Sunday, June 7, 2015

Buy and Sell Essays

If you want to know where to go to buy a high school-level essay suitable for use in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald has a number of suggestions, with some indication of prices:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/cheating-endemic-in-nsw-high-schools-20150607-ggw8h9

A couple of years ago I went to a high school science teachers workshop, where, over lunch, I shocked a number of teachers of physics and chemistry by telling them how easy it was for students to buy their "extended experimental investigation" online, and, how cheap it was. My point in doing this was not to shock the teachers (I thought everyone knew about this), it was to point out that the notion of using this type of investigation as an assessment tool was not assessing students' scientific abilities it was only assessing their ability to find relevant information online (arguably just as important and useful in its own right). Unfortunately, as an assessment tool, it also favours those with money to spend. The answer is not to try to "crack down" on this "cheating", which, although possible would almost certainly not be practical, rather the answer is to change the way students are assessed.

There is probably a much more deeply-rooted problem in all of this "cheating". I strongly suspect that for many students, there is no joy in learning or indeed in trying to understand concepts, the only purpose for going to school and doing assessments, is to get a good mark in order to go somewhere else after school (university, TAFE).(No doubt, the only reason they want to go to a tertiary education institution is in order to get a good mark in order to go somewhere else again ..... and it is entirely possible they will spend the rest of their lives being dissatisfied and buying their way to "somewhere else").
Perhaps if we could take everyone's focus off "assessment", and get them to focus on "learning", students might find that not only is there a lot of fun to be had out of learning something new, there is also an intense sense of satisfaction when you realise that you now understand a concept well enough to use to it in different situations, and, there is an enormous sense of power in using your understanding to make and test predictions. They might even find the learning process enjoyable.

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