"I will take your online college course for you"

Here is the reality of the for-profit online schools. Getting paid to take a course for someone else is turning into an industry. These for-profit online schools are making a mockery of education. Is there any wonder employers do not accept these degrees?

These for-profit online schools could not care less who is really taking the course as long as they get paid. It is nothing more than selling degrees.

The only admission requirement to get into a for-profit online school is the ability to sign a student loan promissory note. Then not only will the person make a low salary, but he will now have his wages garnished for the rest of his life.

 

And how is this applicable only to for-profit schools?

 

This person doesn't say anything about for-profit schools in his/her ad. The same kind of fraud advertised there would be possible at most for-profit and non-profit schools. And as I pointed out in another thread, this sort of thing can happen even at B&M schools.

I agree that the reputation (rightly or wrongly, in many cases rightly) of certain for-profit schools is a bit suspect, but these posts seem like trolling to me.

 

Oh, please! This guy is just flaming and there is no place for that on this board. Can one of the administrators please block him? All serious, intelligent opinions are welcome, but not this garbage.

 

If you can pay someone to take a class at a for-profit school, then you would be able to pay them to take a class online at a traditional B&M school.

 

And since when has writing term papers for B&M students been an industry? 100 years?

 

This sounds very much like a troll. I submit the possibility that the poster of this message also posted the advertisement that he links to.

 

Possibly, there have been services to pay for your term papers in existence for quite some time now... even degree mills have existed for centuries.

 

More easily an issue online, but an issue in B&M classes as well.

Not a profit or not-for profit issue.... seems you are coorelating issues that are not the case for personal reasons.

 

The Sparknotes forums have to be the most hideous thing I've ever seen. Whomever designed that needs to be punished in fairly inapproriate ways.

And that's not limited to College, I knew people that would make money doing that in highschool as well. When I was dabbling in college in the Northern VA area (some 20 years ago,) you could find people advertising term paper/essay writing in the local scene newspapers...

 

Not really, the online environment with unproctored exams makes it easier to outsource to people in other countries. In China, academic fraud is an industry. People pay money for online courses, certifications exams, english tests, etc.

For profit schools are more vulnerable to this as they tend to use canned courses. A fraudster can take the same course multiple times and would have to do the work only once as the course is the same across multiple sessions.

Yes, you can pay someone to do this at a B&M school but that person would have to charge you a lot more to make it worth their time.

Proctored exams were used at one time to avoid fraud but this makes it so inconvenient to students. Also, many chose online course from for profit because they don't have exams.

 

Yes, the difference is that now you can find a PhD from Russia to do the work for one tenth of the price of a local graduate student trying to make money on the side.

It is highly unlikely that you can find a local student willing to write a full dissertation. There are some dissertation services that would charge few thousands for a dissertation created by a professor from Russia or other country with lower wages.

 

Is this your personal opinion or can you provide some proof?

I recently finished a course from UC Berkeley Extension that was pretty much canned as well. I am also taking a course at a rather well known Lund University in Sweden where the course is also canned. I consider it an advantage as the way it is "canned" is rather well designed. On the other hand the course I will be taking soon at AMU will have an entirely different set of required textbooks starting February, as well as the assignments I suppose.

Or do you work with some other definition of "canned"?

I thought there existed services such as TurnItIn that helped deal with this sort of problems. However, I don't know if and how much they are used by non-profits and for-profits.

 

I have worked for several for profit and all of them used canned courses. Canned in the sense that assignments and course work are exactly the same across different sections and sessions. This makes sense as this helps to reduce cost and allows instructors to receive lower salaries as we don't have to prepare every course we teach.

There are also more chances that a professional fraudster would specialize in popular online schools (most of them for profit) with large amounts of degrees and students rather than a obscure state school with very few online classes or programs

I have taught online also for few Canadian schools (non for profit). Salaries are higher but you are expected to create all the content and works pretty much the same as you have it with face to face classes where the instructor has the freedom to create assignments and provide lectures but this also creates an incredible amount of overhead for the instructor. I would expect that chances of fraud are less due to controls and most schools in Canada use proctored exams provided by professional organizations. It wouldn't make sense for me to pay someone to do my assignments as I would need still to write the final exam.

I personally completed some external courses at the University of Southern Queenslad in Australia. The courses were not run online but given on campus as any other traditional course, the difference as external student is that you were given the flexibility to write your exams in your place of residence. The chances of fraud are again lower as you are required to write your exam and present your ID.

I'm sure that non for profit schools that want also to make money copy the same model of the for profits that is the creation of canned courses and then hire cheap labor to give the course. The model makes sense business wise but it has the academic flaw that kills pretty much academic freedom and increases the chances of academic fraud.

Yes, many online schools use now turnitn that can check for previously submitted assignments but not all the schools use this system. Also, even if you have to create a new assignment for every class, it is a lot easier for the fraudster to generate if the assignment is always the same.

Proctored exams in my opinion is the best way to prevent fraud but this makes it less convenient for people. There is also the trend to run online classes without exams that would make it even easier to commit fraud.

 

More likely for every student that approaches you, which would drive up the costs. It's not just that they would have to write a new paper every time, but would have to work extra hard to make sure that it doesn't get flagged as plagiarism (it would drive "customers" away). I'm not sure how easy or difficult that would be. However, you have a point, canned courses with same assignments for different sections would eliminate the need for the person writing these papers to do research after they've done it the first time. So I guess much could be gained by simply changing the assignments in a canned course, you don't have to change the course materials and the way it is organized and taught, or at least not that often.

Personally I always felt pretty comfortable taking exams, much more than writing papers (something I am trying to correct now) so I have no objection to taking exams. But one has to wonder just how far can exams go where graduate studies are concerned, where student has to be prepared to do some research, projects and/or paper writing.

On the other hand, what I have most problems with is the way proctoring is supposed to work for us international students, but I guess we are a small minority and our opinions don't hold that much weight. Still, I think the Brits have a good system with the British Council being often the designated proctoring center for UK universities.

 

You have the dissertation writing services also.
You probably think that is not worth for people to get a fake education that might not provide any value to their knowledge or professional skills. However, don't forget that you have many government employees or college teachers that might be able to get a salary raise just if they finish a degree. It might be tempting for a high school teacher to pay someone 20K to do a degree if this degree would report a 10K or more salary increase as the degree might pay by itself in few years.

I wouldn't be surprisedif eventually this kind of things become more common and at some point the government would need to put more controls in institutions providing distance learning.

 

Yes, that is true. Happens here as well, in the form of less-than-wonderful-yet-legal universities. In our case, given it is a tiny market, we generally know which universities and particular faculties/departments of universities are more prone to "go easy" on the students, but in the case of the US I guess it is much more difficult.

Government or an association of universities.

For research papers, these plagiarism checking services, coupled with draconian punishments for academic dishonesty, regular changes in assignments and updates to the curriculum maybe would not totally eliminate paper writing "services", but it would make them more expensive, both money-wise and in potential sanctions.

And in the case of exams, my guess is that they would have to be heavily based on essay or calculation type questions. Multiple-choice exams open up a whole new field of potential misuse, with people selling braindumps (already very much happening in the IT certification industry). With braindumps and a huge market in the case someone specializes in a particularly popular online university, there wouldn't be much difference in whether the exams are proctored or not, cheating would still be very much a possibility.

Also, I think good innovations, such as web-cam proctoring, that make it easier for students to decide to enroll in a course and negotiate it, and yet do not compromise academic honesty should be more widely accepted.

Definitely, a body to introduce strict guidelines for distance learning should be there. Why isn't DETC doing this in the US, and is instead trying to compete with US regional accrediting agencies could be an interesting question.

 

I thought I saw once that sparknotes was related to Barnes & Noble?

I agree the guy probably posted the ad he feigns to detest.

 

An interesting idea would be to have someone offering the service "I can teach the course for you". With so many online adjunct opportunities, you can have someone in the US with a PhD applying for the job and then giving it to a teacher overseas. The local PhD gets 2000 dlls for the course, pockets half and gives half to a starving professor overseas from a developing country. The greedy American professor can be applying to all the schools in the US and teach 200 courses per term for a profit of 100K for every two month term. The American professor could be picky enough to hire only ITT graduates that might be able to do a great job so nobody could find out.

 

Often all the answers to an online course are posted online, then all the person has to do is copy and paste.