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[eirias]

Tales of a term-paper miller

One thing that's interesting about this business is that it gives the lie to typical moralizing about plagiarism. Ordinarily, teachers equate plagiarism with theft: use of a person's words without attribution is implied to mean use without permission. But the whole business model here is that the student pays the author for rights to an entirely new paper, which the student may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with his own name. The original author is undeceived. Theft is not the true nature of the crime.

In other fields, of course, this is common practice: everything produced by the government is either ghost-written or has no author, and nobody comments about intellectual dishonesty there. But it also exists within academia, specifically in rec-letter culture, where it is not uncommon for teachers to ask their students to write their own letters, which the teachers may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with their own names. I don't see much difference between this and the above, but I've seen professors go to strange lengths to defend the one practice and not the other. (Fortunately, none of my own mentors has ever been this crass.)

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, the real issue isn't theft, but fraud. Sometimes it is fraud and theft, but mainly it is fraud. A term paper is designed to show that the student is competent in the material. A ghost-written term paper simply does not do that. A letter of recommendation is not designed to do that; it is designed to get a recommendation from the teacher about the student. Having the student write it is often done to help the teacher remember any specifics or accomplishments they may otherwise forget, and if they are honest they will not sign it but will modify as needed if they do not agree with it and will sign something they agree with. If they send a recommendation that is true and what they agree with, then there's no real fraud involved. Nobody cares about proving whether or not the teacher can write a letter of recommendation, just about the qualifications of the person being recommended.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

It's true that the evaluate-the-author aspect is absent from rec letters. I think that is a huge part of what makes writing-for-class so weird: it is so different from what real writers do.

But there are two other things in play with rec letters: 1) the source of the praise matters quite a lot -- having a rec letter from a bigwig is much more meaningful than having one from a no-name person, and the implication I take from that is that Bigwig's opinion, and not just his signature, is what matters; 2) the person being recommended is never supposed to see the letter -- though recommendees have a legal right to see what is in their files, they are expected to waive this right, and risk being summarily dismissed from further consideration if they do not. The reason given for this is the desire for the recommender's objective view of the student, untainted by any social pressure, and it's hard to see how a student-penned letter fills that need.

It's true that the professor can edit the rec letter... but so can the term-paper purchaser. I think that if you maintain that editing makes it no longer plagiarism, you wind up in weird territory: how much editing is enough to make the ideas your own?

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, the point is if you are giving the letter of recommendation you didn't write but fully agree with, then you are giving the recommendation - it is your belief. And the only important thing is that you believe what you send. Whereas with the paper, it is important that it is your work. So, with the letter of recommendation, as long as you fully endorse whatever you send (so whatever amount of editing is needed for it to be true to your beliefs whether that is none or tons) is what is needed to make it ethical. And as the recommendee does not not know how much editing was done, the lack of knowledge still even holds.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I think the real question is, Would you give the same weight to a letter written by the student about herself as you would to an identical letter written by her mentor? Personally, I would not. (Of course, knowing this custom means that in practice, I'm going to assign a weight of 0 to any rec letters I have to read -- I think they're a pretty broken system, where data integrity is concerned. So I will actually wind up weighting them the same, trivially so.)

Another interesting twist -- suppose the student purchases a rec letter on one of these sites? I presume they are for sale. Would it make you queasy if the prof signed that instead?

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yes. I would give them equal weight. Where I think the weighting should be is on how honest the recommender is and how scrupulous that person is on only using a letter they agree with. But even if they wrote it themselves, it could be bunk if they feel a need to give a glowing recommendation to anyone who asks. And someone who has a student write their own letter, but only uses it if they truly agree with it and modifies it if they don't would be a much better recommendation than the fully original but less honest recommendation.

Now you can claim that if the student writes the letter it is likely to be less honest, and we could study that issue to see if it is true, but I'm not sure that it is. I think I'd be worried about writing too positive a letter if I were writing my own recommendation and having the person reject it and then need to write their own while being annoyed with me for making more work for them. So, a student written one might be more honest.

[narya.livejournal.com]

At least at the level of academia, it seems like a good letter is essentially a zero but something even vaguely negative in there is a minus. Or at least that's the impression I've gotten when my mom is reading them.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

The issue I have with this is that students and teachers are likely to see different things, and the recipient of the letter is likely interested in the teacher's perspective. The teacher can agree that the student's letter is true, but that doesn't mean it tells the same story that a teacher-written letter would have. And, of course, more likely, the teacher is busy and doing this to save time and is not deeply interested in the details.

[leora.livejournal.com]

That's fair, but I think that comes back to the integrity of the teacher to make sure the recommendation well reflects what they want it to. But I think the important element is that, not who wrote it. In theory, the student written letter could be a great reflection of what the teacher thinks and sees. In reality, it probably isn't, which is why the teacher should modify it as needed, although I think it's fine to use a student written one for inspiration. But from a moral standpoint, I just don't think the problem has anything to do with who wrote it, but what information it conveys, and that makes it fundamentally different from the term paper example.

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

I know that some of those practices you have described in academia are considered by some to be "common" or maybe even "accepted." However in my own academic upbringing I was specifically taught each of those practices are wrong. On occasion as a student or post-doc I produced material which I personally expected to be accredited to a team or my advisor/boss, but each time great pains were taken to get me credit. That was a great lesson.

The lesson I got has always been that proper credit is thanking someone for a job well done. That's what I teach my students. Most of them identify better with the idea of thanking and being thanked and how that applies to the golden rule rather than ethical obligation.

I'll admit that I tend to look down my nose at others in academia who don't feel the same way about the role personal integrity should play in all aspects of their professional and personal lives.

students can write their own rec letters?

[cynic51.livejournal.com]

And this doesn't ring anyone's ethics alarm bells? Like every single one of them?

If the person giving the reference has to ask someone else to write it, then they are not able to be a valid reference. The whole point is that they write it on their perceptions of the recommendee. If they don't know the person well enough to do that, they can't give a valid reference. And if they're really busy? If they desire to give a recommendation for someone they like, they'll be able to take 20 minutes to do so; if they can't be bothered to clear up that little time why did they agree to write the recommendation in the first pace.

Re: students can write their own rec letters?

[eirias.livejournal.com]

And this doesn't ring anyone's ethics alarm bells? Like every single one of them?

I agree with you, but clearly this sentiment is not universal ;).

Re: students can write their own rec letters?

[cognative.livejournal.com]

You could think of a rec letter more like a contract. It doesn't matter who originally wrote it, as long as the person signing it agrees with the terms.

Though I do think having students write their own letter is a dubious practice. I can't imagine a good letter coming out of it.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Funny - it was never present as theft to me. Intellectual property/copyright infringement, perhaps, on occasion. But that's not theft either. To me, it was always decried as fraud.

As mentioned above - academic work is meant to illustrate the depth of knowledge a student possesses. The goal is to assess the writer's familiarity with the topic and ability to present information. Hiring on someone else to do it entirely defeats the purpose of the essay.

The goal of a letter of recommendation, on the other hand, is to give an impression of the individual being recommended. If the prof giving the recommendation concurs with the self-assessment, their signature is all the letter needs. If the prof disagrees, then they shouldn't be signing the letter, and are committing fraud too if they do. It's a rather different ethical consideration - in both cases, it is the student being assessed, never really the professor, so the prof is not actually misrepresenting him or herself, whereas the student most certainly is.

Also, I continue to find it hilarious that even people who studied the humanities insist that it's certainly worse to be a poet in a science class than a scientist in a poetry class.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Also, I continue to find it hilarious that even people who studied the humanities insist that it's certainly worse to be a poet in a science class than a scientist in a poetry class.

I double-majored in math and classics at an engineering school.

I have complex feelings on this issue. I don't think "hilarity" is one of them. Even so, I think the statement is all too often right.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I was CompSci/German, m'self. "hilarious" might not be exactly the word, but it's more positive than "irritating." I took poetry, and history, I wrote verse and code. They're different, but neither one is inherently "harder" unless you decide it should be.

Some people lean more to the humanities, some to the sciences, but this impression that being a right-brain (if you'll pardon outdated terminology) student in a left-brain class is so much more deadly than being a left-brain student in a right-brain class.... I hate it. It implies either that the rigor in the humanities is lacking, or that somehow study of the hard sciences is intellectually superior to study of anything else.

I know schools that offer Basic Math For English Majors. I don't know schools that offer Basic English For Science Majors. It implies bad things about the humanities, and untrue things about the sciences.

The way classes work in different disciplines is, of course, a divergence. They're very different approaches, but they're equally alien when you're coming from outside the discipline and ignorant/afraid of it.

[cos]

Huh, weird. I never thought that was the main moral argument about plagiarism. I always thought it was about the fact that you're passing something off as your own when it's not, thus deceiving the person reading/rating/judging/whatever into thinking they're reading your words. I guess when you get down to single phrases or ways of expressing an idea, when it becomes acceptable to quote without attribution unless the turn of phrase is particularly unusual, then that objection recedes and the issue of permission comes to the foreground. But usually when I think of plagiarism I think of entire paragraphs at least.