ASSUMING the Chronicle of Higher Education article is true and I am not so quick to assume that it is, this article points to a one of our most significant problems in education. A system that:
focus[es] on evaluation rather than education
and where meaningless work that can be easily created by someone who isn’t even in the course.
The author is a self confessed ghost writer who writes custom papers for students and claims that he as written thousands of vacuous scholarly pages, contributed a masters degree in cognitive psychology and a Ph.D. sociology as well as countless other undergraduate assignments. We all know that cheating is rampant in higher education and articles like this confirm the problem is only getting worse. In the article Anti-Teaching Confronting the Crisis of Significance, Micheal Wesch a social anthropologist from Kansas State and the creator of the viral youtube video Vision of Students Today suggests that our classrooms and what we do in them are void of meaning for our learners. Wesch argues that when we hear questions like: “How long does this paper need to be?” or “What do we need to know for this test?” we should understand that
Such questions reflect the fact that, for many (students and teachers alike), education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create.
When assessment, grades and credentials become the focus, is there any wonder that ghost writers that support cheating can exist and flourish in this type of environment?
