Bozos in the Ignorance Business

This blog could also go in the "Labyrinth and the Garden,"
but I'll put it here, since it involves academic misadventures, fortunately not my own. The labyrinth of The Great Academic Cheating Machine, though, is a sewer where the scum hang out, justifying their rottenness with ignorant, exalted claims. I could also title this Blog, "Bozos in the Bullshit Business."

My wife recently referred me to a website called "Asian Grade" and printed out its manifesto, which harps self-defensively on the theme that term papers are a waste of time for the students, are never read anyway by professors, and are a sign that any professor who assigns one has "no fucking idea" what to teach. Their idea of a good "lesson" is a Power-Point presentation. For awhile, I avoided reading the manifesto because I knew it would just make me angry. But, I succumbed. And it did. And here's my response.

The creators of the site (I'll leave you to find it and read the manifesto for yourself) are self-righteous about their enterprise, but Asian Grade, for all its chummy, pretentious rhetoric, is just another arrogant, sleazy example of the Great Academic Cheating Machine.

In the interest of persuading desperate students to download the free papers, Asian Grade doesn't tell the real truth. Professors do generally read term papers, and they can detect the plagiarized, or canned/purchased paper pretty quickly. The student who ventures to submit such a paper risks getting no credit (he or she doesn't deserve any for their smart-aleck attempt to hoodwink the prof), but more than that, he or she risks being regarded as ignorant, incompetent, insecure, arrogant (they consider themselves above the law), or just plain lazy. Perhaps they risk academic probation (and a permanent notation on their academic record), or, if the student has tried this trick before and been caught, expulsion from the institution. Contrary to popular belief, schools do take cheating seriously.

The good students do not, generally (there are always exceptions, of course), purchase or plagiarize. They either don't need to, or they're willing to put in the effort to think, organize, work out ideas, discover new depths of creativity in themselves--these are, after all, the point of writing assignments--or just follow the path of intellectual integrity. They take pride in their achievement, not in simply being able to pull the wool over someone's eyes.

Asian Grade is the most egregious example I've seen of a Cheating Machine website taking the stance of a Robin Hood, fighting for the poor, oppressed student suffering from meaningless assignments by bored professors who are lousy teachers and would be out the door if they didn't have tenure. The manifesto writers (never mind that the blog piece is embarrassingly written for an act of public communication) are really self-serving charlatans, claiming to perform an exalted act of liberation--to bring down the tradition of the pointless, mindless term paper.

I'm trying to imagine what would happen in a music department if a student tried to avoid an end-of-semester recital (which is the equivalent of a term paper) by substituting a recording, or by being conned into believing that the music teachers won't be listening anyway, or getting someone else in to play the recital.

Perhaps, if there's a failure on the part of professors, it's not explaining why they give writing assignments. (After all, contrary to the canard insisted on by the Asian Grade team--that professors don't read the papers--professors spend good time going over the papers and consider them an important part of the learning process.) I mentioned above a couple of reasons why they might be valuable--the reasons will certainly vary from discipline to discipline. But they must include, at the very most basic level, the practice in finding and integrating information, perhaps critiquing it, putting ideas into a coherent form (the corporate world is on record that the quality of written communication among college graduates is consistently dismal). The writing practice, in and of itself, can be worth the effort of putting together a term paper. Good writing is one key to success; bad writing may not guarantee failure, but in today's competitive world, I would think a person would want to give him or herself every possible chance. Good writing also implies other qualities: a sloppy, lazy writer appears careless, indifferent, shallow, and generally willing to cut corners, or incapable of the kind of sustained attention to coherence and detail that are required for any kind of success.

It's wrong of the various members of the Great Academic Cheating Machine to pretend that they're doing students a favor. In fact, they're lying to students and exploiting them: professors aren't stupid or gullible, though they are often willing to give a student in a jam a little extra time and/or answer questions, or look over drafts. The students might get "that piece of paper" (i.e., their degree), but the inadequacies they've created for themselves by cheating will be exposed at some point. There's a better than excellent chance that a student who buys or plagiarizes a paper will get no credit or a failing grade. And professors don't necessarily have to "prove" that the student deliberately cheated. A canned paper sets off the professor's innate alarm. If Google doesn't yield results quickly, the professor can always figure out why the paper is a failure; students ignorant, desperate, or cynical enough (the Asian Grade gang is profoundly cynical) to cheat generally aren't competent enough to know whether what they're submitting is flawed, and a professor can shred it pretty much at will.

The Asian Grade Gang is offensively anti-intellectual. Their manifesto is too much like the bozos in grade school who considered the smart kids "nerds" and ridiculed them for getting good grades. Intelligence, hard work, honest effort are re-branded as stupidly falling prey to meaningless exercises. This is a form of intellectual thuggery.

The Asian Grade Cheating Machine Gang is offensive and cynical in yet another way: they're either Asians themselves, or they're trading on the hopes and ambitions of Asians, in which case they're racists. It's like saying, "We know you Asians need this lousy help, and you're dumb enough to fall for our lies." They're saying to all students, "Come on--you'll never make it without cheating." On the one hand, they're trading on people who come to America for a "Western" education, but then luring them into exactly the behavior that undermines what is best about American education: the development of a critical and analytical mindset. You get this from writing term papers, no matter what the Asian Gang tells you about the meaninglessness of such projects.

Get an honest job, Asian Grade. If professors get cynical, you're one of the reasons.