You may think there are plenty of writers, and there are, but with all the online - "I'll write your essay for you" websites, what will the writer of tomorrow look like?
I agree with the next guy that making someone write an essay to get into college is dumb. No high school teaches the college level skills needed to be semi-successful especially when you are competing against essays written by college graduates and paid for by other potential students. The only essay that should be considered is the one that is a part of the SAT or any other college entrance exam. (Read: one that has been written after the student's identity is verified and under controlled circumstances.)
Guru does not allow school projects to be posted, but some people have found ways of getting around this (as you know by my last couple posts). For example, there was the guy who posted a project looking for an engineering paper. I thought the project looked a little suspicious, but the next one he posted was for a nursing paper. Okay, no engineer is going to need a nursing paper, so I thought this guy was legitimate. I applied to the next job, which was also on a medical topic, and that was how I discovered he was trying to have freelancers do college papers for students.
Anyway, if a freelancer is writing college entrance essays, basically they are allowing the rich (who can afford to pay freelancers) to get into college and discriminating against the poor (who may be better writers but will not be able to compete against a college graduate). How sad is that. Furthermore, they will be allowing a disproportionate number of cheaters into the college system. These cheaters, it can be expected, will continue to cheat throughout college and will never learn anything (like how to write for themselves).
So, my question is, when we get to that point - what happens when all the educated people (who had been covering for the uneducated but wealthy) die? Who will write papers then? What will happen to all that knowledge that did not get passed on to the next generation because they were too busy cheating to learn it?
Maybe that is the real reason all the empires of the past fell.
Monday, August 11, 2014
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Let the Buyer (or Freelance Employer) Beware! Part 2
Now, I was actually in contact with the next employer. But, as you probably know if you have been following me for any length of time, I am not a salesman. My work sells itself. If you don't like my work, don't hire me.
Now, for this particular job, I was listed in the top three on Guru. I was pretty sure I had underbid the top two, though because I offer long- and short- rates. My long-term rates (if you let me work your project into my schedule) are cheap. My short term rates are probably average for Guru (low for the professional world).
So, I waited... and waited... I needed the job ASAP to consider it a long-term job and still get it done on the employer's deadline. And, then the job went to someone else. This person claimed to have an MBA in English, but he has only had one other job on Guru and no feedback. Now, I initially thought, wow, he beats me. But then I decided to give it the bologna sausage (B.S.) test. Why? Because he claimed to be an award winning editor - while editing his college newspaper and working on his Masters.
The more in investigated, the more my suspicions rose - first he lists his GPA. In order to remain in any Master's program, you must get A's and B's, therefore listing your GPA is slightly redundant. Second, when I checked out the newspaper, he was not listed as editor-in-chief during any of the years he said he worked on it. Third, the award he said he received earning his Masters, is only given to juniors and seniors (read undergraduates).
He says he graduated in 2011. Presumably, this means he was a senior (cough, cough - assuming perhaps he was doing an accelerated program that gave him his B.A. and M.A. at once) in 2011. Now, he did not receive the award in 2011. I was able to find the name of the person who did. I was also able to find archives for the student newspaper where he worked - His name did not appear on any of the articles from 2006 until the present. The person who won in 2011 had several articles attributed to her.
So, I went back and looked at his profile again, and it suddenly became glaringly obvious that he did not even arrange the paragraphs in a logical order. He jumped from his graduation backward and forward to present day. He also repeated himself - perhaps he neglected to edit.
Freelancers (self-publishing authors/ traditional publishing authors)- don't lie. Someone like me who is a little more heartless could expose you. I could have named names in both my examples, but that is not my intent. Be honest - eventually you will lose if you aren't. I quickly rose above example #1 in rank and have never been close to him since. There is a reason. No matter how cheap nor how much he mixes sausage with bologna, my work will always stand above his because I am honest.
Employers - please check out the "facts" listed on freelancer profiles. I cannot tell you how many people post complaints about freelancers on the Answers page at Guru. Just within the past week, one company discovered that the freelancer they hired not only gave them a bad website design, but also had plagiarized their own website design from another site. All it takes is a little research to save you much lost time and money.
Now, for this particular job, I was listed in the top three on Guru. I was pretty sure I had underbid the top two, though because I offer long- and short- rates. My long-term rates (if you let me work your project into my schedule) are cheap. My short term rates are probably average for Guru (low for the professional world).
So, I waited... and waited... I needed the job ASAP to consider it a long-term job and still get it done on the employer's deadline. And, then the job went to someone else. This person claimed to have an MBA in English, but he has only had one other job on Guru and no feedback. Now, I initially thought, wow, he beats me. But then I decided to give it the bologna sausage (B.S.) test. Why? Because he claimed to be an award winning editor - while editing his college newspaper and working on his Masters.
The more in investigated, the more my suspicions rose - first he lists his GPA. In order to remain in any Master's program, you must get A's and B's, therefore listing your GPA is slightly redundant. Second, when I checked out the newspaper, he was not listed as editor-in-chief during any of the years he said he worked on it. Third, the award he said he received earning his Masters, is only given to juniors and seniors (read undergraduates).
He says he graduated in 2011. Presumably, this means he was a senior (cough, cough - assuming perhaps he was doing an accelerated program that gave him his B.A. and M.A. at once) in 2011. Now, he did not receive the award in 2011. I was able to find the name of the person who did. I was also able to find archives for the student newspaper where he worked - His name did not appear on any of the articles from 2006 until the present. The person who won in 2011 had several articles attributed to her.
So, I went back and looked at his profile again, and it suddenly became glaringly obvious that he did not even arrange the paragraphs in a logical order. He jumped from his graduation backward and forward to present day. He also repeated himself - perhaps he neglected to edit.
Freelancers (self-publishing authors/ traditional publishing authors)- don't lie. Someone like me who is a little more heartless could expose you. I could have named names in both my examples, but that is not my intent. Be honest - eventually you will lose if you aren't. I quickly rose above example #1 in rank and have never been close to him since. There is a reason. No matter how cheap nor how much he mixes sausage with bologna, my work will always stand above his because I am honest.
Employers - please check out the "facts" listed on freelancer profiles. I cannot tell you how many people post complaints about freelancers on the Answers page at Guru. Just within the past week, one company discovered that the freelancer they hired not only gave them a bad website design, but also had plagiarized their own website design from another site. All it takes is a little research to save you much lost time and money.
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