Term paper writer for hire

Another minor gem courtesy of Kottke: a first-person account of a writer for hire in the academic world. He writes papers on any topic that doesn't require actual laboratory work or math. His clients? Students who are lazy or too deficient in their command of written English.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

The work is immoral. The account may be fictitious. Read it anyway: it's entertaining.

If there was a takeaway from this, it's that there's plenty of blame to go around for the pseudonymous ghostwriter's purported career. However, my gut tells me that, whatever the systemic failings are, they can't compare to the baseness of human nature. Greed and arrogance, combined with an outsized sense of entitlement, have gummed up many of our works (just look at our economy); it's no surprise that our education system and our kids show the same rot.