Academic “ghost-writing”: the cheating scandal no one will discuss (2020)
In my experience the system incentivizes this sort of behavior. I&#x27;ll give my personal story as an example, singular though it my be. This is very long winded but I feel many here at HN may appreciate the details so I&#x27;ve included them.<p>I&#x27;m currently going back to school and my experience in doing so is quite troubling. Largely my issues reside in two classes, English and Ethics. While I have a B in both classes, I have not at any point learned anything in either class. By learned I mean learned in the traditional sense of doing class work, receiving feedback, revising, repeat. This process usually culminating in a full formal essay or test.<p>In English, my professor gives only a few sentences of rather generic feedback on each class item. We write many pieces of a total essay that we turn in to receive this feedback on before putting it all together into an major essay assignment. So for one of these pieces we were supposed to give a critical response to a couple of articles we read about the tech industry and its effects on human thinking. One argued that human beings were &quot;evolving&quot; into man&#x2F;machine &quot;centaurs&quot; such as the super powers of &quot;ESP&quot; that are gained by using Twitter (not joking). The other was an article from The Atlantic titled &quot;Is google making us stoopid?&quot; (no, I did not misspell &quot;stupid&quot;, that was the title). The assignment was to argue for which one was most persuasive.<p>I of course found neither very persuasive. I found some sentiments that I agreed with in the second one, such as people losing their ability to focus for long periods of time brought about by an industry of attention battling (too many distractions). But overall this was not a good case for human brains being made defective, which to its credit was said in the portion where the article&#x27;s author talked to a neurologist.<p>In the first article I found an overwhelming misunderstanding of general and specific A.I. This position of my final essay had one note on it from my professor, it was a YouTube link to a dancing robot that I presume was supposed to be a snarky response displaying how intelligent robots actually are.<p>So I wrote my paper with the thesis that neither of the two were persuasive. I focused much of my paper on the fact that intelligence was poorly defined throughout despite it being the foundation of each argument. I spent a portion of the essay explaining that even though computers played chess (a main sticking point for article 1), this did not constitute anything near human intelligence and that is not exactly viewed as an overall positive thing from the chess community at large (I myself have played chess for many years, won a couple state championships as a child and currently after not playing for a long time have a rating of around 1600-1700).<p>I received little to no feedback on any of the smaller portions of this essay and got full marks for each. Yet, when it came time to put it all together, I received a C and was told my thesis &quot;side-stepped the entire point of the exercise&quot;. I wrote my professor and said that I had already turned in drafts of my thesis twice and I was not told it would be outright rejected. The only real thing I had been told to change was my summaries of each article, as they were too thorough and I should cut it back to the &quot;gist&quot;. My final essay was scored poorly on the summary section for &quot;only capturing the gist&quot;. I also pointed out that in my last draft, I had specifically asked (parenthetically to my teacher and fellow students) if my thesis was okay or unclear in any way as I felt summarizing intelligence arguments in 5 pages or less was difficult to do effectively. This note was ignored and I was given no notes on it at all, only top marks.<p>He responded saying he graded it for overall effectiveness and that if I wanted to try again I was welcome to. I declined since I did not have time to redo it as by the time I received this, I was three weeks into our next essay. It&#x27;s interesting to note that a week later I was told I had to scrap the work on this &quot;formal research essay&quot; as well because it contained &quot;too much research&quot; and was not &quot;opinionated enough&quot;.<p>The point is, I was really trying to use my time at school to actually learn something. I know my writing can be better and I want to make it better, but this environment is not conducive to doing so. Admittedly, even this comment could use some work: better organization, less choppy thought structure, etc.<p>My ethics class is much the same way. We read portions of our two textbooks and take lock-down browser quizzes (on camera) as well as major tests. The quizzes are intended as practice and for understanding what you should study for the test. However, you are only allowed to see the numerical results of those tests and quizzes! You are NOT told which ones you missed or what you maybe did not understand. I fail to see how anyone can benefit from this approach to learning.<p>Which is an extremely long way of saying I understand completely why people would cheat and not try while in school. I myself am not one of those people but the design of the institution, at least the one I attend, seems to be begging people to game it and further circumvent actual practice and learning.<p>On top of all of that, when I asked an English professor about my issues leading up to that first essay, she informed me that my generic non-feedback sounded like the output of A.I. grading software. Something I had not before known existed and was mortified to be made aware of, as ironic as that is in light of the subject matter my class was concerned with.<p>Seems to me that the schools themselves are also outsourcing their jobs.<p>An example of this software: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elearningindustry.com&#x2F;artificial-intelligence-new-role-in-education-automated-paper-grading" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elearningindustry.com&#x2F;artificial-intelligence-new-ro...</a>