Ever known someone who you really wondered how they got the job he or she had? You know the type, someone who is incredibly qualified on paper yet just couldn't seem to back up their pedigree on the spot. Someone who just made you wonder... how did this happen? As you have now guessed (well, maybe the title helped)... this article is about academic integrity.
Cheating and Academic Integrity in the Free Market
As you well know, the market applies to all tradable goods, not just those which are smiled upon publicly. What we refer to as the black market - stolen goods, narcotics, illegal weapons - also behave in much the same way as other markets. Information is generally the input which is most at a premium in black markets, which is what made a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education so fascinating to me.
Ed Dante, the 'shadow author' of hundreds (if not thousands) of student essays and dissertations on everything from Nursing to International Diplomacy, is a professional writer. Unlike say a Stephen King, he operates under a vastly different business model. Mr. Dante (not his real name) writes essays for anyone who will meet his price. That price? Around $2,000 for a standard assignment. Mr. Dante claims to pull down $66,000 a year.
Working for a Living
Do you trust your peers' academic integrity?
Mr. Dante is verbose, but he's a great writer. Yes, he's a much better writer than me, with my completed upper division writing requirements for my Engineering Degree. He's been exposed to loads of material; he's "written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration." Yes, Mr. Dante has loads of expertise which he'll never be able to pass along to a potential future employer... and that's too bad.
At some level, you have to feel bad for the guy. Not taken seriously by his University's English department, his peers did take him serious enough to pay him to write papers for them. On another level, Mr. Dante was a bit unrealistic in his expectation that as a junior his department would push an independent novel of his. However, he's a product of the system we all were in when we got to our respective positions.
I speak with a certain amount of empathy for Mr. Dante. I didn't use services offered by people like him in college (math seems to be one area where Mr. Dante wouldn't write...). However, I was offered money in return for taking standardized tests. I was also caught once in my younger days helping someone to cheat. The irony was the cheat sheet he had was traced back to me due to me having the only perfect score to that point. Regardless, I like to think I learned my lesson after that incident, and have moved on to more vanilla methods.
External essay and these writers are hard to catch... even when it seems that a student couldn't have written something, it is still hard to prove for certain that they used dubious means to write something. Academic integrity is a big deal, and tossing accusations around is a sure way for a teacher to never get tenure (and if the author is to be believed, a fair number of teachers are cheating as well). In class essays and follow-ups are a good start, but it seems to be a bandage on a larger wound. How would you clean up academics, if you had unlimited power?
