(2010-11-15) Contract College Paper Writing

The "ShadowScholar" explains his way to Make Money: write papers for College Education (and High School) students. I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. (Cheating)

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid. For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top. As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them.

Zungu Zungu notes how this points to the stupidity of the college process. I want to suggest that this person’s existence is simply a symptom of a basically misguided approach to what paper Writing is. If you treat a paper in objective terms, as simply a thing the student conjures up magically from the bowels of their laptop, you make this sort of counterfeit easy. The easiest way for a professor to assign papers is to remove him or herself from the process, to simply say “here’s the assignment, turn it in on this date.” Which is the logic of capitalist production: you specify what you want and when you want it, but by removing yourself from the process of production, you get to transform the labor of paper writing into a monetary transaction, de-socializing and de-contextualizing the object of production. Students produce the Commodity (the paper) and you pay them for it (in a grade), and whatever happens in the middle goes blissfully unexamined... (Changing the process) takes work on the part of the professor, of course. And part of the problem is that in those enormous classes so beloved of education-as-commodity minded administrators, it becomes very difficult to be involved in students’ writing processes.