It’s simple, really, but laborious.
A couple weeks ago, Ed Dante, “The Shadow Scholar,” told his story in The Chronicle Review. He’s a ghostwriter for a “custom-essay company,” drafting paper after paper for students who can’t complete them on their own. According to Dante (a pseudonym), he has written in fields ranging from labor relations to film to theology to sports management to architecture to marketing to ethics (!) to anthropology. He writes undergraduate papers and graduate theses, proposals . . . whatever: “The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me,” he declares.
Students come to his employer desperate and hopeless and frenzied and cynical, the “lazy rich kid,” the ESL student, and the “hopelessly deficient” ones. It’s a full-time job, he announces, and the courses he writes for, he suggests, have clueless instructors. “You’ve never heard of me,” he boasts, ”but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work.”
If the practices is as widespread as Ed believes, academia has a serious problem. Either teachers aren’t paying close enough attention, or students aren’t recognizing the ethical crime, or grade mania has grown too intense, or students assume every bad grade destroys their future or . . . Whatever the reasons, Ed doesn’t think it can be stopped. ”My customers are your students,” he says. “I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.”
Can’t defend against? Yes, we can, but it takes time and labor. All that is required is for teachers to get involved in their students’ writing process. I often teach freshman courses, and I assign short papers to students (3 to 4 pages) every two weeks. On Fridays, I schedule 30-minute editing sessions with each one, making for a long day of revision, but a productive one. We go over commas and verbs and syntax and transitions, sentence by sentence and word by word.
With that much focus on the composition, students won’t risk the exposure. They know they can’t pass off someone else’s prose as their own when under the microscope. Moreover, because they have a rough draft to do first, they don’t put the final version off to the night before it’s due, and hence don’t suffer the discombobulating need to find someone else to do it.
I’m lucky to have only a 2-2 load, of course, with only 10-15 students in a freshman class. People with heavier loads and larger classes, often on a multi-campus itinerary, can’t afford to take that much time to do editing sessions. But if the plagiarism problem is as bad as Ed alleges, then colleges and universities ought to provide them with editing assistants of some kind who can assume the task and monitor students away from the paper providers.
It would be easy for English and comp departments to justify the request. Perhaps the worst revelation of Ed’s exposure is the awful e-mails in garbled prose that he receives from student-clients. As he puts it, “You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing.” With Ed around, students proceed to the next course without having improved their writing one bit. “The Shadow Scholar” should be a prime exhibit in the need for more funding and more support for writing courses and instructors. Perhaps with an intense writing experience with heavy surveillance in their first year, students might not take the shadowy route later on.
8 Responses to How to Stop the Shadow Scholar
wbgleason - November 22, 2010 at 7:52 pm
If you do, indeed, know your students, the process described by Professor Bauerlein can be accomplished, digitally…
My usual request for research papers is a first draft of about five pages so that we can get things worked out as far as formatting, references, and background for the project. This can be submitted electronically and then I can make editorial corrections/suggestions and send them back to the student. I used to do this by hand but my handwriting has deteriorated considerably. Such a process effectively eliminate middlemen like Ed.
There are many ways to Nirvana… Even digital ones.
luther_blissett - November 24, 2010 at 12:22 am
Um, doesn’t this just mean that the student buys the paper before the first draft is due? And that you’ve probably edited a purchased paper?
You can usually purchase different levels of work, on a sliding price scale. So the student buys a B paper, takes it to you, you discuss it and edit it together, and the kid saves the money and gets an A-.
Now, you can usually get around this, but you have to keep track of the student step by step from the initial planning stages all the way to the final draft. Brainstorming, freewriting, outlining, drafting, etc. You can then have them write a reflection essay on the process itself. And that’s all more work than most anyone can actually keep track of, as a teacher.
(Also, be aware that your students are also having their friends and family “edit” — i.e., rewrite — their work for them.)
My solution at the high school level is rather simple. Our curricula specifies that we have to assign one formal take-home essay and one in-class essay test every eight weeks. So I have students write the in-class essay test first. Then they have to revise and expand it (double the size) for their take-home essay, which they submit to a plagiarism-checking website.
jffoster - November 24, 2010 at 8:00 am
There are of course, as has been outpointed, a number of possible solutions. I experienced two as a student. In my high school 3rd classman English class, we had term papers and two days after the term papers were turned in, we were assigned an in-class essay to write about something we had learned about while doing the research for our term papers but had included nothing or very little about in the paper. I wrote about ‘Religion in the Soviet Union’ (This was 1958.) Those who hadn’t done any research would have been up a creek, or in this case a bayou, without a pirogue pole.
The second solution I experienced was in an advanced class in college in ‘German Civilization’ — taught in German BTW — none of this “Teach “Culture Courses” in English so students will take it instead of real social science for “diversity credit” stuff. Again, we had term papers. A short while after they were due, we got an inclass essay assignment to write an abstract of our term paper.
But I suggest Shadow Scholar is partly right. The kind of paper assignments some faculty give lend themselves to being hired out. Many of my colleagues in History used to give blanket topics and on exams as well and then prided themselves on how long it took to read them. THEY were moral — THEY were reading 80 bluebooks. We in the sciences and pricklier social sciences weren’t as virtuous because we were grading problems or highly focused problem discussions. (Of course it takes much less effort and imagination to think up a “Discuss the Napoleonic Wars kind of quuestion but those are a) harder graded and b)highly open to plagiarism. I doubt Shadow Scholar would have as easy a time doing a highly focused paper on a problem in Linguistics, Mineralology, or Statistics.
So some fields are more open to Shadow Scholars, but so are some kinds of paper-problem-essay topics. Indeed, is the term paper all that great a teaching tool?
markbauerlein - November 24, 2010 at 9:01 am
I think, Luther, that the face-to-face questioning about and editing of a student’s prose prevents them from submitting someone else’s work as a rough draft. If you ask questions such as, “Why that verb?” and “What transition do we need here?” and you’re attentive,any fraudulence will surface.
wbgleason - November 24, 2010 at 9:52 am
You make some good points, Luther.
You should realize that at most universities, mine included, there is already an office on campus where students can get editorial assistance. I actually refer my students to this office, especially those for whom English is not their first language.
Operationally, it is rather difficult to get a spec paper written for my students since it involves their own laboratory research. The first draft – of half the final paper – is due at midterm. The second half depends on how the research goes in the lab. So the buy a B- paper strategy would not work.
Of course one could do what professor Bauerlein does. And I admire him for taking the time to do this. I’m sure the students do also.
markbauerlein - November 24, 2010 at 10:17 am
Technology can certainly be the enabling factor here, Bill, for teachers, students, and budget folks alike, for instance, Skype serving almost as well as face-to-face. The convenience factor is often the prime reason for failed office visits, and a program of online tutorials using teaching assistants could be inexpensive enough to give the tutors decent pay while addressing the serious writing problems of undergraduates.
0noggin - November 26, 2010 at 2:34 pm
You are right, Mark, in that getting involved in each student’s writing process makes it difficult for cheaters. At the same time, as you also recognize, large class sizes render that level of individual attention nearly impossible. In those large, first-year classes, I like to employ targeted quizzes (e.g. analysis, grammar, paragraphing, thesis-writing) to open students’ eyes to the reality that writing is a very learnable skill. I’ve had to teach a whole summer course compressed into 6 weeks, yet managed to help my students make dramatic progress in their writing. The point is, they were made aware of the problems, and were helped along to where they COULD do it themselves.
As Mr. Dante acknowledges, much of his work came from repeat customers – i.e. those few students who refused to learn and didn’t believe in themselves enough to even try. Sadly, as educators, such students are mostly beyond our ability to help them, and we must concentrate our limited time on the other 90% who we can nurture.
philosophy - January 24, 2011 at 6:49 pm
It looks like (nearly?) all the above insightful comments are from writing teachers. Profs in other fields aren’t so skilled in dealing with writing issues. What can they do – even at the post-graduate level – to discourage cheaters?