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Doing your own work...

An interesting article in the latest WIRED magazine covers the topic of people buying degrees (Bachelor, Master, and PhD) and this professor who discovered this million dollar scam and got the FBI involved.

Over the past year or so, I've continued to receive spam from a number of websites selling term papers, research papers, and other false documents - sites like this one. One goes down, another comes up. (I'm not giving anything away with this link - a simple Google search will turn up hundreds of these.)

There seems to be a growing trend, both in the USA and abroad, of people taking the shortcuts and not doing the work for themselves. The WIRED article talks about some of the people who have been tracked down with false credentials - these include many government workers and even a US Marshall!

Over the past few years, we've had a handful of people post requests for programs on the forum. Sometimes these requests have come from students who state quite clearly that the program is for an assignment. Apparently this problem has no age barriers.

I worry that one day I'll be driving across a bridge designed by a civil engineer who got his degree by simply paying $1500.00 for the piece of paper.

The contributors here at The NXT Step are good about pushing students who request hard answers to do the work themselves... but let's be honest and agree that the likelihood of a student who posts this kind of request actually saying "Okay, I'll go study more" is very slim. What are your thoughts?

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