reading and writing assignment
guesszzz
ba_readings_summer_17.pdf
Reading for Question 1 Yelp review of the restaurant Brigantessa by customer “James G.,” posted on 2/26/15
“2 stars”
Just a quick update: Having received several (obnoxious) private messages from the owner, Francis Cratil Cretarola, apparently, if you don't like the food at Brigantessa, the problem is you and your ignorance.
Quite a way to run a business.
Uneven.
At the start, I have to say the Jamón ibérico was indeed, the finest ham on earth and well worth the $20 price tag. That being said:
Service: Good, not great, a little on the slow side, not enough to reduce the overall grade.
Atmosphere: A nice couple of rooms, not over crowded, nicely appointed.
Food: Beet Salad and Pheasant tureen were pleasant. Not, in and of themselves a reason to visit, but decent.
Pizza: I knew in advance this was a Neapolitan pizza and was ready for it. It would be completely unfair to compare this to American pizza, and I would never do that. However, the pie was relentlessly bland. Essentially a middling quality dough, lightly baked, and sparsely topped with an excruciatingly flavorless tomato sauce and flavorless ricotta. I'd compare it to Wonder Bread with ketchup and some Kraft Parmesan sprinkled (sparingly) on top. This is not a good interpretation of Neapolitan pizza, at least the way it was executed this evening.
Admittedly, it was restaurant week, but we arrived quite early and didn't order off the restaurant week menu.
Long and short, there are simply too many other very good Italian restaurants on Passyunk (Virtu, Birra, Paradissio, etc.) to spend an evening and $150 at Brigantessa. Life is short, don't settle for average.
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Brigantessa owner response, posted to Yelp on 2/27/15
James G, this is Francis Cratil Cretarola, one of the owners of Brigantessa. I'd like to quickly address some of your comments.
There is no "sauce" on real pizza napoletana. By Neapolitan regulations, which we follow to the letter, tomatoes must be raw and from the slopes of Vesuvius. We use DOP San Marzano or the even rare DOP piennolo variety, which grow closer to the sea and have more salinity.
Any ricotta you consumed was imported from Italy (though its inclusion in your description confuses me).
The "middling dough" was made with flour milled in Napoli and did, indeed, get a "light" baking. By Neapolitan regulations, it must be cooked in a wood-‐fired 900+ degree oven for 60 to 90 seconds. No more, no less. We don't do the crackery crusts you obviously prefer. We do pizza napoletana, which must be "umida e soffice," moist and soft. It's not for everyone.
I admit to being confused about just what pizza you had. The Calabrese has ricotta, but its accompanying ingredients are calabrese chili oil, roasted peppers and sausage. The Margherita has raw San Marzano tomatoes, fior di latte mozzarella and basil, but no ricotta. The Regina is dressed with Piennolo tomatoes (or San Marzano, depending on their availability), mozzarella di bufala from Caserta, Campania and basil (no ricotta). The Marinara has San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, oregano and extra virgin olive oil (it has no cheese of any kind). The Sorrentina has yellow piennolo tomatoes and Meyer lemons. No ricotta however. The other pies include components (lamb sausage, potato croquettes, pancetta ... ) you fail to mention. So, which pie did you have?
We follow the rules as we're applying for Neapolitan certification from the AVPN, a body in Napoli that determines the standards for pizza napoletana. We would be the first pizzeria in Philly to receive certification.
If you prefer pizzas with "sauce" that are more crackery, the world is your oyster. We don't disparage such pizzas; they were the pizzas we grew up with. We are doing something different, rooted in tradition, that it seems you actually weren't "ready for." I happily post this video we've made explaining the traditions we follow: youtube.com/watch?v=kXLH…. It's fun, so please watch it ... it's not "excruciating."
We support and take pride in the work of all of our neighbors (including the establishments you name ... they all have their virtues), please do encourage others to visit them. East Passyunk is a community.
Reading for Question 2 Below is former Temple University President Neil Theobald’s letter to the Pennsylvania State Legislature requesting funding for the 2016-‐17 school year. Public universities such as Temple get state funding annually, and while Temple’s funding (like all state universities in Pennsylvania) has been decreasing in recent years, Theobald is asking for a 21.63% ($33 million) increase over 2015-‐16 funding.
Introduction
I am greatly honored to bring you Temple University’s annual request. This is my third year submitting a request as Temple’s President. Each year I do so, I am deeply humbled by the thoughtful and enthusiastic response I receive from state leaders, especially for initiatives designed to keep Temple affordable and accessible. The partnership between Temple and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a long and proud one that has generated tremendous benefits for Commonwealth residents. I look forward to strengthening and sustaining that relationship in the years to come.
I am pleased to share with you the impact Temple has on the Commonwealth. In the discussion that follows, I will describe how Temple creates value for the Commonwealth through our unprecedented efforts to provide a high-‐quality education to Commonwealth residents; create life-‐changing research; and remain affordable and accessible while maintaining our excellence.
I would be remiss if I did not note that Temple is surging in quality. Our new class of freshmen and transfer students is the largest and most academically qualified class we’ve ever
had. Their average high school GPA of 3.51 is the best of any incoming class in Temple history. They also represent a 20 percent rise in African-‐American freshmen and 26 percent rise in Latino freshmen, adding to the more than 45 percent of all Temple students who identify themselves as non-‐white.
Most importantly, the new students come from throughout the Commonwealth; we now have registered students from 63 Pennsylvania counties. Temple reflects this state— talented and diverse. We are able to educate so many high-‐achieving Commonwealth students in part because we have increased financial aid to ensure talented students of all backgrounds have access to our high-‐quality education. At the same time, we have had three consecutive years of record fundraising, and we recently moved into the top 100 of the National Science Foundation’s research expenditure rankings.
Given our value to the Commonwealth, it is not surprising that Temple rose six spots this year to achieve its highest-‐ever ranking in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges— No. 115 among national universities. Our rise was a sign of our incredible momentum: Over the past five years, Temple has ascended an unprecedented 17 spots in the U.S. News rankings, making us the No. 1 gainer in the Commonwealth over that time.
Alumni who power Pennsylvania
The impact our university has on the Commonwealth is immense. Go into virtually any boardroom, newsroom, classroom, rehearsal room or operating room in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and you are likely to find a Temple graduate.
Temple is the number one provider of professional practitioners in Pennsylvania, including graduates of our medical school, dental school and law school. More than 80 percent of our students come from the Commonwealth. Just as important: those who come from out of state elect to stay and work here after they receive their degrees. There are more than 167,000 Temple alumni living in Pennsylvania—equivalent to the Commonwealth’s third-‐largest city.
Because of Temple, the Commonwealth has an influx of talented, highly qualified college graduates entering the work force every year. Numerous state elected officials are Temple graduates. With your continued support, we will be able to keep producing the future leaders of this state.
Temple’s benefit to Pennsylvania is clear. Temple supports 71,000 jobs in the Commonwealth. Every $1 the Commonwealth appropriates for Temple generates $43 in state impact.
Fly in 4
Since I arrived at Temple, I have been emphasizing the crucial importance of graduating in four years to reduce student debt. Today, I am proud to report that Temple has made major strides in this area.
This year, about 93 percent of our freshmen signed up for Fly in 4, Temple’s innovative plan to help them graduate on time and limit their debt. To briefly review, here's how Fly in 4 works: students agree to meet with their advisors regularly and take classes when they’re offered. They commit to sticking to their academic plan and graduating on time.
For its part, Temple has invested heavily in advising. We’ve also ensured that courses are taught when students need them. If students meet all of their requirements under Fly in 4 but still can’t graduate on time, Temple will pick up their remaining tuition bill.
This year’s incredible 93 percent participation rate in Fly in 4 follows last year’s impressive rate of 88 percent. These students are making a commitment that will limit their loan debt and put them on the path to success in their careers and lives.
As I have discussed with many of you in the last year, we want our students to graduate in four years because taking longer delays their entry into the higher-‐paid, college-‐educated segment of the work force. It also adds significantly to their debt: Students who stay in college for more than four years often have to take out riskier loans or—even worse—use their credit cards to pay for college expenses.
In recent years, Temple has made tremendous progress in raising our four-‐year graduation rate. With Fly in 4, we expect that rate to rise even higher. Fly in 4 also positions us as an innovative leader for other institutions in the Commonwealth and the nation to follow.
Research that improves lives
Temple’s research is focused on real-‐world results. For example, our researchers helped lead an international study that found that providing HIV patients with drug therapy immediately after they’re diagnosed significantly lowers their risk of developing AIDS. That discovery follows the pioneering announcement last year that our researchers successfully eliminated the HIV virus from cultured human cells—an incredible first step on the path toward a permanent cure for AIDS.
At Temple, we produce research that changes peoples’ lives. The breakthroughs and technologies we produce in labs are being transferred to the marketplace faster than ever before. And our research is especially beneficial right here in the Commonwealth.
Just recently, a study supported by Temple’s Center on Regional Politics found that closing Pennsylvania’s student achievement gaps could generate billions of dollars in state impact. Our researchers are also working on projects to improve language development among impoverished youth; reverse the effects of heart failure; and develop new treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Temple’s research has been helped tremendously by our new Science Education and Research Center (SERC), which opened last fall. This state-‐of-‐the-‐art facility allows faculty, researchers and students to collaborate across disciplines and meld learning in the classroom with discoveries in the lab.
SERC was funded in part by generous support from the Commonwealth. I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for the Commonwealth’s investment in our research enterprise.
We look forward to providing a return on that investment by producing even more transformative research for Commonwealth residents. SERC—and all of the life-‐ changing research produced at Temple—perfectly demonstrates the impact that is possible when the Commonwealth partners with Temple University.
The Temple Option
Farid Abdelrahman is a Temple freshman who plans to become a neurosurgeon and open up hospitals. He attended public school in Philadelphia, graduated high school with a 3.88 GPA and participated in a variety of extracurricular activities. But he did not do as well on his SATs as he had hoped.
Students like Farid are why we created the Temple Option, an alternative admissions path for students who show great potential but don’t perform well on standardized tests. With the Temple Option, students can apply to Temple without submitting a standardized test score, such as the SAT or ACT. Students who do perform well on standardized tests are encouraged to choose the traditional route and supply their scores.
The Temple Option is our response to the growing body of research evidence that shows high-‐school GPA, class rank and “noncognitive” factors are more reliable predictors of college success. If students choose not to submit test scores, they must answer specially designed, self-‐reflective short-‐answer questions. When evaluated by trained readers, the answers to these questions provide evidence of noncognitive motivational and developmental traits that are better predictors of future success than are standardized test scores.
Temple was the first state-‐related school in Pennsylvania to offer such an admissions path for talented students. But we are hardly alone. Hundreds of other colleges and universities have moved to test-‐optional admissions in recent years, including George Washington University, Wake Forest University, Brandeis University, Kansas State University and the University of Arizona.
We want our students to know that at Temple, they are more than a test score. This year, about 18 percent of our freshmen enrolled at Temple via the Temple Option. They included students like Farid, who can go on to change the world—thanks to this new admissions path.
An affordable, high-‐value institution
In this era of great change in higher education, Temple stands for accessibility, maximum affordability and excellence of many kinds—all at once. Many colleges see those factors as a choice; they pick just one to emphasize. We see them as inseparable. That is the unique Temple value proposition.
Because of our commitment to creating value for the Commonwealth, we have kept base tuition increases to an average of 2.4 percent over three years. That is an unprecedented effort at tuition control that is unlikely to be found at many other schools— public or private— in the Commonwealth or the nation.
We have also taken several other steps to help our students. This year, we increased financial aid by $6 million, raising the total amount of available financial aid to more than $100 million.
But we are not resting on our laurels. Recently, Temple engaged Gallup, Inc., the well-‐known polling company, to conduct a survey that will help us learn more about how our alumni are doing post-‐college. This survey will provide invaluable data on the value we create in our students’ lives and how we can continue to benefit students for years to come.
Conclusion
At Temple, our mission is clear. We are committed to transforming lives through our research; growing the Commonwealth’s economy; and providing talented and motivated students of all backgrounds with access to a high-‐quality college degree. Because of our unique value proposition, it should be clear that Temple generates value for the Commonwealth at an effective cost.
I am proud to be the leader of one of Pennsylvania’s great urban research institutions. If there is anything I can do to help you learn more about Temple University, please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected].
Thank you for your consideration,
Neil D. Theobald
President
Reading for Question 3 U.S. News ranking categories, subfactors, and weights
Category Subfactors U.S. News weighting (%)
Peer assessment survey Undergraduate academic reputation High school counselor’s rating
22.5
Acceptance rate High school standing in top 10%
Student selectivity Critical reading and math portions of the SAT
and the composite ACT score
12.5
Faculty compensation Percent faculty with top terminal degree
Percent faculty that is full-‐time Student/faculty ratio Class size under 20
Faculty resources
Class size over 50
20.0
Average graduation rate Graduation and retention rate Average freshman retention rate
22.5
Financial resources Financial resources per student 10.0 Alumni giving Average alumni giving rate 5.0 Graduation rate performance
Graduation rate performance 7.5
How U.S. News Calculated the 2016 Best Colleges Rankings Here's a breakdown of the key college data that go into the annual rankings. Sept. 8, 2015
By Robert Morse, Eric Brooks and Matt Mason
The host of intangibles that makes up the college experience can't be measured by a series of data points. But for families concerned with finding the best academic value for their money, the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings provide an excellent starting point for the search.
They allow you to compare at a glance the relative quality of institutions.
The measures, their weights in the ranking formula and an explanation of each follow.
Undergraduate academic reputation (22.5 percent): The U.S. News ranking formula gives significant weight to the opinions of those in a position to judge a school's undergraduate academic excellence. The academic peer assessment survey allows top academics – presidents, provosts and deans of admissions – to account for intangibles at peer institutions, such as faculty dedication to teaching.
To get another set of important opinions on National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges, we also surveyed 2,200 counselors at public high schools, each of which was a gold, silver or bronze medal winner in a recent edition of the U.S. News Best High Schools rankings, as well as 400 college counselors at the largest independent schools. The counselors represent nearly every state and the District of Columbia.
Each academic and counselor surveyed was asked to rate schools' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who didn't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly were asked to mark "don't know."
The score used in the rankings is the average score of those who rated the school on the 5-‐ point scale; "don't knows" are not counted as part of the average. In order to reduce the impact of strategic voting by respondents, we eliminated the two highest and two lowest scores each school received before calculating the average score.
The academic peer assessment score in this year's rankings is based on the results from surveys in spring 2014 and spring 2015. Previously, only the most recent year's results were used.
The results from the three most recent years of counselor surveys, from spring 2013, spring 2014 and spring 2015, were averaged to compute the high school counselor reputation score. This was done to increase the number of ratings each college received from the high school counselors and to reduce the year-‐to-‐year volatility in the average counselor score.
Ipsos Public Affairs collected the data in spring 2015. Of the 4,530 academics who were sent questionnaires, 40 percent responded. This response rate is down very slightly from the 42 percent response rate to the surveys conducted in spring 2014 and spring 2013. The counselors' one-‐year response rate was 7 percent for the spring 2015 surveys.
Retention (22.5 percent): The higher the proportion of first-‐year students who return to campus for sophomore year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services that students need to succeed.
This measure has two components: six-‐year graduation rate (80 percent of the retention score) and first-‐year retention rate (20 percent). The graduation rate indicates the average proportion of a graduating class earning a degree in six years or less; we consider first-‐year student classes that started from fall 2005 through fall 2008. First-‐year retention indicates the average proportion of first-‐year students who entered the school in the fall of 2010 through the fall of 2013 and returned the following fall.
Faculty resources (20 percent): Research shows that the more satisfied students are about their contact with professors, the more they will learn and the more likely they are to graduate. We use six factors from the 2014-‐2015 academic year to assess a school's commitment to instruction.
Class size has two components: the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students (30 percent of the faculty resources score) and the proportion with 50 or more students (10 percent of the score).
Faculty salary (35 percent) is the average faculty pay, plus benefits, during the 2013-‐2014 and 2014-‐2015 academic years, adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living using indexes from the consulting firm Runzheimer International. We also weigh the proportion of professors with the highest degree in their fields (15 percent), the student-‐faculty ratio (5 percent) and the proportion of faculty who are full time (5 percent).
Student selectivity (12.5 percent): A school's academic atmosphere is determined in part by the abilities and ambitions of the students.
This measure has three components. We factor in the admissions test scores for all enrollees who took the critical reading and math portions of the SAT and the composite ACT score (65 percent of the selectivity score). We also consider the proportion of enrolled first-‐year students at National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes or the proportion of enrolled first-‐year students at Regional Universities and Regional Colleges who graduated in the top quarter of their classes (25 percent). The third component is the acceptance rate, or the ratio of students admitted to applicants (10 percent).
The data are all for the fall 2014 entering class. While the ranking calculation takes account of both the SAT and ACT scores of all entering students, the ranking tables on usnews.com display the score range for whichever test was taken by most students.
We use footnotes on usnews.com to indicate schools that did not report to U.S. News the fall 2014 SAT and ACT scores for all first-‐time, first-‐year, degree-‐seeking students for whom the schools had data. Schools sometimes fail to report SAT and ACT scores for students in these specific categories: athletes, international students, minority students, legacies, those admitted by special arrangement and those who started in the summer of 2014. We also use footnotes to indicate schools that declined to tell U.S. News whether all students with SAT and ACT test scores were represented.
For schools that did not report all scores or that declined to say whether all scores were reported, we reduced the value of their SAT and ACT scores in the Best Colleges ranking model. This practice is not new; since the 1997 rankings, we have discounted the value of such schools' reported scores in the ranking model, because the effect of leaving students out could be that lower scores are omitted. If a school told U.S. News that it included all students with scores in its reported SAT and ACT scores, then those scores were counted fully in the rankings and were not footnoted.
If less than 75 percent of the fall 2014 entering class submitted SAT and ACT scores, their test scores were discounted in the ranking calculations. This policy was also used in the 2015 edition of the rankings.
Financial resources (10 percent): Generous per-‐student spending indicates that a college can offer a wide variety of programs and services. U.S. News measures financial resources by using
the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services and related educational expenditures in the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years. Spending on sports, dorms and hospitals doesn't count.
Graduation rate performance (7.5 percent): This indicator of added value compares expected graduation rates with actual ones. It shows the effect of the college's programs and policies on the graduation rate of students after controlling for spending and student characteristics, such as test scores and the proportion receiving Pell Grants. We measure the difference between a school's six-‐year graduation rate for the class that entered in 2008 and the rate we predicted for the class.
If the school's actual graduation rate for the 2008 entering class is higher than the rate U.S. News predicted for that same class, then the college is enhancing achievement, or overperforming. If a school's actual graduation rate is lower than the U.S. News prediction, then it is underperforming.
Alumni giving rate (5 percent): This reflects the average percentage of living alumni with bachelor's degrees who gave to their school during 2012-‐2013 and 2013-‐2014, which is an indirect measure of student satisfaction.
To arrive at a school's rank, we first calculated the weighted sum of its standardized scores. The final scores were rescaled so that the top school in each category received a value of 100, and the other schools' weighted scores were calculated as a proportion of that top score. Final scores were rounded to the nearest whole number and ranked in descending order.
Readings for Question 4 Memo from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on Dec. 14, 2010:
Yahoos,
I want to share some tough news with you. Today, we began notifying some Yahoos that they will lose their jobs. Most of the reductions will come from the Products org and, when completed, will affect about 4% of the company.
I know this has been rumored for some time. It’s disappointing when things like this leak, and it certainly doesn’t make it any easier for anyone involved. This was a tough call, but a necessary one. We need to make these changes now to ensure that Products is structured and running the way we want as 2011 begins. And that means we need fewer Yahoos in some areas, and different types of Yahoos in others.
There are several reasons for this. First, we’ve found a lot of duplication in work between Products and the regions. Second, it’s no secret that we’re cutting investment in underperforming and non-‐core products so we can focus on our strengths (like email, the homepage, search, mobile, advertising, content and more). And lastly, we need to get the Products cost-‐structure in order so it aligns with our development plans for next year and beyond.
You’ve heard me say before that I didn’t come to cut Yahoo! to greatness. That’s still true. This decision is about more than cost savings. The changes are meant to get us into a position so we can invest more in the kind of products and technology we know we need to be successful. The process that begins today – along with Blake’s past org changes and new Products operational plan – helps to get us there.
It’s never easy to say goodbye to Yahoos we know and work with, especially before the holidays. Please know that we’re helping those affected with severance pay and benefits, plus services to help them find other jobs.
One last thing before I go: It’s important to put this in perspective, and remember that we’re making good progress on our turnaround. Margins have expanded. Revenue growth has stabilized after a long period of decelerating trends. Product rollouts are accelerating as we modernize our infrastructure. Our Search alliance with Microsoft continues on schedule, and more.
We’ve got a lot of potential, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Let’s stay focused and not lose sight of that.
Carol
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Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara’s memo to staff in September 2014
There is no easy way to deliver today’s message. As you know, we at Warner Bros. have committed to reducing costs across the company in order to meet our long-‐term financial targets, and that includes cutting staff. These changes are challenging, but we believe they will allow us to reallocate resources and position the company for growth and stability in the years ahead.
We’ve now completed much of our company-‐wide review, and most business groups will be announcing staff changes this week, beginning today. However, some groups, including Finance, MIS and Technical Operations, have been engaged in more complex reorganizations; they will make some staff changes now, with most coming in the first quarter of next year. Similarly, international territories will proceed according to local policies and protocol, and most of their changes will be announced in the early part of next year.
I know that every employee around the world is a part of Warner Bros.’ success, and it’s difficult to lose colleagues who have helped make the Studio the global industry leader it is today. As always, we are committed to taking care of our employees, and we will be as generous as possible with those who are impacted by these cuts.
These are difficult decisions, and we don’t take them lightly. We examined every aspect of our businesses to ensure that we were restructuring in a way that would allow us to minimize the impact on our employees, while continuing to adapt to the changing global marketplace. With your continued help and support, I am confident that Warner Bros. will remain the best studio in the world, while preserving the culture that has made this company so special.
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EA executive chairperson Larry Probst, April 2013
As we begin the new fiscal year, I want to provide you with a brief update on some important changes to our organization. As Executive Chairman, my focus is to ensure EA is delivering high quality games and services to our consumers, while helping the executive team develop a FY14 operating plan that drives growth, rationalizes headcount and controls costs.
In recent weeks, the executive team has been tasked with evaluating every area of our business to establish a clear set of priorities, and a more efficient organizational structure. This process has led to some difficult decisions about the number of people and locations needed to achieve our goals.
The workforce reductions which we communicated in the last two weeks represent the majority of our planned personnel actions. We are extremely grateful for the contributions made by each of these individuals – they will be missed by their colleagues and friends at EA.
We are also taking action to streamline our organization, including changes in two key areas: • Core marketing functions have been consolidated under our COO, Peter Moore. The
combined group will bring together our Label marketing teams, Global Acquisition Marketing and Marketing Analytics into one multi-‐talented team under Todd Sitrin’s
leadership. The development and marketing teams will continue to work as cohesive units, driving clear and consistent messaging and consumer engagement for each of our franchises.
• Origin will move into Frank Gibeau’s Labels organization. Andrew Wilson will take on the leadership of Origin, working with CJ Prober and the team to create more value and an enhanced entertainment experience for our consumers.
Change is sometimes difficult, but essential. The adjustments we are making will put us in the best position to build great games and services, deliver them more efficiently to consumers, and demonstrate to players around the world why they should spend their time with us.
EA is a great company, with talented and hard-‐working teams, a strong portfolio of products and an extremely bright future.
Thank you all for your dedication and commitment to our long term success!
Reading for Question 5
The New Cheating Economy
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Brad Wolverton August 28, 2016
Fifteen credits were all he needed. That’s what the school district in California where Adam Sambrano works as a career-‐guidance specialist required for a bump in pay. But when he saw the syllabus for a graduate course he’d enrolled in last year at Arizona State University, he knew he was in trouble.
Among the assignments was a 19-‐page paper, longer than anything he’d ever written. The idea of that much research worried Mr. Sambrano, who also spends time serving in the Army National Guard.
Before the class started, he went on Craigslist and enlisted the service of a professional cheater. For $1,000 — less than the monthly housing allowance he was receiving through the GI Bill, he says — Mr. Sambrano hired a stranger to take his entire course.
He transferred $500 upfront, "From Adam for ASU," according to a receipt obtained by The Chronicle. Then he just waited for the cheater to do his work.
On any given day, thousands of students go online seeking academic relief. They are first-‐years and transfers overwhelmed by the curriculum, international students with poor English skills, lazy undergrads with easy access to a credit card. They are nurses, teachers, and government workers too busy to pursue the advanced degrees they’ve decided they need.
The Chronicle spoke with people who run cheating companies and those who do the cheating. The demand has been around for decades. But the industry is in rapid transition.
Just as higher education is changing, embracing a revolution in online learning, the cheating business is transforming as well, finding new and more insidious ways to undermine academic integrity.
A decade ago, cheating consisted largely of students’ buying papers off the internet. That’s still where much of the money is. But in recent years, a new underground economy has emerged, offering any academic service a student could want. Now it’s not just a paper or one-‐off assignment. It’s the quiz next week, the assignment after that, the answers served up on the final. Increasingly, it’s the whole class. And if students are paying someone to take one course, what’s stopping them from buying their entire degree?
The whole-‐class market is maturing fast. More than a dozen websites now specialize in taking entire online courses, including BoostMyGrade.com, OnlineClassHelp.com, and
TakeYourClass.com. One of them, NoNeedtoStudy.com, advertises that it has completed courses for more than 11,000 students at such colleges as Duke, Michigan State, even Harvard.
As cheating companies expand their reach, colleges have little incentive to slow their growth. There’s no money in catching the cheaters. But there’s a lot of money in upping enrollment.
Two professors at Western Carolina University were so concerned about the encroachment of cheating that they set up a fake online class to learn more about the industry’s tactics, and see what they could detect.
About a dozen students agreed to enroll in the introductory psychology course, including John Baley, then a graduate student in clinical psychology. They were provided with fake names, email addresses, and ID numbers, plus a pot of money for cheating services. Half were asked to cheat, and they did so in a variety of ways, collaborating inappropriately with classmates, buying papers, and paying others to take tests.
Mr. Baley went looking for a company to take the whole class for him. He typed a few words into his browser — "cheat for me in my online class" — and turned up dozens of results. Many sites seemed untrustworthy: Their content was misspelled or grammatically incorrect, or their customer-‐service reps had trouble with basic English. Some requested confidential banking information or asked him to enter it into a website with no security protection.
But one company impressed him. Its representatives responded promptly, explained how their colleagues would complete the course, and guaranteed a B or better — or his money back. He agreed to pay the company $900, half upfront, and handed over his course username and password.
Over the next 10 weeks, the company, which Mr. Baley declined to name, to protect any further research, passed him from the customer-‐service staff to the management team to the person who took his course. At each stage, he says, he dealt with people who were efficient, responsive, and reliable. In fact, the cheaters performed better than he thought they would. They completed every assignment without prompting, at one point providing a written script for a video presentation with less than 36 hours’ notice.
The instructors, Alvin Malesky, an associate professor of psychology, and Robert Crow, an assistant professor of educational research, used Turnitin and Google to check students’ work for plagiarism and monitored them to see if groups were taking exams at the same time.
The professors caught several students plagiarizing material. But they didn’t spot the paid test takers, purchased papers, or coordinated assignments. And they had no clue that a person in New York to whom Mr. Baley had mailed his books was behind the A’s they were giving.
Even when professors knew that students were cheating, and were trying to catch them, they came up short.
Mr. Baley’s only frustration was with the barrage of marketing he got. His Facebook and Instagram feeds were saturated with ads for cheating companies, he says. That didn’t let up for months.
Two years after the company took his class, its representatives are still trying to enlist him to refer other students as clients.
Like any underground industry, academic cheating has its share of sloppy opportunists and savvy operators. Most work in the shadows. Click on a website that offers academic work for hire, and you’ll probably find little information about the people or company behind it. The owners often use aliases and mislead prospective customers with fake addresses and exaggerated claims.
No Need to Study LLC lists its corporate address as 19 East 52nd Street, in New York,, but complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau say that address does not exist. A representative for the company said in an email that it is a virtual business offering services exclusively online and does not have an office open to the public. A dissertation-‐writing service that claims to be based in Chicago seems to operate out of Pakistan. "In order to create a best academic assignment that rank #1 among other assignments," its website says, "then you will seek for a dedicated and experienced writer’s help."
Even more-‐established companies can be difficult to track down. The headquarters of one, Student Network Resources, appears to be in the middle of a New Jersey cornfield. A half-‐mile away, in a generic strip mall, it maintains a post-‐office box in a packing-‐and-‐shipping store. The owner of the store says he forwards the mail to Florida. It goes to the company’s founder and president, Mark DeGaeta.
Mr. DeGaeta got the idea for Student Network Resources in the late 1990s, when he was still in high school, he says in an email to The Chronicle. Over the years, he has registered more than a dozen domains, including PaperDue.com and HelpMyEssay.com, which funnel work to his company, whose name is relatively unknown.
When students place a request through one of the sites, they enter their name, email address, and as much information about the assignment as possible, including due date and level (undergraduate, master’s, or doctoral). That information goes into Student Network’s system, where a price is set based on the difficulty of the assignment. The job is posted to a private board for writers, stripped of any personal details about the student. From there, a willing writer picks up the order and corresponds with the client through a private channel in which students often disclose personal information about themselves and their courses. Then the writer delivers the completed assignment.
Mr. DeGaeta is mum about the revenue he has brought in, but the business appears to be lucrative. Two longtime writers say they’ve earned as much as $10,000 a month. At peak times, the company says on its website, most of its 150 writers earn more than $1,800 a week. Writers typically pocket half the price of an order; the company gets the rest. If those numbers are accurate, annual revenue for Student Network Resources would be in the millions. The company has only two employees.
The founder has made a good living, according to public records. He owns an apartment in a tony neighborhood of New York, near the United Nations building, and seems to reside near Miami Beach. But his business has fallen off in recent years, he says, as the industry has expanded overseas.
The company emphatically denies that it is a cheating service. It says it tells customers that they may not use its material for academic credit — and requires them to acknowledge as much before purchasing papers, during the research process, and before receiving the work. "We vehemently protect our copyright," Mr. DeGaeta said in a written statement. "If the customer decides to use our material as a reference they must cite Student Network Resources Inc."
Several current and former writers told The Chronicle that they had believed that. Amelia Albanese, a former community-‐college tutor who worked for the company in 2010, says she thought she was writing sample papers for tutors and teachers. When she realized she was doing students’ work, she quit.
"I worked at a college," she says, "and if the students I worked with had cheated, I would have been furious."
The company’s business depends on covering its tracks. A memo it sent to writers last year gives step-‐by-‐step instructions for wiping the metadata from documents they produce.
"Every document that you submit must have 100% blank ‘Summary’ properties," the memo says. "You can make the ‘Author’ field (and other fields) blank by default for all new documents by going to ‘Preferences’ -‐-‐> ‘User Information’ and replacing the content of the ‘First:’ and ‘Last:’ fields with a blank space."
According to Mr. DeGaeta, the memo was aimed at preventing writers from poaching clients. But if there’s no trace of a cheater on a document, a college has no way of knowing — or if an instructor suspects something, no proof — that the student didn’t do the work.
Cheating has become second nature to many students. In studies, more than two-‐thirds of college students say they’ve cheated on an assignment. As many as half say they’d be willing to purchase one. To them, higher education is just another transaction, less about learning than about obtaining a credential.
The market, which includes hundreds of websites and apps, offers a slippery slope of options. Students looking for class notes and sample tests can find years’ worth on Koofers.com, which archives exams from dozens of colleges. And a growing number of companies, including Course Hero and Chegg, offer online tutoring that attempts to stay above the fray (one expert calls such services a "gateway drug").
Many students turn to websites like Yahoo Answers or Reddit to find solutions to homework problems. And every month, hundreds of students put assignments up for bid on Freelancer.com and Upwork, where they might get a paper written for the cost of a few lattes.
It’s not uncommon for students to disclose personal details in their orders, which anyone online can see. This spring a student from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte included an attachment to his Upwork order that identified his institution and the introductory philosophy class he was looking for help in. A few days later, a Ph.D. candidate in Britain went on the same site to solicit help with his dissertation. A document he attached to his order included his name and his adviser’s.
Some of the most explicit exchanges happen on Craigslist, which has become a hub of cheating activity. Over two days in April, The Chronicle analyzed Craigslist posts in seven cities in which a
cheater or cheating service offered to complete whole courses for students. The search turned up more than 200 ads. In many cases, the same ads ran in multiple cities, suggesting a coordinated marketing effort.
Craigslist posters appealed to students by acknowledging how little time they had for busywork. "Online classes are a pain in the ass," said one Chicago-‐area ad. Others outright asked students to hand over their online credentials. "You can trust us with your login and password information," said a Phoenix post. "We will do every section of your online class including discussion boards, tests, assignments, and quizzes."
The Chronicle exchanged messages with several Craigslist posters to inquire about the cost of their service and how it worked. One person who has posted regularly in the Los Angeles area said he had been in business for 10 years and had a staff of "over 20 experts." His prices, he said, depended on the number of hours it would take to complete a class, not how well a student wanted to do.
"We always get A’s and B’s," he said in a text message. "Calculation based classes are $750. All others are $600. Anyone quoting different is not a pro and doesn’t know what they are doing. Cheap quotes = F grades.
"Oh," he added, "and you can split up the payments."
Another poster said his prices depended on the institution. "A course from Penn State World Campus requires more effort than a course from Post University," he said in an email. "Previously, I completed a remedial English course for a client at Kaplan University. This person requested a ‘B’ for $90/week for eight weeks. Another client at a Cal State University required an ‘A’ in a four week upper division Asian Studies course for $300/week."
The most common way students cheat is through a simple web search — typing, for example, "essay," "essay help," or "write my essay." As many as half of the visits to some sites used for cheating come through search engines, The Chronicle found.
The companies that have made the biggest strides in the business have mastered the search game. Search-‐engine optimization efforts have helped Ultius, founded in 2011, grow fast.
The Delaware-‐based company, with a call center in Las Vegas, has hired more than 40 employees, including engineers and customer-‐service representatives, according to job ads. It has contracted with more than 1,400 writers.
That growth has coincided with a surge in traffic. Over a recent three-‐month stretch, the site drew about 520,000 visits, according to a Chronicle analysis of data compiled by SimilarWeb. Thirty to 40 percent of Ultius’s traffic comes from students’ web searches, according to estimates on Alexa, which measures internet usage. Ultius is the No. 1 or No. 2 search result that pops up when someone Googles "buy a term paper," "buy a research paper," or about a dozen other phrases that indicate an intent to purchase a completed assignment, according to a Chronicle analysis of search data compiled by Spyfu, a search-‐engine optimization tool.
Boban Dedovic, 27, the company’s chairman, helped start it after three semesters as a student at the University of Maryland at College Park, during which he worked as a tutor. To him, Ultius is a technology company that connects customers to writers, he says via email.
He denies that Ultius is part of the cheating industry, referring to it as a "doc prep service." In a written statement, the company says it works hard to ensure that its customers don’t misuse its services, informing them of its fair-‐use policy (that its work is meant for reference only and must be properly cited) at least three times and requiring them to accept it. When the company suspects a problem, it conducts an investigation, drafts an internal report, and, if it finds a violation, disables the customer’s account. However, the company says, it cannot individually monitor every one of its orders.
Ultius protects its business by keeping those orders private. When a student posts an assignment on Craigslist or other sites, looking for someone to pick it up, Google indexes that text, making it visible in searches. But the customer experience at Ultius occurs behind a wall, in the same way a bank keeps its clients’ information private. Because Google can’t create a record of those pages, professors wouldn’t be able to find them.
The company’s dealings with one Ph.D. candidate illustrate the increasingly complex work that students are outsourcing, while faculty members remain in the dark. Last year, Ultius contracted with a student who described herself as a "single active duty parent" to help write a concept paper for her doctoral program, records show. The job included revisions requested by the chair of her dissertation committee.
The Ph.D. student requested that Ultius complete a literature review and produce a theoretical framework for her dissertation. The order required the company to find data on migration patterns and economic growth in Jamaica, and to apply advanced economic theory. The company did the work, but the customer was so displeased with it that she filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
Ultius considers customer service a top priority, and despite 19 complaints in the past three years, mainly minor beefs over papers and assignments, it maintains an A+ rating from the BBB.
The Ph.D. student threatened to go public with her story, but more often it’s the paid cheaters who make threats. After Mr. Sambrano, the high-‐school guidance specialist, transferred $500 to have the whole course at Arizona State done for him, he stopped hearing from his Craigslist cheater and filed a PayPal claim against him. The cheater advised him to drop the claim or he’d hand over evidence of the arrangement to the university. Mr. Sambrano, afraid he’d be expelled, dropped the charge. He says he ended up doing the class himself.
In another case, if not for a cheater turning a student in, a college may never have known that the student was paying someone else to log in to the course and complete the work. In May an undergraduate at Colorado State University-‐Global Campus, dissatisfied with the quality of the work done for him, filed a PayPal claim. Angered, the cheater gave the student’s name to the instructor, along with text messages, screen shots of the student’s portal, and payment records detailing how the student had arranged to have the entire course done for him, says Jon M. Bellum, the provost.
CSU-‐Global, an online institution with about 15,000 students, had its information-‐technology department look at the IP addresses used for the student’s coursework and found more than one.
Mr. Bellum would not disclose the penalty the student faced, citing privacy law, but says such abuses can result in expulsion. Often, though, the university is not aware of the violation.
Colleges have tried technology to combat cheating. Several thousand institutions around the world use the anti-‐plagiarism software Turnitin, which says it has a database of some 600 million papers. But a recent study found that custom work is "virtually undetectable."
Coursera, an online education platform employed by dozens of prominent colleges, uses webcams and "keyboard dynamics," which attempt to verify students’ identities on the basis of their typing patterns. But that doesn’t do much good if the cheater is always typing.
CSU-‐Global says it spends about $60,000 a year administering random identity checks on its students. The tests require them to provide answers to personal questions like what banks service their loans or what streets they’ve lived on. If they don’t answer accurately, they can’t log in to their classes. About 2 percent of identity checks result in students’ getting locked out of the CSU system.
Other institutions have blocked access to sites that help students cheat. Victor Valley College, in California, has prevented anyone on a campus computer from accessing the website of Student Network Resources. But students can turn to their own laptops or other devices.
The biggest key to fighting the problem is faculty engagement, says Tricia Bertram Gallant, a former president of the International Center for Academic Integrity. She often speaks with professors about the business, she says, and finds them surprised that someone else could be doing students’ work.
"When I tell them about contract cheating, they’re shocked," she says. "They basically say, ‘What? That goes on?’ "
Others are in denial that it could happen in their classes. And even those who know about it and want to stop it say they’re too busy, or feel that the fight is futile, with new cheating companies popping up all the time.
But some professors are catching on. Last fall, Megan Elwood Madden, an associate professor in the School of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma, spotted a suspicious passage in a student’s paper. She ran it through Turnitin, finding several plagiarized sources but no match for the bulk of the text. So she Googled the student’s research topic and found the assignment posted on Course Hero with the student’s request for help.
A web search did not turn up the text the student had handed in, because it was hidden in Course Hero’s system. But once Ms. Elwood Madden had logged in to the site, she could see communication between the student and a contractor suggesting that the student had had the work completed for him, the professor said in an email.
She discovered that the student had used Course Hero to arrange work in at least four other classes as well. The revelations led the university to expel the student.
Such stories are rare, academic-‐integrity officers say, because there are so few would-‐be enforcers in pursuit. After The Chronicle published an article about the Western Carolina
experiment, two federal law-‐enforcement officials contacted the professors, eager to hear more about the business.
William Josephson, a former assistant attorney general in New York who has investigated fraud, says companies that assume false identities violate federal laws governing interstate commerce. Laws in at least 17 states prohibit students from using cheating services to complete their assignments. But prosecutors aren’t enforcing them.
Faculty members on the front lines are no more active. That’s also true in other countries where the cheating industry has developed. This spring, Marcus J. Ball, a higher-‐education reformer in Britain, came across an advertisement for academic cheating services on the wall of a London subway station.
The ad offended Mr. Ball, who began emailing college administrators and professors, trying to persuade them to sign a petition for the British government to debate the issue of contract cheating. His goal was to create a "unified block" of people willing to stand up to the cheating companies, with hopes of taking the fight to Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.
In May, Mr. Ball contacted more than 250 college officials, including academic-‐integrity leaders in several countries. Only five responded.
"Academics are constantly complaining about the essay-‐mill problem," he said in the email. But when presented with a "practical way forward to potentially solve the problem, they don’t engage."
Last year, Ms. Bertram Gallant, who is director of the academic-‐integrity office at the University of California at San Diego, organized a dozen international experts to study the growth of contract cheating and how to stop it.
The group laid out a series of big goals. Chief among them: Mobilize faculty members and students to demand laws making it more difficult for cheating companies to operate. It is creating a tool kit to help professors detect and prevent cheating. And it is organizing an international awareness day to bring more attention to the problem.
But the group can only muster so much fight. "There’s just not enough of us who care," says Ms. Bertram Gallant. "It’s a very small cadre internationally who really dedicate our lives to working on this issue, and that’s just not enough people."
College leaders haven’t helped, she says. Many have failed to make the issue a priority. Few colleges have academic-‐integrity offices, she says, or devote dollars to the problem.
"There is a lot of money to support these companies, but not a lot of money to support our research," she says. "All the money is going to the illegal part of the industry, and none of it is going to combat the industry."
Colleges also might need to rethink their approach, says Ms. Bertram Gallant. As online education continues to grow, and cheating companies have more opportunities to infiltrate classes, institutions would do well to enlist people with the skills to ferret out violations, she says. While educators may be equipped to catch plagiarism, they don’t have the tools to track a paid cheater who is assuming someone else’s identity.
Instead, colleges continue to rely on proud traditions to fight the scourge of cheating. This fall, as students return to campus, some colleges will require them to sign an honor code. Others will spell out for them the potential consequences of academic dishonesty.
In October, academic-‐integrity officials at the University of Oklahoma plan to hold a session to warn new students about paper mills. The tool they're using to combat cheating? Tea bags. To remind the students of the importance of ethics, the university is encouraging them have a cup of "integri-‐tea."
Dan Bauman and Ben Myers contributed reporting to this article.
