It's always intriguing to see how people justify grossly unethical behavior to themselves.

I don't think the issue is your disservice to higher education in general or grade systems as a whole, but to your customers, who never receive the education they were meant to, and that they paid for.

Ethics are in the eye of the beholder.

...Something nobody ever said when they were on the receiving end of someone else's poor ethics instead of the one partaking in it.

There's far less variability in the human brain than you imagine; we have a natural tendency to amplify it.

I don't believe that.

I do however agree ethics are system dependent.

The effects of unethical behavior on the system are objective however.

Many of my customers could barely compose a cogent e-mail. In most cases I was left wondering how they could possibly be admitted at whatever school they were at. Sure, my assessment of my customers was limited to a few back-and-forth e-mail exchanges, but I was usually left with the impression that they were enrolled at a school they didn't 'deserve' to be at.

Further, you're just completely discounting the agency of my customers here. They knew what they were doing, and how it devalued their education experience.

I presume they ended up enrolled in that school because there was always a way that money got them out of learning the hard lesson of failure. Case in point that they could pay someone to write papers for them.

Failure is arguably an important part of the process of learning.

Failure is the most important part in the process of learning. That statement says nothing about cheating. One could fail at cheating too, and either learn a better way of cheating or learn not to cheat. Both are fine. If you're good at cheating you might be a decent hacker because you might better see the flaws in any seemingly rigid and fixed system. People who break things often find a way to better recreate those things.

There's a thing that happens with loopholes. There's the guy that finds the loophole and tests it out for himself. Then there's the small group that follow him in if it suits their needs, and then word spreads and a good proportion of people also follow. If the loophole threatens the existing system in any way, then the upholders of that system will attempt to barricade the loophole. A few upholders might change the system itself, but that is rare.

The one guy who first used the loophole will always be on the lookout for new loopholes, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can say it's wrong, you can say it's not fair, but it's a fact of life. And by using that loophole that one guy can create change all around him. He can change it himself, or he can open the door for other people to see the change that needs to happen. Maybe it's good to patch the loophole, maybe it's good to change the system in which the loophole was found-- either way, it comes down a great deal to our explorer friend. He learns from failure too, but his goals are different and that's fine.

Sorry, but you can't claim that they both knew exactly what they were doing and that they were (forgive my paraphrasing) too stupid for it to matter.

>The impact of a few students paying others to author papers on their behalf is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US.

grade inflation is real, but at least it effects everyone equally. cheating allows dishonest students to get ahead by paying $$$. moreover, you can adjust for grade inflation, but you can't adjust for cheating.

Grade inflation at top US schools happens through $$$ as well. Having a parent that is a major donor matters. I've seen it firsthand.

Your argument seems similar to somebody saying that it is okay to litter because the environment is screwed anyway. You may be correct in your criticism of the educational system, but how does that justify you making the situation worse?

On some level things have to get worse before there's willpower to make progress toward a solution.

I worked with less than 100 clients over the course of two years. My impact was statistically insignificant.

No single raindrop believes that it's responsible for the flood.

Statistics don't enter into it. Whether something is morally wrong or right is intrinsic to the act itself, not based on what other people are doing. If everyone in the world starts stealing from stores, that doesn't mean it is OK for you to start stealing as well.

Okay, so you're into the deontological line of thinking. I'm not. The fact that you think your approach to morality is the default just suggests that you haven't actually had a meaningful engagement with current literature on moral reasoning.

My argument is "if everyone in the world is doing something immoral, it is still immoral for you to do it," which works equally well in consequentialism. The fact that your actions are statistically insignificant compared to the whole only means that the immorality/morality of your individual actions are small compared to the whole of humanity. That's a false comparison, I'm not aware of any ethical system that determines morality by comparing your impact against the totality of humanity. Maybe comparing your impact against the impact of the average person, but not the total. Under such a system only the Hitlers and Ghandis of the world would even register.

Morality isn't anymore intrinsic than the concept of good and evil. My mother thinks the Catholic faith is inherently evil, but Catholics will fight to the death for their belief that it is inherently good. Who's right? Probably neither of these people-- the question is irrelevant and not useful. Morality isn't determined by any absolute truth. Morality is only useful when the majority agree with it and the outcome of that belief helps the group in context. Over time, the group changes along with the majority opinion, and morality changes to suit the needs of the group in flux.

Stealing is usually harmful to any group, which is why we haven't seen any real change in how we look at stealing. Cheating, however, is undergoing change. What is a hacker if he is not a cheater? We have jobs for hackers now-- it's called penetration testing. An increasing number of people see many of our dominant systems as being flawed-- thus, an increasing number of people may begin to cheat the systems to get where they need to go. This is important because if those systems want to exist, they either need to change or they need to be more secure. You will see moral opinions change along with this entropic state until an equilibrium is reached which will continue for some period of time until another relevant variable changes.

I just want to offer some terms from ethics that match your perspectives. You or anyone else can read up on them if you’d like.

> Morality is only useful when the majority agree with it...

This sounds a lot like a moral relativist stance. I hear it’s not a very popular stance among ethicists, so I don’t have any recommendations off the top of my head for philosophers to study. Basically moral relativism just means that morality is defined by the standards of a culture.

> Morality is only useful when ... the outcome of that belief helps the group in context.

This sounds similar to what a utilitarian would believe. They focus more on the result of an action and the sum total happiness it creates and they judge higher sum total happiness to be of higher morality. John Stuart Mill is probably the biggest proponent of utilitarianism.

Oh, really? By that logic, since you're eventually going to die, probably horribly, then you'll be ok with me coming by and taking out one of your kidneys. Or, as in The Big Lebowski, lopping off a toe. Those are as nothing to a death from a brain tumor, after all.

No, it's really quite different. You take my kidney? That's going to have a direct impact on my quality of life. It'll hurt for a while. I won't be able to drink as much and I'll have to be careful about my diet.

I write a paper for someone else to turn in as their own? In a situation where I know more or less nothing about the client? The outcomes are both unknowable and in most cases impossible to tie to my act directly.

> The outcomes are both unknowable and in most cases impossible to tie to my act directly

You breached academic code and, if money was exchanged, potentially the law. Given you wrote the paper and received the money, the act is quite simple to tie to you.

I'm sorry, what academic code? What which binds students at schools that I didn't attend and have no contractual relationship with? Lol, okay.

>potentially the law

Yeah, show me the law that tells me it's illegal to write something for someone else. Thanks.

> show me the law that tells me it's illegal to write something for someone else

Writing papers for someone else is not illegal. (The student presenting the paper as their own violates your copyright, and potentially other laws.) But if you market and sell your papers for the purpose of cheating, particularly with respect to students pursuing degrees they intend to use for licensing/certification (e.g. law or civil engineering), you're aiding and abetting fraud.

Hmm. Seems like there could be an argument for tortious interference here, though establishing damages could be difficult.

Why would someone pay you to write an assignment for them if the outcome of you writing the paper is so unknowable?

> it doesn't bother me much, because higher education is already eating itself alive in the US.

The ship is sinking already, so it's OK if I set fire to it.

Cheaters aren't setting fire to the sinking ship. They're escaping via unofficial routes-- ie. they are foregoing the life rafts.

Depends on the ship and its contents.

The 'ship' that is the US higher education system doesn't seem to hold much value, imo. Set it ablaze.

You were a professionally immoral person, so it not bothering you much is probably a shitty metric. Surely the people who gravitate to this work are the least reliable people to assess the impact, sort of like pimps and dealers.

I never claimed to be a 'reliable person' to assess the impact. Just sharing my thoughts and experiences.

You're a lesser purveyor of counterfeit goods, but you're still a counterfeiter.

Counterfeit implies a copy of something that has a defined market value. Academic papers don't. What I did is closer to a tailor creating a suit for someone from scratch, rather than someone operating a sweatshop to produce fake suits from some known brand.

In the "marketplace" of education, the paper was the token that the student expended the mental effort of doing the work, which would be graded on its merits as a sign of what he should have done. You faked that token knowingly. Your customer did no work, and the professor would never have accepted the monetary equivalent of what he paid you for that work. Not at any multiple, if he wanted to keep his job and the university its accreditation.

> Academic papers don't

Did you get paid for them? If yes, they had a market value. That's the most basic definition of a market--a buyer and seller negotiating and agreeing upon a price for a good or a service. "Market" doesn't mean commodity. Hopefully you weren't writing anyone's economics papers...

> there isn't a pre-existing reference good that has a defined market value to counterfeit

By your rationalization, it's impossible to counterfeit a painting.

Can you explain to me how you would come to that conclusion?

It seems increasingly likely that your customers got what they deserved.

Counterfeit goods are not labeled counterfeit for their labor condition origins.

You are a terrible person.

There were far worse ways that I could have kept myself afloat, income-wise. I'm pretty okay with this one, thanks.

> There were far worse ways that I could have kept myself afloat, income-wise

"Your honor, you should not judge me for stealing. For I could have also murdered."

A) Cheating hurts everyone.

> is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US

B) Because student at top universities (For the most part) have higher GPA in high school and a higher SAT scores already. Unless your morals require a strict bell curve of 10% F, 10% A, 40% C and 40% B?

Do you want to be able to identify the best of the best? That's the fundamental question here - if that's a useful thing for society, to have credentials that distinguish beyond "did well in high school," then you don't want grade inflation.

And if you don't - you could make a solid case that the extreme ends of those skills may not be that useful in general outside of academia - than do Harvard et al need nearly as much money as we throw at them today?

Peer group matters. Being bottom 10% at Harvard is quite different than being bottom 10% at Boston University (no offense).

The people who seem to not believe this are the people pushing for grade inflation, no? Grade inflation is all about making everyone who isn't top 10% have a prettier resume.

Ah so the us veriosn of the "gentleman's" degree - a third from Oxbridge in the UK

Identifying the best of the best requires complex statistical methods to remove several different types of bias.

I'd rather give students PRoPS, which is to say "percentile ranking of passing students". But that would require some means to normalize different professors teaching from different curricula, with variations in the capabilities of their students across different classes.

Automatically failing x% of your students every semester is as cruel and pointless as stack ranking. Clearly, if a student can demonstrate a minimum objective level of understanding, independent of the performance of their peers, they should not fail the course. Equally clearly, if a section is full of geniuses with perfect understanding, they should be graded more highly than a section full of normals that can barely get it after intensive study.

If you pile up enough testing data, year after year, it would be theoretically possible to construct a mathematical model to compare with some confidence the student achievement across disparate classes, professors, and institutions, as well as to say definitively who the good and bad professors are, and whether they write difficult or easy exams.

If you get a 100% on Dr. Aardvark's CHEM220 final at Example U., that may put you at PRoPS of 80 for "organic chemistry, milestone one", whereas if you get a 60% score on Dr. Zymurgy's CHEM235 final at Hypothetical Institute, that may actually have a PRoPS of 95 for "organic chemistry, milestone one". Dr. Z's exam was simply written to be impossible, and scored very harshly, while Dr. A's exam was built to be more forgiving, and maybe left out some elements that the Example U. chem faculty prefers to save for later courses.

This will, of course, never happen. Firstly, you would have to get academics to agree on the essential elements of a given subject at a particular checkpoint in a course of study. Secondly, institutions that rely on selective admissions and political connections for prestige would never participate, if there were even a shred of possibility that the objective evidence would show that they do not actually produce the quality of graduates that they would like to claim. Imagine if Ivy Limestone Woodpanels Law cranked out PRoPS for complete J.D. from 30 to 85, and Bigcity Urban Campus Law ranged from 50 to 99. The former is selective and does a lot of networking, but then passes anyone who still knows enough to not embarrass the school in a connected job, whereas the latter takes everyone, presents a huge challenge, and quickly flunks those who can't master the coursework and get hired through sheer merit. Those numbers would be a huge blow to the former's reputation.

Grade inflation is thus a natural by-product of institutions trying to be a "top tier school". It goes right along with publishing in the highest impact journals and wheedling more money out of your alumni. Schools that benefit from institutional prestige want to keep their reputations polished and shiny.

Cheating is a constant that must be controlled for. It doesn't stop when you graduate.

Further, grade inflation at top-tier US schools has nothing to do with the stats on incoming students. I don't even understand why you think that would be relevant.

Doing their assignments (well) contributes to grade inflation