I am honoured to present another great guest post by our good friend, The Male Brain, who has very kindly taken it upon himself to translate from the original Hebrew an article about why universities and schools permit students to cheat. Indeed, they actually NEED them to do so, because the profit motive gives them a very powerful incentive for it. My thanks as always to our good friend for taking the time to enlighten us – this is a subject in which he has real-world personal experience, as well, so this is a topic of great interest to him.
Why the academia needs students to cheat and why the oversight board looks the other way (money and jobs)
Intro by Dawn Pine
This article is translated from an Israeli website, but is relevant to most countries, so I believe. I’ve been part of this industry in my past, as I have done my share of writing papers for students. It’s not a part of my history that I’m proud of.
I have seen on Captain Capitalism’s website commercials for this for almost a decade. If you look it up you’ll see multiple websites, persons and corporations catering that market.
So why is it getting traction? Let’s see.
The Original Article by Noga Brienes
(Link to the original, in Hebrew)
According to the Council For Higher Education (CHE) there are currently 336,330 students in 59 colleges and universities in Israel [TMB – Israel is a nation of 9 million people]. If any of those students does an online search for the term “A guide to writing a seminary”, they’ll reach dozens of websites offering to write his degree – solving homework problems in all classes, writing thesis and even PhD work. It’s only a matter of money. Some of those websites aim at high school, or abroad. Summing up all those numbers gets us into the 7 digit potential market.
That’s nice
It’s actually an industry
Not legal, but unregulated and with no penalties.
When is the first IPO? Maybe it’s time that the pension funds invest in this lucrative industry? The industry not only helps students snatch their degree, but it also employs students! They are righteous people. They probably have one or two admins and the rest are freelancers. Why pay benefits if you can “not pay” it.
[TMB – that’s partly true. Most of the industry that I knew where a one man operation, but some do use freelancers and focus on the sales and marketing].
If we have a market of over a million potential customers, and the CHE which cares a lot about higher education, and there are 59 higher education institutes that some even do research… Maybe we can find research papers about who buys, how many are caught, how many are put on trial and where.
Are there any research papers on this?
I looked it up and found Ofer Katchergin’s paper on students impersonating disabled persons. The research paper [TMB – Hebrew article] positions it as part of the local cultural climate, that belittles effort on the one hand, and focuses on “success at all cost” on the other. That climate reinforces systemic trends of avoiding responsibilities in education, which the impersonation is only a private case of. I also found a paper [TMB – Hebrew article] of Dr. Ohela Gross Avinir and Dr. Adia Meirovich on the evolution of personal integrity of students during their degree which concludes “cheating evolves during the academic years. On the one hand, the academic experience legitimizes plagiarism, but on the other hand does not positively affect the student moral-ethical perception”.
Ouch, that is not why parents insist the kid goes to college.
Moreover, there is a 2017 State Comptroller and Ombudsman report [TMB – Again, in Hebrew], looking at 2010-2015, which is like the 20th century given the latest Covid years ramping up the numbers of students, and the Internet evolution of online accessibility and secure payments for companies helping to cheat the academia. For starters, the reports provides many examples of how higher education institutes exempt staff who lie, deceive and harass even though it borders criminal behavior. The institutions avoid disciplinary acts even when it a plagiarism or selectively filtering unwanted data, as well as theft, fraud… Well, the academy practices “my brother keeper”, but they’ll probably be harsh with the students, right?
WRONG
Some of the procured papers are master’s thesis and PhD, so when one says “students” it also means “colleagues” and like any group, people watch over their own. The report also shows that even if there is a minimum obligatory penalty, the actual punishment is less severe. As the tribunal are staff who want their students to complete their degree.
If that wasn’t enough, there is no follow through; Criminal acts are not reported to the police – such as forging documents and computer hacks, and even if the academy does go against one of the corrupted corporations writing papers for students, the police and the prosecution burry the case.
The report was published in 2017, following that the CHE decided to right the wrongs.
Since then? They probably went all in on it, put the effort and resources and they were adamant about eliminating the phenomenon.
NO.
5 YEARS AND NOTHING.
Why? Because it is a hot potato no one wants to hold, and every stakeholder in the government and academia has something to lose by promoting and backing up the academic ethics.
Allegedly, the main goal of any university is to provide quality education and advancing professional excellence. However, like any other for-profit the goal is to preserve and increase income – get as many students as possible, in any stage, in more faculties and if possible in associate degrees and arrangements with organization bringing in more head count – the more the merrier. More students – more tuition and state budget per capita, thus creating more jobs, with higher pay, more influence, and the ability to dispense PhDs to our “birds of a feather”, cut ribbons and go abroad for all those important conferences.
If an institution wants to spend time on judging and booting students for cheating, they’ll need first to spend money on committees and legal to deal with it. Next thing they are going to lose students. How many will they lose? There is no research on the quantity of cheaters, but based on the amount of actors in the field of “academic assistance” (some of which also help with online tests) that there is a market and money on the table. Even if some of those actors are dummy companies, and the works are duplicated [TMB – Been there, done that] across several companies. There is still a large amount of them, and likely there are more hanging on bulletin boards physically in the institutions.
Trial means expulsion or suspension. If students can’t cheat, they might fail and leave. Students churn means loos of student tuition and state revenue, which corresponds with less staff and so on. What is the administrative board made of? Lecturers, deans and a few managers who love to show off how they contribute to society. After all, less students equals potential loos of job and later on maybe others as well. No No No. Let’s not rock the boat and keep our head in the sand by ignoring cheating, what’s the harm?
It harms us all.
First and foremost, government provides additional pay for additional education [TMB – In Israel it can be substantial, sometimes even 30%]. How many raises did government employees who bought their degrees? We can’t say, there is no research. The education as well as the pay raise are both taxpayer money.
Second. What is the quality of service cheaters will provide? If an intelligence officer has bought his degree, doesn’t it make sense to sell state secrets to get money? If an IRS auditor has bought his degree, would they have the mind to go deep into the tax report? If our kid’s teacher bought her degree, what kind of education would our kid get? That cheating is OK [TMB – even without cheating, we don’t have a great opinion on teachers]. Private sector? How many mediocre or worse products and services do we purchase because employees cut corners, after they iron their credit card at the university?
Third, the education budget is overblown unnecessarily since the state funds students who should not be there. They should have been booted on their second or third year, but stayed with a little help from “friends” and cash. The state sponsors faculties and departments that should have no students [TMB – we can think of a few examples].
Fourth, cheating expands the social gap – if you have the money you can pass with no effort. You can even buy good grades, or a PhD. If you can’t spare it, you need to use your own mind and not the best corrupted minds money can buy (if your job is to write papers for students you aren’t an honest person).
One may think that the academia will announce out loud the number of student kicked out or trialed for cheating. After all it is a reputation, and they don’t want people thinking that you can buy your degree. They want their graduates to be perceived as quality persons who busted their ass the right way (reading, writing, thinking and not using the credit card). Only a handful publish it [TMB – The writer provides 3 examples: a college, a university and the Open University].
Maybe the student body is on it? Hell no. Less students means less budget. Also, how many students write papers for their fellow students? The student body would not want to hurt their job. Some of them might be staff, or part of the student body. The student body was busy lately selling their assets for pennies. (TMB – Link in Hebrew. The national student body holds shares at a travel agency. They sold some of them – ~12M$ worth – at a discount of 24%, which is more than 3 times the expected discount for a large stock sale).
A whole world of corruption, in a point in time essential to everyone’s life.
What does our degree we had over the last 2 decades (Internet boom years) mean, if one can just swing a credit card and effortlessly buy it? So we studied, crammed, educated and invested. However, our competitor’s resume for the same position has higher GPA, the best that money can buy. All we have is our integrity, because we won’t get the job.
The government is employing an arms race of high-tech workers – as many CS and programmers. That shouldn’t be complicated – just transfer the funds to those companies writing the works.
What’s the point in promoting higher education on the one hand, while the other hand drops the responsibility for quality? So graduates would have bought their final paper online. They can even pass the home interview (buy it from the same website) and waste weeks of employee selection and months of make believe work, all until the new employee will be shown as a genius, in cheating. Actually, that sounds like a good documentary pitch meeting – we can call it “The degree swindler” [TMB – based on “The Tinder Swindler” from Netflix].
Final Thoughts from Dawn Pine
The main problem with journalists (for this article) is the lack of understanding on how the industry works. You cannot just “buy” a thesis. You need to show progress. This means that unless it is a small paper, the process requires involvement of the student with the writer.
However, as most points are true, we can also see what education inflation creates. That is why more and more corporation don’t just rely on degrees. They want to see a portfolio, or an equivalent (e.g. real time show of abilities). Buying the degrees works mostly in the public sector, where no one “cares” about your skills.
Also – most skills don’t come from degrees. I’m an electrical engineer. If an EE uses 20% of his knowledge from his undergrad, he is considered a core R&D person. In my lifetime I hardly used even 10%.
That does not make things right. We are living in a down spiraling society, and this is just another nail in the coffin.
What can we do about it? Be better at both PR and actual abilities. People who bought their degree tend to be less “driven”. That works well to the ethical ones. Also – learn how to present yourself and research the hell out of the company you are interviewing to. E.g, about a decade ago, I went to an interview at a corporation. After the ~40 minutes of questioning, the interviewer asked if I had question. I said yes, and asked why their net profit was down last year after several “good” years. My interviewer, who was a VP, was shocked. No one has ever looked up the Q10 report and analyzed it. I made an impression.
To conclude, even though it looks like an Israeli phenomena, it is probably universal. Focus on what you can do, and accept that the playing ground is not leveled.
Didact’s Thoughts
Once again, my deep gratitude to my good friend for this excellent and thought-provoking contribution to this site. The basic phenomenon outlined here is indeed troubling, and it is indeed common. I have observed repeatedly throughout three different university degrees that there are plenty of people who simply cannot be arsed to do the work, and who skate by, taking the easy route wherever possible.
Worse, those people seem to be rewarded for doing so. They put in minimal to zero effort, they pay other people for their results, and they get good jobs and cushy lifestyles as a result.
This is infuriating to the rest of us, who put in the work and who have actual talent. Believe me, I have seen it enough in my personal, professional, and student lives to understand exactly why people hate it so much. Toward the end of my last degree, I had to watch as people far less experienced and qualified than me, got job offers long before I did – even though I could easily prove that I was smarter and much more polished than any of them.
And yet… the great Benjamin Graham had it right when he astutely observed that, in the short run, the market is a voting machine – but in the long run, it is a weighing machine. This is not an endorsement of democracy, but rather of the cold calculus of the market. It does not take long for the hollowness of an empty suit to show itself, and it does not take much to expose the sheer vapidity of the majority of college graduates and especially MBAs. Those who only speak in buzzwords and cliches, can only last so long before they have to do actual work – and the vast majority of them simply cannot cut it.
As unfair as the system outlined above is – and it is extremely unfair – the fact remains that, in the end, quality wins out. It just doesn’t seem to win out in the fields that truly matter – politics, high finance, and business management – because the incentives in those fields are skewed to favour the most telegenic and politically connected over the actually knowledgeable, wise, and competent among us.\
Eventually, the incompetent among us always expose themselves. Unfortunately, the problem is that they always inflict untold amounts of suffering before they do. And that is the great tragedy of situations like the one faced in Israel – and elsewhere in the world, for this problem is of course far from unique.
1 Comment
Those people are often hand-picked assets of Cabal. They don’t have to be good, just loyal to Cabal. It’s the reason why the same family names keep popping up in so-called circles of success and power. Be grateful they let you have any crumbs at all.