Paraphrasing tools are getting more sophisticated

[artalot]

Along with others, I think that devising assignments where various forms of plagiarism are impossible or not useful is the way forward. I also scaffold large assignments - students are evaluating sources, writing drafts, peer editing, and then submitting a final paper. When the class is small enough, I meet with each student individually. The problem is that this kind of scaffolded approach works best in small classes (15-20); you can't do it with 50 students unless you want to be inundated by grading.

[Morden]

A number of them are advertising at $15 a page: https://www.reddit.com/r/EssayForAll/

[downer]

A number of them are advertising at $15 a page: https://www.reddit.com/r/EssayForAll/

I wonder if that turns out to be font size 24, double spaced, in Courier.

[arcturus]

I found a site that promises "100% plagiarism-free" papers. It is possible that their writers are quite good. They promise high quality and affordable custom essays and dissertation writing. However, they do not seem to understand that even if their work is 100% plagiarism-free, it becomes 100% plagiarized if a student submits it as their own work. Sigh.

Note: I found this essay generating website after googling my course title and number. The posted "essay" was one of my homework assignments, which mostly requires data entry, not many words.

[Aster]

Yeah, put me down in the "nothing new under the sun" camp. The papers I assign are all designed in a way that cheating wouldn't get you a very good grade. I'm always asking for something fairly specific. A student could certainly dig something vaguely adjacent up and put it through a paraphraser, but it won't really fit the assignment, will probably be weird and stilted and will end up getting a C at best. Honestly, most of the time a student who did this could have spent a couple of hours and wrote a bad paper all on their own. If the student is a bit more clever and tweaks things, perhaps they manage a B, but again, now they have spent their time trying to cheat when they really could have just written a not great paper on their own. All they've really done is cheat themselves out of gaining useful skills.

My take-home essays are also like this. The grading rubric mostly assesses for specific content items that only the student would have the resources to answer if they performed certain tasks.
It does require periodic maintenance to update the content items so that the older stuff can't be sold/copied onto the internet and recycled.

[Kron3007]

Yeah, put me down in the "nothing new under the sun" camp. The papers I assign are all designed in a way that cheating wouldn't get you a very good grade. I'm always asking for something fairly specific. A student could certainly dig something vaguely adjacent up and put it through a paraphraser, but it won't really fit the assignment, will probably be weird and stilted and will end up getting a C at best. Honestly, most of the time a student who did this could have spent a couple of hours and wrote a bad paper all on their own. If the student is a bit more clever and tweaks things, perhaps they manage a B, but again, now they have spent their time trying to cheat when they really could have just written a not great paper on their own. All they've really done is cheat themselves out of gaining useful skills.

My take-home essays are also like this. The grading rubric mostly assesses for specific content items that only the student would have the resources to answer if they performed certain tasks.
It does require periodic maintenance to update the content items so that the older stuff can't be sold/copied onto the internet and recycled.

Personally, I like to focus more on presentations and tests for grades over essays.  Plagiarism etc. Is one reason, but I also find grading essays  onerous and subjective.  These formats are much more difficult to cheat on.  I am also lucky that my field is lab heavy, which is less prone to cheating.

[Caracal]

I found a site that promises "100% plagiarism-free" papers. It is possible that their writers are quite good. They promise high quality and affordable custom essays and dissertation writing. However, they do not seem to understand that even if their work is 100% plagiarism-free, it becomes 100% plagiarized if a student submits it as their own work. Sigh.

Note: I found this essay generating website after googling my course title and number. The posted "essay" was one of my homework assignments, which mostly requires data entry, not many words.

I doubt it's particularly high quality. Probably B level work for undergrad. It does make me curious what I would get if I the assignments for papers for my classes. The claim that it would work for dissertations is laughable. Do they do all your dissertation research for you too? Having written a dissertation, I can tell you that the amount of money it would cost to get me to write another one is very high.

On a much smaller scale, I assume that's going to be the issue with the economics for this in general. Once you get beyond basic writing assignments, it just takes too much time to actually create something good and someone would need to charge a lot to make it worth their time. I assume the model is going to be in charging 100 bucks a pop for essays about the theme of sleep in Mice and Men

[marshwiggle]

On a much smaller scale, I assume that's going to be the issue with the economics for this in general. Once you get beyond basic writing assignments, it just takes too much time to actually create something good and someone would need to charge a lot to make it worth their time. I assume the model is going to be in charging 100 bucks a pop for essays about the theme of sleep in Mice and Men

Hint: I bet they demand cash up front.

[Puget]

An assignment that can get a passing grade with a paraphrasing tool or purchased paper is not a well-crafted assignment in my opinion. My assignments are both extremely specific and scaffolded-- you would have to both know the subject matter well and put in as much time as an actual student to get a decent grade on the work. I suppose that is possible, but seems like it would get very expensive and hard to arrange.

[apl68]

An assignment that can get a passing grade with a paraphrasing tool or purchased paper is not a well-crafted assignment in my opinion. My assignments are both extremely specific and scaffolded-- you would have to both know the subject matter well and put in as much time as an actual student to get a decent grade on the work. I suppose that is possible, but seems like it would get very expensive and hard to arrange.

And yet there are apparently an awful lot of assignments and courses out there that can be passed through such methods.  I remember the old CHE discussion about the big paper ghostwriter self-expose that made the news some years back.  His slop-work was apparently all that many students needed to get a passing grade with scarcely any effort on the students' part. 

What permits this situation to develop?  For-profit schools (and others) that prioritize customer satisfaction over educational standards?  Overworked adjuncts who just don't have the time or incentive to design relatively cheat-proof assignments?  ROAD scholars?  Or maybe this happens mostly with lower-level courses, where the assignments are less sophisticated in the first place?

[marshwiggle]

An assignment that can get a passing grade with a paraphrasing tool or purchased paper is not a well-crafted assignment in my opinion. My assignments are both extremely specific and scaffolded-- you would have to both know the subject matter well and put in as much time as an actual student to get a decent grade on the work. I suppose that is possible, but seems like it would get very expensive and hard to arrange.

And yet there are apparently an awful lot of assignments and courses out there that can be passed through such methods.  I remember the old CHE discussion about the big paper ghostwriter self-expose that made the news some years back.  His slop-work was apparently all that many students needed to get a passing grade with scarcely any effort on the students' part. 

What permits this situation to develop?  For-profit schools (and others) that prioritize customer satisfaction over educational standards?  Overworked adjuncts who just don't have the time or incentive to design relatively cheat-proof assignments?  ROAD scholars?  Or maybe this happens mostly with lower-level courses, where the assignments are less sophisticated in the first place?

The point is that even if these can get students a "passing grade" in some courses, there's hardly going to be a deluge of graduates with high GPAs who managed to outsource a significant part of their education. In jobs where the credential is only a signal, then they may get employed, but in any job where they actually need the expertise of a specific degree, it's hard to imagine them being able to fake their way though interviews,etc., and they certainly won't have good references from any internships or other discipline-specific work experiences.

Box-checking is about the only place that this can have a serious impact.

[kaysixteen]

Random points:

1) Lotta folks out there with jobs that theoretically 'require a BA' that are indeed just checking off those boxes.  Another significant reason why there's so many kids going to college who do not really want to be there and probably oughtn't either.

2) Am I right to suspect that the grading standards for undergrads, ostensibly in the same disciplines, vary verrrryyyyy widely across our extremely variegated higher ed system in this country?   I am not sure that this would be the case in many if not most other countries.

[marshwiggle]

Random points:

1) Lotta folks out there with jobs that theoretically 'require a BA' that are indeed just checking off those boxes.  Another significant reason why there's so many kids going to college who do not really want to be there and probably oughtn't either.

2) Am I right to suspect that the grading standards for undergrads, ostensibly in the same disciplines, vary verrrryyyyy widely across our extremely variegated higher ed system in this country?   I am not sure that this would be the case in many if not most other countries.

I'm just now reading the book "Noise" by Cass R. Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Olivier Sibony about the problem of inconsistency in human judgement. They haven't mentioned academia yet (I'm just a couple of chapters in), but it's a pretty obvious place to find it.

[reverist]

Fun anecdote. I teach in a couple of different but related subject areas. I once received an essay in response to a prompt asking them to deal with certain 'technical terms.' These technical terms were words with everyday uses and hence synonyms. So plagiarism of the paraphrase variety became easy to spot, since the software simply provided replacement words for the technical terms. So imagine my bafflement when I read about 'aggregate abasement,' only to eventually figure out it was a replacement for 'total depravity.' Good times!

[ergative]

Fun anecdote. I teach in a couple of different but related subject areas. I once received an essay in response to a prompt asking them to deal with certain 'technical terms.' These technical terms were words with everyday uses and hence synonyms. So plagiarism of the paraphrase variety became easy to spot, since the software simply provided replacement words for the technical terms. So imagine my bafflement when I read about 'aggregate abasement,' only to eventually figure out it was a replacement for 'total depravity.' Good times!

What does 'total depravity' mean in the technical sense? And could it possibly be replaced with aggregate abasement? Because aggregate abasement is pleasingly alliterative.