Friday, August 8, 2014

No, I won't do your schoolwork for you!

I have had two jobs in the past week that wanted me to do schoolwork for someone. One said they needed a political science paper "to make it presentable at a group function." Hmm, I got a totally jacked up undergraduate paper with instructor's notes (that primarily said the paper was jacked up - no thesis nor basic organization not to mention sentence structure, content, citations, etc.). Sorry, I really don't consider school to be a group function.

I mean really, I write at a post-graduate level. If I rewrite your completely disorganized undergrad paper (maybe even high school on this one - I hope the guy wasn't in college), do you think your professor isn't going to notice? Do you think he or she might not be a little suspicious as to how a person who could not even form a thesis sentence suddenly writes a publishable paper after receiving one page worth of notes?

Then, I had a graduate student looking for "tutoring." For the record, I do help graduate students edit and polish their theses and dissertations. Not everyone is a scribe. Few undergraduate degrees require more than two classes in writing. Therefore, I do not mind helping education majors, or IT majors, or even biology majors clean up their final work before they present it to an adviser. But I ONLY EDIT. I give advice to make it sound better - the student must write it and do the work/research. The student must know what he or she is doing.

So, I got a guy who wanted me to "tutor" him. First, he asked me to download all this garbage - including Skype and TeamViewer. Now, I don't Skype and TeamViewer is scary because it allows you to take control of someone else's computer (or vice versa). Needless to say, I didn't install that one. However, after downloading this, he contacted me asking if I could get him a paper because he didn't have the entire article - in 12 hours! I need a few days to get things from IU since they upgraded their computers and decided I could not longer have immediate access.

(I have been trying to think of whether it would be worth (a) going back to school for yet another degree and dumping even more money into the IU system or (b) applying for some menial job just so I can be "faculty" and get my immediate access back, but neither is all that tempting.) 
Well, the next morning, he was not asking for the paper, but he sent me all his work to analyze for him before his 3:00PM appointment. We are talking about reading through Java code to find mathematical errors that were "too advanced for him to do" and crunching about 30,000 or so numbers after I already told him I did not have a computer that could do that kind of work (you need Linux not Windows if you are interested in becoming a biostatistician). And by the way - he REALLY needed it because he hadn't brought anything to his adviser in two weeks.

Now, if I wanted to do all the work to get a Ph.D., I would just do option (a) and get the PhD in my name. Who would want to do the work for a degree so someone else can put their name on it? Sadly, there are people who do this. I have no idea why, though. Really, no amount of money would inspire me to do this for someone else. Especially since that someone else might be the nurse waiting on me in the ER or the Engineer who designed the bridge I am about to drive over. Yeah - those two school paper subjects were posted this week too.

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