I’ve complained before about the same thing. My only answer is “it’ll pass eventually, the only question is how much we’ll have to suffer in the interim”.
Fortunately, these ghost writers basically give us a rosetta stone for identifying the lost and valueless fields: anything they consistently produce work on and which can escape detection is such a field.
With the caveat that low-level undergraduate assignment substance levels are not the same as cutting-edge research substance levels, though they are related.
See my reply to Desrtopa: A non-lost field should have a large enough inferential distance from a layshadow that the layshadow shouldn’t be able to show proficiency from a brief perusal of the topic, even at the undergraduate levels.
I think you’ve started to identify an empirical test to sort the wheat from the chaff in universities. I’ve read your post from June, and agree. My guess would be that the proportions would turn out to show a lot of very expensive (and heavily subsidized) chaff for every unit of worthwhile wheat. This is a big issue, and I think you’ve called it correctly.
I don’t think any field in which they can produce an essay without being detected is necessarily valueless. At an undergraduate level, students in hard sciences are often assigned essays that could reasonably be written by a layperson who takes the time to properly search through the available peer reviewed articles. That may be an indictment of how the classes are taught and graded, but it’s not a demonstration that the fields themselves are lacking worth.
But they do mention googling sources and doing literature review, and “Ed Dante” says he will write about anything that does not require him to do any math (or animal husbandry.) For original research in hard sciences, there’s probably not going to be much of anything that doesn’t at least require some statistics, but for undergraduate literature review papers, it probably wouldn’t be hard to get away with.
I’ve complained before about the same thing. My only answer is “it’ll pass eventually, the only question is how much we’ll have to suffer in the interim”.
Fortunately, these ghost writers basically give us a rosetta stone for identifying the lost and valueless fields: anything they consistently produce work on and which can escape detection is such a field.
(Btw, change your last * to a \*.)
With the caveat that low-level undergraduate assignment substance levels are not the same as cutting-edge research substance levels, though they are related.
See my reply to Desrtopa: A non-lost field should have a large enough inferential distance from a layshadow that the layshadow shouldn’t be able to show proficiency from a brief perusal of the topic, even at the undergraduate levels.
I think you’ve started to identify an empirical test to sort the wheat from the chaff in universities. I’ve read your post from June, and agree. My guess would be that the proportions would turn out to show a lot of very expensive (and heavily subsidized) chaff for every unit of worthwhile wheat. This is a big issue, and I think you’ve called it correctly.
Thanks! Fixed!
[NOTE SilasBarta’s point about formatting is right and appreciated—too meta to warrant a whole new comment.]
That’s not what I said! ;-)
Just so you know: the backslash escapes you out of Markdown, so to produce what you quoted, I put a double-backslash wherever you see a \.
I don’t think any field in which they can produce an essay without being detected is necessarily valueless. At an undergraduate level, students in hard sciences are often assigned essays that could reasonably be written by a layperson who takes the time to properly search through the available peer reviewed articles. That may be an indictment of how the classes are taught and graded, but it’s not a demonstration that the fields themselves are lacking worth.
All true, but the shadow authors:
don’t mention doing work for the hard sciences or reading peer-reviewed articles in such fields
are able to learn all they need from a day or so of self-study, showing low inferential distance in the fields and thus low knowledge content
mention high involvement in graduate level work, where the implications of their success are much more significant.
But they do mention googling sources and doing literature review, and “Ed Dante” says he will write about anything that does not require him to do any math (or animal husbandry.) For original research in hard sciences, there’s probably not going to be much of anything that doesn’t at least require some statistics, but for undergraduate literature review papers, it probably wouldn’t be hard to get away with.