How come so many students buy the wrong course? Aren't the directions what to get clear? Or am I missing something here?
when i say they buy the course i mean they are buying the answers - to all the discussion questions and assignments. this way, for as little as $20US they can just post things and not have to read anything or do any work to pass the course.
when you teach you are given a default course with all the discussion questions and assignments built in so if you don't change anything you can just go in and do your minimum responses and grade papers and get about $1200 for very little work. "Tutoring" sites get this list and create responses that students can buy. none of these strategies work with my classes since i change all the assignments with each iteration and write my own discussion questions. In my research methods class the questions look very similar until the week 3 quiz. that's the point at which many of the plagiarists drop the class.
this time around i had five plagiarists from my previous class who may have grabbed the materials and gone to another kind of "tutoring" site which has people who look at your questions and create responses. this costs more - sometimes it can be $20 for a single question. however if they compared what they bought with what's in this iteration of my class they would find significant differences. all five of the plagiarists dropped the class within a day of start.
later four more dropped so that i now have 10 out of 19 in the class. i am a little worried about what will happen in week 3 - i have identified two other plagiarists, one of whom i have already confronted. it's hard to maintain sufficient discussion with so few students.
