If you have a few minutes today, read this incredibly entertaining, and depressing, article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The unnamed author recounts his tale of writing thousands of papers for cheating college students interested in paying top dollar for his work. He writes:
"In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper.
I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting...I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else."
Ed Dante (his psuedonym) goes on to recount his experience working for an online company that produces essays for college and graduate students at a price. In witty prose, he recounts writing 75 page papers in two days, email correspondences with college students whose English prose makes text messaging lingo look like Shakespeare, and making top dollar for writing essays for nursing students, education students, business ethics students, and (my favorite) seminary students.
Read the article.
It's astounding how pervasive cheating has become in higher ed as well as in high schools across the US. One must ask the question, "Why?" The most obvious answer is that people will pay. Laziness rules. But how could literally thousands of our most educated be so comfortable with an obvious ethical volcano?
Universities like my own alma mater practiced "the honor code," which was supposed to stem student cheating. But the fact of the matter is that we live in a pluralistic society that has very little basis for absolute ethics. And we live in an academic system that prizes good grades and "achievement" over more foundational matters of right and wrong.
This will be a common theme on this blog. What does it mean to educate? Can a person truly be educated without knowing right from wrong?
I wonder what the shadow scholar would say....
Great (shocking, scary) article Jeff. I'm appreciating your thoughtful posts, including this one. Another contributing factor to the pervasive lack of ethics among students, which also stems from skirting the reality of right and wrong, is the examples that students follow. Check out chapter 1 of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book, Freakonomics, which discusses incentives and cheating, and how some schoolteachers are the unscrouplulous culprits. If a person cannot be truly educated without knowing right from wrong, then neither can they be a true educator – or at least not an educator in the truth who achieve’s Milton’s end of redeeming and repairing the ruined world by regaining the knowledge of God.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, Dallas Willard is making the exact same point of this blog post in one of his new books I'm reading called "Knowing Christ Today: Why we can trust spiritual knowledge." He recounts that one of the basic worldview questions is "what makes me a good person" and shows how the educational and political systems in the West have stopped asking this question in lieu of more "utilitarian" questions....
ReplyDeleteTo Mark: I've seen Freakonomics on the shelf, but haven't yet picked it up. But I'd agree: when did we go wrong and divorce right and wrong from the educational process. Secularists and Christians say they educate for "character," but how is this done without a plumbline?
ReplyDeleteTo Dave: Willard mentioned some of this at the Kern retreat as well. He outlines how modern society has moved ethics, right and wrong, from the realm of knowledge to the realm of value, or opinion. If there's no knowledge of right or wrong, just opinions, then why the outrage at such a character like the Shadow Scholar? Good thoughts, buddy.