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RE: [xmca] The Shadow Scholar - He writes your students' papers.
I see this matter from another perspective. The idea that Turnitin is less
authentic than policing plagiarism by knowing students' writing voice more
personally overlooks the shadow scholar's point: Professors accept this. This is
what they want. He writes fluidly on topics entirely foreign to him before being
contracted to compose on them.
This shadow scholar makes his living as a professional bullshitter.
William Perry wrote in 1963 of a Harvard student with the same skill
accidentally taking an exam for a course he wasn't enrolled in and getting an
A-.
http://lclane.net/101/examsmanship.html
(Interestingly, when I searched to find a url I discovered a host of pages where
students are seeking help writing essays on Perry's essay.!)
Perry concludes that in academia we prefer students who can "bull" over students
who merely "cow." Those who cow don't have the habits of mind of academia, they
don't have the discourse, they just deal with the 'facts' of the content.
Bullshitters can 'learn' any material (a la the shadow scholar), and so they are
the ones we court as student scholars. Bartholomae (J Basic Writing, 1986;
sorry, can't find it online) posits the same-- we want those who are "like us."
I'm working on my dissertation on academic bullshitting. One of my participants
told me of a doctoral course she took-- She worked very hard on her first paper,
but she got a low grade, without specific comments about why or what to change.
(This, I'm finding, is quite common.) For her second paper, then, she found an
article published by that professor and mirrored it: "He started with an
anecodote, I started with an anecodote, he wrote x, I wrote x, he introduced his
theory in this sentence structure, etc etc." The result? HE LOVED IT.
And so part of the issue I see with the shadow scholar--and especially with
higher ed's response to the article-- is that it is seen as yet another problem
with kids these days, and a problem of the system that doesn't teach them how to
quote and cite properly, and it's a matter of ethics and research skill, and if
only we teach students what really counts as "intellectual property" (whatever
the hell that is), then they will be enlightened and not take such a dark, easy
path.
One little bit in the shadow scholar's article is that one-third of his clients
are "lazy rich kids" who give him precise criteria for what the paper must
include, how to structure it, etc. These kids have been well-schooled. They know
the school game. They know the schooly discourse. They could write their own
bullshit essays if they felt like it, but it's even easier to pay someone else
to write them.
But bullshitting isn't simply reserved for the lazy-but-schooled kids. I worked
with Peter Smagorinsky (my major professor) on a study where a high school
senior, an eager and honest girl who was a very successful Student, bullshitted
an essay because the content knowledge required was beyond her grasp. But she
knew her own writing strategies and had a strong sense of efficacy about being
able to be successful with school writing. She knew what school writing needed
to be, so she pulled it off. Not to be deceptive, but because she needed to, and
she could.
So, it seems like academic bullshitting is reinforced (and rewarded, to the tune
of $60,000 a year). Is the shadow scholar reflecting the students' abilities to
complete the assignments? or the tacit criteria for assessment? or that the
assignments themselves are so cliche and mindless that to not bullshit (or not
to inadvertently write what some bored student wrote sometime before) becomes a
task in itself?
...and what is it that outrages higher ed?--that not only does this person do
such a thing but that he take such a public stage to point out the naked
emperor?
-
Elizabeth Daigle
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