Lots of people are responding to this essay , by a professional writer-of-student-papers-for-them:. All for someone else. My customers are your students. I promise you that. And maybe it did. Which is why I think blaming someone misses the larger point, which is that when a system is set up to make cheating easy and profitable, someone will come along and profit from it. Treating a systemic problem moralistically accomplishes very little. If you treat a paper in objective terms, as simply a thing the student conjures up magically from the bowels of their laptop, you make this sort of counterfeit easy.
Students produce the commodity the paper and you pay them for it in a grade , and whatever happens in the middle goes blissfully unexamined. The same is true with papers: when we treat a paper simply as an object — something we teach our students to produce and then critique objectively — we make it impossible to think in any kind of critical terms about how it was produced.
You can grade it, but you cannot confirm that the student wrote it because you know nothing about how it was produced. This is therefore an easy hurdle for a dedicated plagiarizer to clear. As Angus Johnson writes ,. Combating cheating and plagiarism takes inventiveness. It takes dedication. It takes flexibility. But it absolutely can be done. I agree, and treating papers as a process rather than a product is the first step. Because focusing in on all the stages between assignment and submission — making that the focus of your intervention — transforms the problem.
By requiring a series of intermediate steps which build to a final portfolio of work and include a variety of different interventions and conferences both with me and with other students , you accomplish two things. On the one hand, it makes the paper writing process much more transparent. At the same time, it allows you to do exactly what it is your job to do: intervene in the process, guiding, critiquing, and being involved long before the student makes the irrevocable errors that pointing out after the fact does little or nothing to correct anyway so many papers that students turn in were flawed from the start because the first step the student took was the wrong one; intervening earlier allows you to prevent that from happening in ways that postmortem evaluations cannot.
This takes work on the part of the professor, of course. But it only becomes easier and cheaper to the extent that it does by skimping on something very, very important, whether or not it shows up in the bottom line. But we should understand that treating education as an economic transaction is almost the entire problem, and we have significant means available to us to push back. I also think that the burden of responsibility is most often put squarely on the student.
