Yes.Joe wrote:They actually turned in your essays for their classes?I used to ghost-write essays for people taking liberal-arts classes in university. I didn't always get an A, but I could always get a B or better. All I needed was a bit of notes from the class and a brief description of what the essay was about. Mind you, I never tried doing this for fourth-year classes, but I did first, second, and third-year liberals arts classes with no problem. And this was generally without actually attending any of these courses.
Arguably yes, until you consider the fact that it's obviously a bullshit assignment in the first place, otherwise a person who never attended the class and spent just one night writing the essay should never have gotten a B+, never mind an A.Isn't that kind of unethical?
It should also be noted that there are a lot more shenanigans in liberal-arts faculties on university; haven't you ever noticed that when a truly whack-job article makes the rounds from some university professor, it's always somebody in the humanities? What was the last time you heard about some engineering prof spending his time writing screeds about the white race should be abolished?
I usually did them to help out a friend, but there were times I was paid. Seriously, it's hard to get worked up over the ethics of falsifying what is clearly a bullshit assignment in the first place. Any assignment where the "money shot" part of the question is "justify your opinion" is a slam-dunk. All you have to do is sound reasonable and make sure your essay is well-structured and harps on its point in a clear but not browbeating way. The only real trick was to ask the student "OK, which way does the prof lean on this question" and then make a logical-sounding argument for that position. Because they may talk about how no interpretation is truly correct, but that's not what they really believe.Or did you just do them in your spare time for fun?
Ironically enough, the fact that I didn't attend the classes may have helped. By arguing for the prof's position without mimicking the exact way in which he did so (an impossibility, since I never actually heard him make his case), it comes off as independent thinking rather than parrotting (yet I still came up with the "correct" answer)