Cheating or Global Outsourcing of Academic Work?

Check out this CBS News Report on the cheating industry that has sprung up to provide essay writing and other services to students at every degree level. The report highlights that such cheating is connected with online educational institutions, but similar patterns of cheating affect face-to-face schools. Efforts to reduce cheating seem both minimal and relatively ineffective.

Perhaps it is time to examine the cheating phenomenon more broadly both to understand the roots of the problem and to take more serious steps to address it. One place to begin is suggested by those engaged as researchers and writers in the contract cheating industry when they observe that they are the ones who are learning because they are the ones doing the work. In an era when work of all kinds has been broken down into less meaningful components and either automated to outsourced in the name of efficiency, it may be necessary to help students understand the benefits and the pleasures of doing their own work.

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