I got an email from my mother today:
Mike,
This is circulating all around universities as we speak. Do you think it’s true?
Follow the link. It’s worth it. Even if you don’t care about the education system, cheating, or ethics, you should read it because it’s a beautiful piece of writing. Ed Dante, a person who gets paid for writing papers for students in college, weaves a scathing critique of the education system around a story about shadow writing a graduate-level business ethics thesis. Here is my response to my mother (unedited, untouched, with some information redacted for privacy; I wanted it to be a representative to my initial reaction):
That guy is an incredible writer. First comment on the article sums it up: “Wow.”
I believe every word he said. Every last one. I really do think that our education system is failing a lot of people, directly and indirectly. Directly – those students who stand to gain nothing from a system so rigid it cannot flex to accommodate them, because they are incompatible with its image, lack the necessary mental prerequisites to succeed, and are neither motivated intrinsically – through self-interest – nor extrinsically – through grades. The ESL and incompetent people he writes about fall in this category. Indirectly – those people who get pushed down the food chain when the privileged are granted a free ride through the education system and subsequently up the workforce chain because they fit the normative idea of a successful person – the privileged being the rich lazy rich kids he writes for.
The question educators should be asking themselves is not, “Is cheating this pervasive?” Nor is it, “How do we catch the cheaters?” I imagine most will indeed fall back to the conventional method underlying these questions, which is to analyze and fight the symptoms of an issue and forget around the source. Reacting in this way means you’ve completely missed the point of his essay. Think of it in the way Hemingway framed his writing on his iceberg principle. For every 3/8ths of an iceberg showing above water, there’s 5/8ths below water. The content of Ed Dante’s writing outlines his experience interacting with the top 3/8ths of the iceberg – the problem you can see. The overarching, or, in the name of puns, underlying message, though, is one of the 5/8ths; the superficial top of the iceberg wouldn’t even show itself if the other 5/8ths didn’t exist. Focus on the tip of the iceberg and you will certainly miss a majority of its mass.
People are starting to realize the shortcomings of our education system. Some are seeing how education is largely self-contained and merely trains students to pass entrance exams while looking good on applications. Others recognize how the entrance exam system benefits some more than others.
Unfortunately, while some do see problems, often educators will not acknowledge them. I showed [redacted] this video featuring Ken Robinson. He criticizes the fundamental attributes of the Western education system. A lot of his ideas can easily be criticized themselves, but honestly it’s a step outside of a box that’s failing a lot of students out there. In turn, she presented some of the ideas to the local educators out here in [redacted]. They shit on these ideas, offering superficial cries of “but we have such great technology here, look at the classrooms!” and such. Technology, up to this point, has merely been a band-aid on a hemorrhaging wound. It really hasn’t revolutionized anything, besides perhaps the accessibility of knowledge. But the paradigm of education remains the same.
You know, once I had this conversation with some people at Notre Dame. I told them I’d rather get an “F” in a class than cheat on assignment, paper, or exam. That is, I wouldn’t cheat in order to avoid an “F”. I don’t believe my response to their question really says much about my ethical fortitude. It just says something really simple: my upbringing, abilities, and mindset fits within the educational paradigm (although loosely, I’ll admit). I could easily say, “yeah, I wouldn’t cheat to avoid the failing grade,” because I knew I’d never need to do that. I did well in school, and it wasn’t hard at all.
So, what about those people who don’t fit so nicely within the system? Sure, some of them might just be dirty, rotten cheaters, but we know from Dante’s essay that this is not necessarily the case. Can we really blame them for cheating? Or do we blame ourselves?
