repeated use of the word "content" suggests that he actually KNOWS what content is an therefore is a shill OR that he's seriously delusional about the purpose of writing papers...wait...that would be 90% of my OWN students...

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