Just seems like a rant from either someone who wants to justify his own cheating/plagiarism or else a ne'er do well who thinks that students doing better than him are all cheating.

Re: the helicopter mom who writes her high schooler's paper is bound to lead to disaster and years of therapy for her child. I highly doubt these urban legends because in all the years of my experience with these schools, I have only met 2 such unhinged parents and their children both left the school. There are plenty of bright children with parents happy to pay tuition to fill any empty seats, so there is no great incentive to keep students having themselves and others.

Anonymous wrote:15:47 is delusional

1. You don't need HPY, you need an out of work english/history major... there are a million of those.
2. Kids are smart enough to take the paper and reword it.
3. Kids don't have writing styles yet, and teachers skim papers while they are drinking wine.
4. Kids can do the check in parts, with minimum work.

Besides, the parents pay tutors and the tutors know how to make it age appropriate, At $85/hr I think some of these term papers cost over $500.

Response #3 alone is sort of a Rorschach result the poster's ignorance and malevolence.

I am going to surmise this is someone who was not strong academically in the humanities (or at all) and told himself/herself that the people getting good grades on papers were doing it because of either (a) cheating; or (b) teacher favoritism. (And sure, jump back to say you're a Harvard grad, champ -- we've heard that before.)

Anonymous wrote:Look, this is all so objective.
I wrote a totally original paper to test how these plagiarism websites work. It gave me almost 40% and showed sites that might have influenced me. Grading papers is a very objective thing. Why is it so difficult to understand that more than one person may had the same thought process.
When a teacher wants to punish a student, the easiest thing to do is to accuse the student of plagiarism. When unable to prove, the student will be accused of not having original ideas. If that fails, the student will be accused of writing in a different style. Again, no proof except for punishing the student with a failing grade.

There is so much cheating and grade inflation/deflation in schools, it's ridiculous.

I think you mean "subjective."

I also have no idea what your point is.

15:47 is delusional

1. You don't need HPY, you need an out of work english/history major... there are a million of those.
2. Kids are smart enough to take the paper and reword it.
3. Kids don't have writing styles yet, and teachers skim papers while they are drinking wine.
4. Kids can do the check in parts, with minimum work.

Besides, the parents pay tutors and the tutors know how to make it age appropriate, At $85/hr I think some of these term papers cost over $500.

So, two things -- first, paying for a paper to be written is not common. With that said, there is cheating at the area schools -- there was probably cheating at your high school too and there will be cheating as long as there are schools.

Here's why "pay for a paper to be written" is not the norm:

1. What you generally get is of extremely low quality, and you would be at a risk of, if not failing on the paper, getting a very low grade. It's not a phalanx of HYP students churning out these papers.

2. There's no guarantee (there's not a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in this biz) that you would be getting an original work. If you get something that has been used before it would be flagged by anti-plagiarism tools such as turnitin.com.

3. In small classes, teachers become familiar with the writing style of their students and something very different from the norm is a red flag.

4. If the assignment is something really big (the "term paper" kind of thing), there's often going to be check-in points during which the student needs to show his/her work and be able to talk intelligently about the research.

Are there unethical practices used with regard to papers? Yes. Most commonly, where the line is crossed is too much help by a paid tutor or a parent (and even then it's generally not being created from whole cloth by the adult). Teachers often pick up on that too -- the writing is more sophisticated/different in tone from what shows up on in-class writing assignments like essays on tests. Many experienced teachers can tell you a story where a parent is complaining about a paper grade and essentially gives away that the parent has written much of the paper and thinks his/her work was not graded highly enough!

I have a friend whose kid started GDS in 9th grade. She told me she HAD to write her kid's research paper because her kid had no idea how to go about it and the teacher was "moving too fast". She seemed annoyed about it but I was flabbergasted. There was no way she was going to let her kid flail so she just went ahead and did the work. She seemed to view it as her duty. I assume this goes on all the time.

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In another time in a city and country far, far away, this would have been called CHEATING. It should result in expulsion. [/quote]

It's called cheating here and now and will result in expulsion, so you can quit clutching your pearls over declining standards and morals. [/quote]

Asked my DC about this last night. Apparently it is quite common at our NW DC private. Kids pay $20 for an essay that gives them a running start on completing the assignment. And they use Mom and Dad's credit card. I was shocked.

[quote=Anonymous]In another time in a city and country far, far away, this would have been called CHEATING. It should result in expulsion. [/quote]

It's called cheating here and now and will result in expulsion, so you can quit clutching your pearls over declining standards and morals.

In another time in a city and country far, far away, this would have been called CHEATING. It should result in expulsion.