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thegazette Over-hyphenating-since-1906
Friday, September 14, 2012
today high 20 low 10
tomorrow high 20 low 8
canada’s only Daily Student Newspaper • founded 1906
Profs writing for pupils Essay writing outsourced to new service
Good guy Spoke to host Reddit meetup Alex Carmona News Editor
Cameron Wilson Gazette
Aaron Zaltzman News Editor The murky world of online essay writing services has gotten a professional upgrade, as the newest players on the scene are university professors. An online group called ‘Unemployed Professors’ emerged last year and is one of the few essaywriting services that employ actual university or college-level professors. “The service got started […] when a suit met an under-employed professor,” one employee, who requested to be referred to as Professor Fishnets, said. “They decided to throw in together, and to see where it would lead.” “We do all that we can to ensure that only those with qualifications necessary to teach at the collegiate or university level are hired,” Fishnets said. “We do value prior teaching experience, and I would say that over 75 per cent of our staff, especially in the humanities and social sciences, have it.” Fishnets explained the organization utilizes a strict hiring process to ensure their employees are legitimately qualified. “I’m sure that we’ve had a bad apple or two slide through the cracks since we began,” Fishnets said. “When this has happened, we’ve terminated them after the first hint of ineptitude.” The service’s prices are determined in a market setting, where students looking to outsource an
essay can log into the website and post a brief description of the assignment. The employees then submit competing offers that include a time frame and a fee, and the user can choose which professor to give the assignment. A 1,000-word essay request submitted to the site by the Gazette received three offers, ranging from $90 to $100, and one to five days for completion.
Despite our catchy slogans and our ohso-glorious marketing campaign, we do not condone cheating. We’re agnostic towards it. —Professor Fishnets
Writer for unemployedprofessors.com
If students choose to hand in material directly from Unemployed Professors, universities cannot do much to detect them. The website advertises that students would only be caught if they “did something stupid, like tell everyone that [they] bought an essay.” However, Jennifer Meister, Western’s ombudsperson, said there are ways of uncovering this type of cheating. “Professors and teaching assis-
tants are very bright people—they can tell when they read a paper that this paper hasn’t been written by a third-year student or a firstyear student,” Meister said. “They can tell that it may have come from a paper mill.“ Officially, the group produces “custom research tailored to [the customer’s] needs” rather than providing students with essays to submit. In its terms and conditions, the group states while they transfer essays to their customers, they do not recommend using them to fulfill course requirements. “Our services fill a void in the marketplace,” Fishnets said. “Despite our catchy slogans and our oh-so-glorious marketing campaign, we do not condone cheating. We’re agnostic towards it.” “Ideally, if a student commissions our work, they can use the research obtained to write an awesome paper. While our research is indeed awesome in itself, they could simply make it more awesome by adding their personal touch. I very much hope that that is what most of them are doing,” Fishnets said. However, the group acknowledges the questionable morality of writing essays for money. The FAQ section of site calls the practice “incredibly” unethical, but also states that “because the academic system is already so corrupt, we’re totally cool with that.”
Volume 106, Issue 8
Fingers crossed that this makes it to th e front page. The first official Western Reddit meetup is only days away. Part of the global College Reddit Meetup Day initiative, the gathering will take place at the Spoke from 6 p.m. until closing on Saturday. Other Reddit meetups will be simultaneously occurring at campuses all over the world, all independently organized by users of the site. College Reddit Meetup day has been in the planning stages since the early summer. Western’s Redditors, however, were almost left scattered throughout London—it seemed no Western student was willing to take it upon themselves to organize the event for their fellow Mustangs. Fortunately for fans of the site, Renee Tamming, a fourth-year science student, took it upon herself to take up the cause in London. “I did a Reddit gift exchange back in December for Christmas. Apparently I was on the Western subreddit’s moderators’ email list and they said, ‘Hey, there’s a global meetup day for universities on September 15,” she said. “I checked and searched ‘Western’ and ‘UWO’ and nothing showed up, so I decided to just make my own.” The plan is simple. “We’re going to hang out, drink beers, have fun and probably talk a lot about Reddit,” she continued. Jonas Trottier, a third-year bi-
ology student at Western attending the event, has never been to a Reddit meetup before, but said he wouldn’t be opposed to organizing his own Reddit-based gathering at Western in the future. “I was thinking about hosting a Halloween meetup so that we could participate in some of the contests that are being run through Redditgifts.” Kaitlyn Eadie, a fourth-year comparative literature student at Western who has been to numerous Reddit meetups in Toronto, noted the gatherings are usually worthwhile, but can sometimes get slightly out of hand. “Sometimes you have like five people sitting around at a bar, and sometimes you have like 50 and the bar gets mad at you,” she explained. She also noted that some male attendees use the gatherings to hit on their fellow female Redditors. “The only bad experiences I’ve had is that my friend and I go together, and she gets a lot of attention from boys. In fact, it sometimes gets to the point where either I’ll have to intervene or someone else will have to intervene,” Eadie said. She stressed, however, the majority of her experiences have been positive, and that she plans to attend the meetup at the Spoke on Saturday. “Mostly they’re pretty good. I’d probably even host my own— maybe somewhere that doesn’t exclude the poor 17 and 18-year-olds who can’t come to bars.”
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