Helping a student to understand his errors in a project associated with relativistic dynamics during cosmic inflation.
Last night, a segment appeared on an ABC News (investigatory) piece, on high level grad students (including at “Ivy league” schools) hiring professional writers to do their theses or other project reports, term papers etc. One such writer for hire admitted he earned $66,000 last year performing such “services” and he admitted he charged up to $2,000 to write a 170-page thesis. He stated to David Muir that his thesis-for-hire repertoire "covered all topics", and he did his work to ensure no chicanery would be evident or easily uncovered.
Muir collected six profs from Hofstra University, and handed out copies of research papers and asked the profs to ascertain which one was the fraudulent effort, e.g. not done by the student himself. All but one of them chose the wrong paper. Even running the papers through plagiarism check software didn’t help and brought up zilch.
One student interviewed (with face obviously concealed) admitted he did it but couldn’t afford not to in order to “get ahead”. He said he knew personally at least ten other students who also hired academic “ghosts” to do their hefty, time-consuming work for them. I guess, why….so they could spend more time on Facebook or Twitter?
Another student admitted her mom actually provided her with an allowance to seek out such help. Help? Are you effing kidding me? It is one thing to help a student on a research project, as I’ve often done, it’s another to do it for them!
This begs the question of exactly what these students are getting out of their so-called education, and what they think education is. Having someone else get educated in your stead? How are they mastering the given task at hand by ditching the work and letting another write their papers, theses?
When a prof assigns a project, for example, he expects it to be an extension of the learning process. It is designed to allow the student to learn an aspect of a complex process or theory by actually working it through.
As a case in point, when teaching at Harrison College in the late 1980s I always assigned a physics project. One in particular was based on computing a model planetary orbit using a few starting parameters (for position, velocity and acceleration) and then obtaining the entire model orbit from the appropriate differential equations. (Students not fully familiar with differential equations were permitted to use finite difference methods).
At the outset, all the students were somewhat puzzled as to how to proceed to generate subsequent points in the orbit. Once they were familiarized with the process of mathematical iteration – using a previous point and equation to generate a new one – it became second nature.
One student did her project so meticulously and completely, including a beautiful computer-generated elliptical orbit, that I had the work published in The Journal of the Barbados Astronomical Society.
As a result of the project, all the students in my physics class learned first hand about gravitational dynamics for an orbiting body, including the role of centripetal acceleration and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. They obtained this by actually working on a problem as opposed to merely studying a book or some equations referenced therein.
Now, would having someone else do this for them translate into the same benefit? Hardly! (Assuming they could even find such a person!) Plus, they’d have denied themselves the total pleasure of discovery and that ‘Aha!’ or “Eureka!” moment that accompanies the final breakthrough to getting a concrete result.
A Masters or Ph.D. thesis is even more critically a demonstration of mastery over the subject in a research area. Indeed, it is the thesis which defines one’s competence to have performed original research in a selected specialist area. If one has another write his thesis, he’s demonstrated neither mastery of the research area nor originality, and hence doesn’t merit the degree. It is just as fraudulent as one obtained from a diploma mill – even if obtained at Harvard, Brown or Yale.
My thesis on the relation of a specific type of solar flare to sunspot morphology took nearly four years to complete (two part time, two full time) and topped out at nearly 400 pages including: 1) more than 12 sub-investigations, 2) twenty two observational tables and a dozen photographs, 3) and an extensive Appendix documenting: a) all the sunspot group profiles entered into the data (including areas by date, heliographic location, change in area and magnetic class), b) the computer program used to obtain energy parameters, c) mathematical derivation of the magnetic free energy equation from Maxwell’s equations, and d) synoptic maps showing the positions of the sunspot groups analyzed by way of solar Carrington rotation.
The thesis yielded no less than five research papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including Solar Physics (4), e.g. see: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k5168403190u1386/
and The Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (1), e.g. see: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1983JRASC..77..203S
The DOING of the thesis enabled me to attain a mastery in a very esoteric area of solar physics that related sunspot magnetic and area changes to a type of geo-effective flare associated with sudden ionospheric disturbances. Had I not done the work myself, I’d have denied myself that mastery of the field and received merely a piece of paper …..degree….for nothing.
The issue here isn’t about “getting ahead” it’s about fraud and total contempt for the integrity of the educational experience. Those students who’d stoop to hiring phoney authors for their papers, projects, theses have no remote inkling what education is about – viewing it merely as a handy utility to help them make money.
What they forget, or perhaps never cared about in the first place, is that such exploitative and self-serving tactics are exactly the opposite of the ancient standards for the "Good life" by which a life is lived nobly - and in good conduct - toward fulfillment of excellence. No one who has another write something as significant a thesis (for major credit toward fulfilling a graduate degree) has the slightest inkling of either living a noble life, or the pursuit of excellence, irrespective of how much money they may earn in their lifetime arising from their cheating to "get ahead'. Or how much time they believe they saved by dodging their own responsibilities. The truth is, no matter what overly paid job they attained, or "success" - they actually received no education at all. In that sense, they're every bit as mentally impoverished as they were before they entered the hallowed halls of ivy.
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