61 replies to this topic

[DeathDude]

No I'm just at one, it's a college where you pick your faculty and then pick your courses up to 5, then your on your way. You then can transfer over to the university also here, or stay and complete your degree which is what I'm doing.

Uh you do know that getting essays from the net is cheating and considered Plagiarism right? (Least hope ya were joking with your suggestion) The schools here really crack down on that sort of thing, so much to the point where you can get kicked out of school for doing it.

And yeah most of the essays for the finals are written in class anyway, all mine will be, good thing most will be just one in a day.

[A. J. Raffles]

DeathDude, on Oct 1 2006, 07:36 PM, said:

Uh you do know that getting essays from the net is cheating and considered Plagiarism right? (Least hope ya were joking with your suggestion) The schools here really crack down on that sort of thing, so much to the point where you can get kicked out of school for doing it.

Not to mention that essays you get from somewhere else won't necessarily be better than the essays you write yourself.

[Nace]

A. J. Raffles, on Oct 1 2006, 08:28 PM, said:

DeathDude, on Oct 1 2006, 07:36 PM, said:

Uh you do know that getting essays from the net is cheating and considered Plagiarism right? (Least hope ya were joking with your suggestion) The schools here really crack down on that sort of thing, so much to the point where you can get kicked out of school for doing it.

Not to mention that essays you get from somewhere else won't necessarily be better than the essays you write yourself.

Whell, I don`t know, an experienced writer (a pro) will certanly write better than me.... But anyway - yes it is defenetly cheating, so if you`r faculties have that kind of restriction, I wouldn`t reccomend it to you

At mine, the things are a litlle bit more errrrr...  lighten up.

I`ll give you this example: We had this american guy teacher who told us that he is aware of the internet essays, and told us that if we commit such a crime he would fall us. OK, I wrote one my self, and I was the only one from my group.
I got the lousyest grade, and  everyone else got super grades.
That realy pissed me off, and since then I`m a reggular internet customer.  

[Tom Henrik]

Nace, on Oct 1 2006, 08:46 PM, said:

That realy pissed me off, and since then I`m a reggular internet customer.  

Don't you mean a regular cheater?

Seriously, that's an attitude I can never understand. Cheating only destroys for you in the end. I don't cheat, ever, but I have been a big liar - which is kinda the same - and when the truth surfaces, all hell breaks loose.

It's better to be honest and fair and get lousy grades, then to cheat for years and be thrown out of school for dishonesty.

[Nace]

Tom Henrik, on Oct 1 2006, 08:58 PM, said:

Don't you mean a regular cheater?

Seriously, that's an attitude I can never understand. Cheating only destroys for you in the end. I don't cheat, ever, but I have been a big liar - which is kinda the same - and when the truth surfaces, all hell breaks loose.

It's better to be honest and fair and get lousy grades, then to cheat for years and be thrown out of school for dishonesty.

But lying and cheating on some exam is not realy the same thing. We are overloaded with materials that we are obligated to know, although they will never do us any good in the future... Only the basic ones will.
I am supposed to know why queen Victoria didn`t want to play the piano, or about  
feminism, and I am supposed to be a future English teacher, or a translator, or something of the kind.
The faculty is loaded with materials that were written by professors who wrote them to become doctors, and they use other people works too...

If a faculty has a policy to ban you   for cheating, thats something else. I wouldn`t do it if that was the case in my faculty.
I know what you mean about lying people. The truth always hits you in your face. If not there, it hits you inside your head.

[DeathDude]

Well that depends on what courses your taking though, some of what you learn is irrelevant but some of it isn't, ya still need it for your midterms/finals because even if you think it's irrelevant your prof may not.

Besides stealing papers off the net why? It's not your own work, your taking credit for something you didn't do, that doesnt' exactly look good plus your telling others that you did this work when in reality you didn't, it just looks bad overall, it's better to actually do the work and put the effort, that way you know even if you don't do well, you did your best and if ya did do well then all that hard work payed off.

Strange though that your faculty doesn't have such a policy, it's really starting to be enforced in most places, and really it's a shame because all it takes is one or two students to do this and everyone has to suffer the consequences, and sometimes if a student accidently doesn't cite a work for some reason and this happens, they could get accused of plagarism even if they really were not doing it.

[Nace]

DeathDude, on Oct 1 2006, 09:24 PM, said:

Well that depends on what courses your taking though, some of what you learn is irrelevant but some of it isn't, ya still need it for your midterms/finals because even if you think it's irrelevant your prof may not.

Besides stealing papers off the net why? It's not your own work, your taking credit for something you didn't do, that doesnt' exactly look good plus your telling others that you did this work when in reality you didn't, it just looks bad overall, it's better to actually do the work and put the effort, that way you know even if you don't do well, you did your best and if ya did do well then all that hard work payed off.

Strange though that your faculty doesn't have such a policy, it's really starting to be enforced in most places, and really it's a shame because all it takes is one or two students to do this and everyone has to suffer the consequences, and sometimes if a student accidently doesn't cite a work for some reason and this happens, they could get accused of plagarism even if they really were not doing it.

I`m guilty. I know that.
But I realy, realy was needed to pass those 11 exams in a month...
I didn`t cheat on all of them you know

[Tulac]

People it really makes no sense arguing about cheating because you haven't seen the Ex-Yugoslav educational system...

[Nace]

Tulac, on Oct 1 2006, 09:34 PM, said:

People it really makes no sense arguing about cheating because you haven't seen the Ex-Yugoslav educational system...

I study in Bulgaria
And I`m just happy because of my recent success at school...
And yeah, the educational system is from another planet

[Tulac]

Well Balkans is Balkans

[A. J. Raffles]

Nace, on Oct 1 2006, 08:46 PM, said:

A. J. Raffles, on Oct 1 2006, 08:28 PM, said:

DeathDude, on Oct 1 2006, 07:36 PM, said:

Uh you do know that getting essays from the net is cheating and considered Plagiarism right? (Least hope ya were joking with your suggestion) The schools here really crack down on that sort of thing, so much to the point where you can get kicked out of school for doing it.

Not to mention that essays you get from somewhere else won't necessarily be better than the essays you write yourself.

Whell, I don`t know, an experienced writer (a pro) will certanly write better than me.... But anyway - yes it is defenetly cheating, so if you`r faculties have that kind of restriction, I wouldn`t reccomend it to you

You talk about it as if it was something very exotic, when really it's the norm for universities to crack down on plagiarism. I mean, it's their reputation which is at stake, after all. I'm sorry if this sounds a little harsh, but even supposing my university wouldn't kick me out if I was found out to have plagiarised some other essay, I'd still find it rather pathetic to nick somebody else's work and pass it off as my own, regardless of whether "everybody does it" or not. If I can't or won't make the effort to do my own coursework, never mind how pointless it might seem, then I shouldn't be at university - or at least I shouldn't be studying that particular subject. Simple.

By the way, I could have become one of those so-called "pros" myself: over the past year, there were several companies trying to enlist students at my university to write essays for them and get paid for it. There's an awful lot of money in plagiarism, which is why some of those companies could afford to offer us quite amazing sums if we sold our essays. Obviously we were strongly discouraged by the university to accept such offers, not just because of the whole moral thing, but also because it would result in students neglecting their own coursework in order to do other people's.
There was an interesting article about those essay companies in the Guardian a couple of months ago: link

[a1s]

now that is just sick!
charging for essays you wrote! next you'll be chrging for the carbon dioxide you produce (not forgetting VAT offcourse consdiering you use oxygen in the process). once you've done your essay- you don't need it. so it should be passed down to those who do. for free (except the delivery fees). if we refuse to share our work with others we might as well shut this site down right now- it's a lost cause.
you might say that your essays are your property. very well.
all of these things belong to someone. they don't mind, and mind you they've probably written more than all who posted on this page combined.

I have never baught an essay. and allthough I've only submited one in my entire life never did the though of selling it came into my head. I used it for the prupose it was designed for, if anyone else needs it (or has interest in the subject) he should have access to it.

[Juni Ori]

Looooong looong time ago, when I was at school, there were totally different ways to cheat. It tells something about my motivation in school that I didn't care about cheating. I didn't care about school or studying at all. The system is too unbending and rebel-hearted, twisted geniuses like me go wasted.

Nowadays... I'm annoyed, because there's so much I'd like to know. I'm actually angry, though we must remember not all is school's fault. There were other factors too. If I'll ever have offspring, I'll make them to do their homework and succeed in school. Whatever it takes. Their potential must not go wasted, like their father's. That all may sound very strict and even inhuman, but I'm going to take care of their welfaring and other needs too and I've succeeded, if they get education to profession. And they'll be having a lot of sports. All in sense of encouraging and supporting, not forcing.

So much for the fantasy, time for truth: I'm doing never-ending (=my favorite word nowadays) days and whenever I have a spare moment, I'm spending it with my friends in bar, "wife" (never getting officially married) and kids at home or where ever...

In short: do your homework, yourself, so you don't have to grieve your pityful past in future, which now feels distant, but is in truth around the next corner...

[A. J. Raffles]

a1s, on Oct 2 2006, 12:45 AM, said:

now that is just sick!
charging for essays you wrote! next you'll be chrging for the carbon dioxide you produce (not forgetting VAT offcourse consdiering you use oxygen in the process). once you've done your essay- you don't need it. so it should be passed down to those who do. for free (except the delivery fees). if we refuse to share our work with others we might as well shut this site down right now- it's a lost cause.
you might say that your essays are your property. very well.
all of these things belong to someone. they don't mind, and mind you they've probably written more than all who posted on this page combined.

I have never baught an essay. and allthough I've only submited one in my entire life never did the though of selling it came into my head. I used it for the prupose it was designed for, if anyone else needs it (or has interest in the subject) he should have access to it.

Uh, hello? Read my post again. I didn't sell any of my essays, and I wouldn't, regardless of what I was offered for them. But I wouldn't "donate" them either. Helping others to cheat has nothing to do with "sharing", it's about helping them to commit a fraud. You'll help someone more if you help him to understand a maths problem than you do if you just give him the correct answer you worked out last week. It isn't really any different for essay writing.
Anyway, all I said was that there are people who will do write essays to help others cheat - and lazy people who'll be willing to pay for them.
Universities are meant to be academic institutions; if you don't do your research yourself, you're a fraud, and that's not what it's all about. One of the main reasons why you have to write essays for university courses is that the skills needed to write them are one of the things your course is meant to teach you. You can't really compare open source software to plagiarising somebody else's work. It's more like a programmer ripping somebody else's work and passing it off as his own - and as far as I know that is frowned upon among the advocates of open source software as well. I bet that if I claimed to have coded DOSBox from scratch and handed it in as a project, Qbix wouldn't be too pleased.

Oh, and by the way, most of the essays those companies offer will be custom-written, so the "it's no use to you after it's been marked" argument doesn't really work in this case either. It's work done specifically for those lazy bums who pay for it, not just a by-product of the essay-writers' courses.

Edited by A. J. Raffles, 02 October 2006 - 07:56 AM.

[a1s]

okay, I officialy have to say "wow!". 200 milion quid a year. that is a lot. that is about as much as our budget (within the order of magnitude of it anyway).
as for you not selling your essays I got from your post that you would, if you hadn't considered it wrong. Now that I have though about it my reasons are the same (I just have a diffren't underlying reason to consider it wrong), so we are actualy equaly proabale to sell them when we become old and greedy .

more aout the point the essays you uh... "donate" are there to help other people with their work too not just cheat. (what are the chnces that you'd need an essay on the development of  Penicillium chrysogenum mold someone else wrote?). one thing I like about these essays is that they are checked out well. there are at least three groups of people (some of these groups consist of a single teacher) who have to read you essay and besides that you yourself try to make it as good as you can, so you would be graded well. by contrast the above mentioned wikipedia is written by people who can wite what they want (including for fun) and checked by people who don't give the most miniature rats *money-maker* in the world what the article says, as long as the artciles are properly formated and aren't obviously contradicotry to common knowledge/themselves (In all fairness I have to admit that only about 1 artcile in about 40-50 differs from reality by a non-negligeble degree, but that is of little consolation if the article you are reading is bovine excrement).