Saturday, March 31, 2012

Honours or honest degree?


I was amazed when I read this. There are students out there who could afford to fork out two grand for someone else to write their thesis? The mind boggles. My experience of student life (undergrad and postgrad) is one of skimping because even if you get a scholarship, it doesn't necessarily cover all your expenses (my uni is located in Kuala Lumpur).


Are we more morally bankrupt than the people before us? Are the changing landscape of professional development and personal growth pushing us to become more dishonest? Are we just lazier than before?

Who knows. It could be any and all or even none of the above. All I know is that being a teacher at tertiary level just got tougher. I mean, you can identify that the student was cheating, but proving it is something else altogether. So you may have to grit your teeth and just pass the kid anyway even though you know well that he/she couldn't use prepositions properly to even save her/his life. The kid whom you know worked hard, built his/her skill sets to write a darn good thesis got no more than the cheating one because you can't prove how the cheater cheated.

How depressing.

5 comments:

♥●• İzdihër •●♥ said...

Totally agree

adham said...

No sense of shame with a dab of hypocrisy i say. This kind of people who will bash other people for alleged wrongdoings. And when it comes to them, they will make hundreds of excuses

Snuze said...

Hi, Izdiher! *waves*

Adham: Yeah. It's always others, not them. My friend once invigilated an exam for candidates from Akademi Pengajian Islam when she caught a student cheating. She called the girl to step out and hand over the cheat sheets. The girl cried and pleaded to my friend not to report her. When my friend relented and seized the cheat sheet, she had the gall to ask my friend if she could take one last look at it.

And this is an ustazah candidate. *facepalm*

naz said...

I do agree 100%. However being the part of the system that check the students' work, you would actually wonder how can this type of students are in the higher institution education in the first place. Some can't even write an abstract correctly.

I do bear guilt in helping them with their work with some payments, however proofreading and paraphrasing are as far as I would go.

Snuze said...

Naz, editing is perfectly all right, but this is doing the work entirely from scratch. Heck, it is good that they made an effort to fine someone to copy edit their work and not torment the poor examiners with horribly worded arguments that is incomprehensible.

I know that I would strongly recommend having someone go through your thesis prior submission to even your supervisor.