Thursday, December 24, 2015

We Are Role Models for Evil!

I stumbled across this on the internet.  I was pretty flattered to see this:
Under this assignment, you should work through all of these questions and then present the topic as you would in a final work, i.e. talk about the concept first and then present the cases (remember how Cohen or Saideman/Auerswald presented their work!).
But then I checked out the website: it is a paper mill!!!  They take students' paper assignments and write papers for students for $$.  What started out as a cool feeling that our work was being used as a model for papers turned into a sick realization that our work was being used to evil....  for students to dodge their own assignments by paying someone else to do it for them.

I tried to find the course for which this paper was assigned.  I didn't find any smoking guns, but it might have been assigned by the European Institute for Public Administration.

What started out as an early Christmas present turned into an ewwwwwwww.   Ick. 

Anyhow, as I have said here and on radio lately, anything can be used for good or evil: pop culture references, the force, etc. So too, apparently can our style of presentation.  Damn.  Can I blame el Nino and climate change?  Nope, because students cheating is as old as education, and paper mills existed long before the internet.  Alas.

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