One previous blog I had I wrote when I was teaching at a university, and at certain times of the year my thoughts were much occupied with the process of writing essays, because I was spending many, many hours marking them. And many, many of them were very, very bad. At some point I put up a post outlining some simple points about writting a good essay, which was quite popular.
Whilst I never actually got around to doing it, this inspired a particularly evil thought that I should write a bunch of example essays and host them on my site. I planned on using perfect style, but using enough factual information that was identifiably wrong that a lazy student might conceivably submit the essay as being theirs, but any marker worth their job would instantly realise they were wrong. I figured that it would be an interesting social experiment to see how many Google hits I got on phrases from the essays, and how many abusive emails I got from students who had submitted them. But whilst I am actually that evil, I'm also lazy, so I never actually did it.
But it occurs to me now that I actually could have made some money from is, because others are. In fact, it's a big enough industry that Google has felt compelled to ban it. Or, at least, they're banning advertising of it. Whilst it's a blow to these entrepreneurial essay writers, I think banning it is entirely justified. There is no legitimate reason for a person to pay for a third person to write a scholarly essay.
As an ex-educator, I can see how this will make the lives of those who teach for a living a little easier. It obviously wont stamp out all such ghost-writing (everyone knows who the smart kids in class are, and all it might take would be suitable financial incentive), but it will make it a little more difficult.
I wonder if I could still conduct my little social experiment if I made it clear people didn't have to pay for the essays. Nah, still too lazy to write them!
0 comments:
Post a Comment