How To Write a Term Paper

[randomness]

My friend nihilistic_kid is a published novelist who used to make something vaguely resembling a living as a term paper artist. In the above titled post, he gives some advice to undergrads:

Spring Break is over, at least in the US, and so now the shank of the semester has begun. Time for term papers! As a former term paper artist I've learned a few things about papering. Things you will not learn from other sources simply because almost nobody has the experience I have. Composition specialists, your professors, and writing center tutors have not written 5000+ model term papers in virtually every field and in every length and format.

So, if you hear different from what I am saying, remember that I am right and they are wrong.

Note: this is "How To Write a Term Paper" not "How To Learn Something." Learning is your problem!

The remainder of the post outlines the process in eight steps.

I also recommend his piece about writing for a term paper mill, "The Term Paper Artist" published in The Smart Set, at Drexel University.

I think if I'd read his post when I was an undergrad, I would have handed in more of my papers on time.

Comments

At the risk of posting something tl;dr, I'll give this a try.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

(I'm sure LJ will reject this comment as being too long, anyway.)

So, a step back.

I recognize that you work hard at your job, and that someone submitting papers they didn't write makes a hard job more difficult. Granted.

The point is not that.

The point, I think, is that many of the people in the colleges do not belong there. And that, I believe, goes to the heart of why students are asked to write papers in the first place.

I think everyone would agree that there are a variety of reasons why students go to college. I also think there would be a fair amount of agreement that many of those reasons are not served very well by the institution of the university as it is currently constructed.

As a result, I think, many students go to universities to perform activities they learn very little from being taught by professors who are pushed to give assignments which do not actually teach in ways professors wish to teach.

What, exactly, is served by a process where students who want to make a better living are forced to jump through hoops whose point has never been explained to them? What is served by a system which forces professors who wish to become better teachers and mentors to instead publish or perish? (Or the reverse, who wish to do research but are forced to teach unwilling undergraduates?)

I will be the first to defend the value of a liberal education. I spent years of my youth, not to mention a small fortune, acquiring one. My only regrets now are that I neither spent enough time acquiring it, nor did I acquire it at a time in my life when I could appreciate it as much as I would if I were there, doing so now.

None of that, however, addresses the fact that many people do not have the desire to acquire such an education. But we as a society demand they get one anyway. Much follows from this: the careerism of undergraduates who don't understand the point of a liberal education, but understand that this arcane ritual is related to their making more money when they have had their ticket punched; the public stereotype of the ivory towered intellectual, out of touch with "real life", informed by the public's experience as students at university; the pressure of workload on junior professors to process undergrads through the system and at the same time publish research of a quality and quantity acceptable to their tenure committees; the oversupply of graduate students, essential as cheap labor in their role as teaching assistants, but left to fend for themselves in a job market which simply lacks enough positions for them as junior professors when they graduate.

The problem, I think, is that we as a society have created a mismatch between the expectations and needs of the market economy and the institutions of education. The universities are complicit in this, because by acting as the gatekeepers between young people and jobs with any sort of future, they can exercise great monopoly power standing between people and their livelihoods. And the universities as institutions have profited from this monopoly. Not for nothing was it observed that Harvard could be thought of as a hedge fund with a tax-shelter called a university attached. (And their finances have suffered as a result, like many other hedge funds.)

There will always be people who game the system. These are, as Brad DeLong likes to describe us, East African Plains Apes we're talking about, and like any other animal these apes respond to incentives. When, however, there are a lot of people gaming the system, that is a sign that the system has problems and needs fixing. Not the universities alone, but the entire way we train people for their futures.

Blaming the people is a profoundly traditionalist way to frame the issue; while there is certainly culpability there, if you blame the people your only recourse is to change their natures. Generally, this means changing the larger society, either by improving the incentives to do what you consider "good" or increasing the penalties for doing what is considered "bad". Perhaps it would be easier to change the way this society trains people, rather than changing the overall incentive structures within a society.

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