Posted on 10/14/2019 4:17:13 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
(A look back. This article was first published seven years ago. The public didn't know this sort of information, but you can be sure the people running education knew everything. Did they move to fix things? No! Everything got worse and more reckless until the big cheating scandal broke this year and we had the spectacle of athletic coaches accepting bribes to say that kids played sports they had never played. K-16 in America has become increasingly corrupt.)
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Pundits routinely assert there is a cheating epidemic in American education. A few statistics can confirm the extent of the problem.
Researchers at the University of Nebraska surveyed students and found that "89 percent said glancing at someone else's answers during a test was cheating, but 87 percent said they'd done that at least once. Also, 94 percent said providing answers to someone during a test was cheating – but 74 percent admitted to doing it."
Paying someone else to write your course work is also common, and now a big business. More than 100 websites provide essays that students hand in as their own work. eCheat.com, a particularly shameless site, flaunts this motto: "It's Not Cheating, It's Collaborating...Welcome to eCheat.com, a leading free essay and student resource site. eCheat has an extensive archive of free essays, all submitted and graded by high school and college students. eCheat also has an archive of 60,000 professionally written papers available for purchase."
One solo scribe bragged in his ad: "I have been making a living doing this work for the last three years....I have graduated with four clients, start to finish, am working with three Masters level clients, and partner with a wide range of clients on an assignment to assignment basis."
Another hustler said, in a mighty burst of sophistry: "It's not plagiarism if I write it for you."
It certainly is. Just as every grade, and every degree, that results from cheating is a lie, and surely constitutes fraud on future employers. (Consult your lawyer. Wouldn't the cheater and the ghostwriter be engaged in racketeering?)
Here's the real shocker. According to Educational Testing Services, "only 35% of college officials believe cheating is a problem," this despite research showing that "73% of all test takers, including prospective graduate students and teachers, agree that most students do cheat at some point. 86% of high school students agreed. But college officials don't see a problem." That's the problem.
Notice the swirling together of academic decline with loss of integrity. Arguably, our Education Establishment aims low, and hits their target. Nobody learns much but everyone gets a good grade and is promoted. The Education Establishment seems irresistibly drawn to leveling. At some point, however, students run into the real world: exams, resumes, entrance requirements, job interviews. If some students need to cheat, let's be understanding – that seems to be the evolving policy. Surely, administrators could easily stop the cheating, or much of it, if they really wanted to. In not cracking down on the cheaters, the officials allow an unforgivable pressure on the honest to begin cheating. And once somebody lies or cheats one time, the next time is easier.
The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed an anonymous ghostwriter. All the sleazy themes come together in his comments:
"In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.
"You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing. I have seen the word 'desperate' misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it.
"For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?"
Another e-ghost provides the perfect summing-up of where we are: "The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): 'You did me business ethics proposal for me I need proposal got approved pls can you will write me paper?' I've gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.
I told her no problem."
So here's the bottom line. The public schools have insisted for decades on doing a mediocre job. The people in charge are endlessly clever at coming up with methods and strategies that seem always to result in less education, not more. Meanwhile, higher education has become a vast multi-billion dollar industry. Follow the money. Who would dare to disrupt the flow of warm bodies to the nation's colleges, where most presidents make a quarter to a half-million dollars, professors do quite well, and government loans to students keep the whole scheme in business?
To conceal this premeditated or at least permitted decline, and to give ever more students a chance to reach college and beyond, and to keep the higher-ed industry at full boil, all sorts of subterfuges (intellectual and otherwise) must be resorted to. There is real moral squalor throughout the following anecdotes from students:
ABC's Primetime heard the same refrain from many students who cheat: "[C]heating in school is a dress rehearsal for life. They mentioned President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal and financial scandals like the Enron case, as well as the inconsistencies of the court system. 'Whether or not you did it or not, if you can get the jury to say that you're not guilty, you're free,' said Will, a student at one of the top public high schools in the nation."
Mary, a student at a large university in the South, said, "A lot of people think it's like you're not really there to learn anything. You're just learning to learn the system."
"Joe is a student at a top college in the Northeast who admits to cheating regularly. Like all of the college students who spoke to Primetime, he wanted his identity obscured. In Joe's view, he's just doing what the rest of the world does. 'The real world is terrible,' he told Gibson. 'People will take other people's materials and pass it on as theirs. I'm numb to it already. I'll cheat to get by.'"
Behold what our Education Establishment has given to the nation – young adults who are cynical, dishonest, and smug about it.
One ghostwriter reports that nurses are a big part of his business. Do some also cheat on their exams? Tomorrow one of them might be amending or evaluating your medical records. Replicate that scene in every direction. Imagine the vast army of phonies and pretenders throughout our society. People who didn't earn their good grades, didn't deserve their advanced degrees, and don't now know their presumed area of expertise. Our society will be less productive and efficient each year.
Is it too late? Can we start over? With the new wave of elementary school kids, for example? Teach them to read, write and do arithmetic. Teach them that honesty is the best policy; and make it difficult to cheat. Meanwhile, teach them foundational knowledge in an orderly systematic way. Then they can pass their tests and advance honestly.
Too many high-level educators seem comfortable with taking away a child's learning and then a child's honor.
© Bruce Deitrick Price
Because many of our leaders have cheated and to this day lie, and have set the example.
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the Democrat Party.
In our area, there are a lot of people, some from other cultures, where it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. They don’t get it that if you don’t actually know the knowledge, you will not be able to do the job. Your building will fall down, your surgery will be malpractice, or your software will crash. They think if you have the grade or pass the qualifying exam, that’s the important thing, in order to make the contacts and score the $$ career.
I remember back in college taking a Humanities class that I never atteneded. At the end of the class I could either take the final, or write a paper. I chose the paper and did some sort of bullshit along the lines of “A Existential View of Death,” or some such nonsense. I threw in logic symbols and equations and lifted heavily from Sarte...But... I made certain to put quotes around all those sections and footnote it...If you lift the whole book but quote it and footnote it...you are all good, evidently. Oh...and I got an A in the class that I never attended. Ha!
When there is seldom any real consequence for cheating, you get more of it. For many, ‘Virtue’ remains dominant when the opportunity for ‘Vice’ is minimized.
When one looks around and sees the so called ‘leaders’ lying and cheating and apparently getting away with it, the general consensus turns to ‘who really cares what someone in ‘my’ -bottom of the barrel- status does.
Why has cheating become a problem? Because millennial parents taught them to cheat. You need look no further than the pay for admissions scandal of Hollywood parents, but if you'd like to go deeper, think back to the Colorado Springs Easter Egg hunt ruined in 2011 by helicopter parents who jumped in to ensure that their little darlings got an egg. This sums it up nicely.
Lenny Watkins took his friend's son to the hunt in 2009 and said he can understand why a parent would step in.Small wonder cheating is so rampant with parenting like that."You better believe I'm going to help my kid get one of those eggs," he said. "I promised my kid an Easter egg hunt, and I'd want to give him an even edge."
You want to be able to trust the students but you know you can't. As my colleagues tells the students: "You can cheat your way to a job, but the problem is that if you don't learn the material, you won't keep that job."
Because DemoRat Communists, Marxists, Fascists and Socialists are in complete control of American Education and Educators, and DemoRats ALWAYS cheat.
A few years ago I read the line from a current student:
“I just cannot understand how a student can allow himself to fail when all you have to do is cheat.”
Because it costs too much to get an education and, quite often, you only have one chance to advance.
If we went back to apprenticeships and you could try to pass the tests repeatedly until you qualify, cheating would probably be reduced.
Cheater.
Not if you go into the "public" sector. In that case when they find out you are clueless they just hire more or promote you out of the picture but you keep the job and income, retirement and all the perks.
At my college you’d have been kicked out long before the final and not had your tuition refunded either. That’s why some college degrees mean more than others.
Bill
Clinton
Because progressivism is so weak that anything run by the progressive agenda, as is our education system, must by necessity cheat and lie as often as possible.
If progressivism had any value, it would offer the freedom to be honest.
Cheating is always wrong, but doing so in basket weaving 101 is less of a problem than in, say, Engineering or Medical school.
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