It Doesn’t Take an Ethics Degree
It doesn’t take an ethics degree to know that passing off a 3rd party thesis paper as your own is wrong. It’s not just wrong, actually. It’s dangerous. A thesis paper, after all, supposedly indicates a student’s qualifications for some academic degree. Presented with a genuine flair of knowledge and intent to further a profession, a thesis paper can even assist with academic funding — funding that could reach into the millions depending on the pursuit.
When outsourced, a thesis paper does none of those things. Outsourced, a thesis paper becomes a mockery of everything education stands for. And instead of qualifying individuals for real, unfeigned study and hard work, the outsourced thesis paper rewards everything education stands against: ignorance, cheating, and deceit. It additionally wastes enormous resources of money and/or qualifies students for opportunities they simply do not deserve.
Outsourcing Thesis Papers Is Illegal
This is why at RentACoder (vWorker), outsourcing thesis papers was an illegal or disallowed project. From RentACoder’s Disallowed Project Posting Policy page, the company made crystal clear, “Any project which would determine a final grade in an academic class (high school or university) is not allowed. This includes test taking, quiz taking, and the writing of final and thesis papers.”
This Stuff Should Be Common Sense
Those of you who were familiar with RentACoder and the policies that it enforced may not be surprised with its stance against outsourcing thesis papers. But the question of why it’s allowed anywhere else is interesting (to say the least). RentACoder shouldn’t have had to be the leader in ethical online outsourcing. Some of this stuff should be common sense, which is why I was surprised to see the following tweet issued by Freelancer.com:
As though it weren’t bad enough that Freelancer.com allows this highly unethical practice, they actually have the gall to brag about Ivy League students using their service to outsource “their work.” What type of work isn’t clearly stated in Freelancer.com’s tweet, and that may be a clever, intentional omission on Freelancer.com’s part since they too, probably know outsourcing thesis papers is unethical.
However after reading over the service’s terms and conditions, nothing gives the impression that outsourcing thesis papers is disallowed at the site. It certainly isn’t specified the way it was over at RentACoder, which leads anyone to believe the practice is acceptable at that service, and the monetary awards of allowing such projects are more important to Freelancer.com than the ramifications of doing so.
What Ramifications!?
How about these examples. This news story describes how “hundreds of parliamentarians in Pakistan could lose their seats because of fake degrees and possibly also face jail time.” This news story describes how a defense minister’s fake thesis paper brought about his suspension, and of course, his stripped degree. Google the issue, and you’ll find plenty of stories that describe similar scenarios.
Then think about how similar scenarios could affect our health care, our finances, our laws, and the quality of our children’s education when the possibility that these things could be handled by unqualified individuals exists — that is, by individuals who chose to outsource their profession, instead of perform the work required to know how to keep society safe, protected, and educated.
The Risks Are Simply Too High
It isn’t that Freelancer.com played a part in those two specific stories. It’s that it could have and probably will play a part in future similar scenarios simply because it offers a service that lets others deceive the public. This isn’t a service I would want to be associated with, and it’s a service you shouldn’t want to support. The ramifications of assisting the generation of unqualified “professionals” are too large. And the risks are simply too high.
One could say that it all boils down to one of the basic principles of outsourcing: Just because it can be outsourced, doesn’t mean it should be. A thesis paper is one of those things. And it’s unfortunate that Freelancer.com doesn’t agree.
