PARENTS are paying up to $1,500 a time to download pre-written essays from the Internet to help their student children pass degree courses.

Worryingly, many of the papers intended to be examples for use as study aids are then submitted as the young persons own work.

In some cases, parents were buying them as Christmas presents, according to online custom essay service.

The company, which provides high-quality essays for students to use as study guides, said it was contacted on numerous occasions before and during the festive period by middle-class parents looking for material that would ease their children’s workload.

In one case, a mother was refused service when she asked for numerous pieces ofworkcosting thousands of poundsand told the company she intended to rewrite them for her son.

A customer survey carried out by the Nottingham-based firm found that, of the6,000 essays it sold last year, 9 per cent around 550 were to students north of the Border.

A spokesman for UKessays.com said: Our survey showed that 50 per cent of our essays are being purchased for a son or daughter, with around 90 per cent of those customers coming from a middle-class background.

We even had to turn down one multiple order because the parent claimed she would rewrite all of the essays so that her son could simply hand them in as his own in January.

Some parents have even confessed on the phone that the custom essays are going to be gifts for Christmas.

The survey revealed that students at the University of Dundee bought the most bespoke essays north of the Border, with 176almost a third of the Scottish total sold to aid in coursework there last year. The University of Glasgow came second with 144 essays sold to students there, while 117 pieces of work went to those studying at the University of Aberdeen.

The practice of copying material from the Internet, or having essays written for a fee, has been growing in recent years at universities in Scotland.

Last year Aberdeen, St Andrews, Dundee and Robert Gordon universities introduced software that scans submitted essays and highlights passages that have been lifted from websites.

But despite the measures, plagiarism is still on the rise, with bespoke essays particularly difficult to identify.

Last year, Glasgow University caught 107 students copying material a rise of nearly 50 per cent since 2004.

A spokesman for the university said last night: We take all forms of cheating extremely seriously and have a rigorous monitoring system in place.

get what you want

2. To appear more powerful in the office hierarchy …
Wear a chic all-black outfit to work, and don’t smile as often as you’re inclined. You’ll be seen as assertive and directed. Studies have found that people in black uniforms (like sports teams) are viewed as more dominant figures, while the act of keeping a neutral face is associated with higher status and power in a work environment.

3. To bond with the boss …
Offer to get her a hot cup of coffee even if you’re not her assistant  and chat her up as she’s drinking it.

A recent study showed that just by holding the high-temp liquid, she’ll implicitly assume you’re an emotionally warm person someone very likable. Just don’t hand her an iced latte or you could trigger a frosty reception.

4. To have “the talk” without making your partner flip out …
Take him to a restaurant that has soft feminine colors and furniture with few angular lines. Researchers think that simply being in this kind of an environment can influence a person to behave in a more feminine way in terms of communicating. That means that he’ll be more likely to be open and disclose his true feelings to you.

Here you can find some useful tips that can help to make your term paper perfect:

Create a contents page (do not forger about: title page, abstract, outline, list of some illustrations, the main text of the term paper, footnotes (if needed), bibliography page and index page.
-  start typing your name, then under your name, on separate lines, double-spaced type: your teacher’s name, than the title of the course and the date. Type all these in the center of the page, about halfway down the page.

Very important notes: never type your title all in capital letters (only proper names of people and places or some very important words are capitalized in the title) and do not put quotations marks before and after the title. Do not use underlining in the title.
Abstract page: create a brief summary of your term paper and write it on the separate page.
Outline and table of contents: create your outline carefully, for table of contents just restate your outline but indicate page numbers.
Do you have any illustrations? All illustrations should be mentioned on the separate page of your term paper (just specify the name and page number of the illustrations used in the term paper).
Index Page: here you should specify all important subjects, citations, names and references presented in your term paper (and do not forget to mention page number on which each reference occurs). Just follow the alphabetical order forming the index page.

Some more important facts about term paper formatting:
- number your pages in the upper right hand corner, flush with the right margin and 1/2″ from the top (do not number title page, start from the second one and mark it as “2”). Some times title page is not necessary at all, please contact your tutor in this matter.
- term papers should be always double-spaced between lines along with 1″ margin on all sides.
- use one space between words and two spaces between sentences (but it is not wrong to live single space between sentences in the term paper)

Before handing in his term paper, each student should ask himself, “Is this the VERY BEST that I can do?”
If the answer is yes, maybe you need some help with your term paper! Just ask our professionals to help you and you’ll get custom term paper written according to all standards.
Our professional essay writers with MA and PhD degrees know exactly how to writer excellent term paper.
All term papers produced by Proessay.com are 100% original. You’ll get exclusive term paper written according to your instructions.

10 lowest an highest

Joel Klein led the Justice Department’s attack on Microsoft for its alleged efforts to monopolize the software market. But Microsoft is a hotbed of competition compared to the organization Klein runs now. Klein is chancellor of New York City’s public school system, a monopoly so heavily regulated that sometimes it’s unable to fire even dangerous teachers.The series of steps a principal must take to dismiss an instructor is Byzantine. “It’s almost impossible,” Klein complains.

The rules were well-intended. The union was worried that principals would play favorites, hiring friends and family members while firing good teachers. If public education were subject to the competition of the free market, those bureaucratic rules would be unnecessary, because parents would hold a bad principal accountable by sending their kids to a different school the next year. But government schools never go out of business, and parents’ ability to change schools is sharply curtailed. So the education monopoly adopts paralyzing rules instead.

The regulations are so onerous that principals rarely even try to fire a teacher. Most just put the bad ones in pretend-work jobs, or sucker another school into taking them. (They call that the “dance of the lemons.”) The city payrolls include hundreds of teachers who have been deemed incompetent, violent, or guilty of sexual misconduct. Since the schools are afraid to let them teach, they put them in so-called “rubber rooms” instead. There they read magazines, play cards, and chat, at a cost to New York taxpayers of $20 million a year.

Once, Klein reports, the school system discovered that a teacher was sending sexual e-mails to a 16-year-old student. “This was the most unbelievable case to me,” he says, “because the e-mail was there, he admitted to it. It was so thoroughly offensive.” Even with the teacher’s confession, it took six years of expensive litigation before the school could fire him. He didn’t teach during those six years, but he still got paid more than $350,000 total.

What did it take to finally get rid of him? What does it take to get rid of any teacher whose offenses are so egregious that administrators are willing to tackle the red tape? Read on.

How To Fire An Incompetent Teacher, an epic spelunk through the New York school system.

Two out of five pupils did not know that Henry VIII had six wives – 34% thought he had eight, the research by military history publishers Osprey found.

Only 36% knew the exact dates of the First World War and more than a quarter thought Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar was the Mary Rose.

Three out of five did not know when the Romans ruled Britain and nearly half (49%) were unable to date the Great Fire of London.

And over 50% could not name the reigning monarch the time of the Armada, with one in ten opting for King Harold out of five multiple choice answers.

Subject ‘squeezed’

The report said historical knowledge had hit a “shocking low” and claimed the situation would only get worse, with the subject being squeezed out of many school timetables.

More than a quarter of school students (26%) were not taking GCSE history because their school timetable made it difficult to arrange, the report claimed.

“Their level of knowledge has fallen to depths which highlight the appalling effects of reducing the emphasis on history in the National Curriculum,” a spokeswoman for Osprey said.

But despite the grim findings, more than half (55%) said they enjoyed history and one in five liked it “a great deal”.

Most felt that an understanding of the past was vital in order to understand what should happen in the future (55%).

“If there was no history there would be no us,” one 12-year-old girl said.

‘Worrying’

The Education Secretary, David Blunkett, admitted the situation was “worrying”.

The government had ordered a revamp of the curriculum “to bring history alive”, for example by including the story of the Bletchley Park Enigma code-breakers and the importance of their work in the Second World War.

It was important for children to know “key dates, events and figures”, he added.

Test results

Below are some of the multiple choice questions and the percentages of pupils choosing different answers. The correct answers are highlighted in yellow.

Source: BBC News

Illiteracy Statistics

Illiteracy of American Society

In a study of 20 ‘high income’ countries, the US ranked 12th on literacy tests. Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 44 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their child. A few other shocking facts:

• 50 percent of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level.
• 20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level.
• Nearly half of all Americans read so poorly that they cannot find a single piece of information when reading a short publication.

How Illiteracy Affects Job Prospects

• 3 out of 4 people on welfare can’t read.
• 20 percent of Americans read below the level needed to earn a living wage.
• 50 percent of the unemployed people who fall between the ages of 16 and 21 cannot read well enough to be considered functionally literate.
• Between 46 and 51 percent of American adults have an income well below the individual threshold poverty level because of their inability to read.

How Illiteracy Affects Society

• 3 out of 5 people in an American prison can’t read.
• 85 percent of juvenile offenders have problems reading.
• Approximately 50 percent of Americans read so poorly that they are unable to perform simple tasks such as balancing a checkbook and reading prescription drug labels.
• To determine how many prison beds will be needed in future years, some states actually base part of their projection on how well current elementary students are performing on reading tests.

How Illiteracy Costs Taxpayers

• Illiteracy costs American taxpayers an estimated $20 billion each year.
• Illiteracy has been proven to cause children to drop out of school. Dropouts cost our nation $240 billion in social service expenditures and lost tax revenues.

The Fight Against Illiteracy

The fight against illiteracy is a constant battle. Activists are working to strengthen education amongst young people and amongst adults. If you want to join the fight, there are numerous organizations that accept volunteers and donations.

You can also help to prevent illiteracy by encouraging a young person in your life to read. Enroll them in a book of the month club or buy them a book you know they will enjoy reading.

In short, do your part. The fight against illiteracy is important. If we continue to ignore what is becoming a growing epidemic, we set our entire country up for failure.

Statistics for this article were obtained from the following sources: National Institute for Literacy, National Center for Adult Literacy, The Literacy Company, U.S. Census Bureau

How banks rip off college students and the government.

college rip off

If you know anything at all about the federal student loan program, you will not have been surprised by the scandal of recent months. The only amazing thing is that it has taken so long to arrive. Here’s how the program works: Banks and other private companies lend money to students. The federal government pays part or all of the interest—currently 7 percent or 8 percent. The government also guarantees the loans.

What is wrong with this picture? Well, the government itself borrows the odd nickel to finance the national debt. This borrowing, obviously, is also guaranteed by the government. For that reason, it carries an interest rate of only 3 percent or 4 percent. If the government can borrow money at 3 percent or 4 percent, why should it be paying 7 percent or 8 percent for the privilege of guaranteeing loans to someone else? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the government to loan out the money itself?

That is the $4 billion question (the approximate annual cost of the interest subsidy). And the answer is: Of course that would make more sense. It is what any levelheaded businessperson would do. And what is stopping the government from behaving like a levelheaded businessperson? Not those head-in-the-clouds Democrats. It’s Republicans, who adopted the student loan “industry” in its infancy, like a stray cat, and have nurtured it and protected it ever since. There actually is a parallel student loan program that does use government funds. It was started in the early days of the Clinton administration. It costs less to operate, and it has not been tainted by scandal. But when the Republicans regained control of Congress in 1994, they pushed through a law forbidding the Education Department to encourage the use of this program. As a result, direct federal loans account for only 25 percent of all student loans.

There is plenty of other encouragement going on. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has extracted fines of more than $1 million each from prestigious institutions like Columbia and Johns Hopkins—and, for that matter, nearly as prestigious institutions like Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America. It seems that kickbacks were being paid to university financial aid officers who delivered customers. Some of them even got stock in some of the more specialized, and dubious, student loan companies. When the government is giving away free money—which is what the program amounts to (and I mean giving it away to the banks, not to the students)—it’s worth a good deal to get cut in on such a good deal.

When the student loan abuse story broke, fingers were pointed at the Education Department, which is supposed to supervise the program. The Government Accountability Office minced no words. It called on the department to “develop a protocol to determine the appropriate level of response for cases of non-compliance and assess the effectiveness of these actions to inform and improve this protocol.” Wow. While the Education Department quaked in its boots over that one, Congress more usefully passed a bill substantially reforming the student loan program and cutting the subsidy to banks and other loan providers by 80 percent. President Bush, to his credit, will sign these reforms into law. In fact, he actually proposed some of them in his budget from February of this year. But this puts him at odds with his party.

The student loan “industry,” as it is comically referred to in the newspapers, is an interesting case study in politics and business. To start, it is hardly an industry. There are no factories. The only things it “makes” are loans. Furthermore, it exists only because of a government program. Yet in the four decades since the federal government started it, the student loan business has evolved into a pretty good imitation of an industry, with trade associations, lobbyists, and support from politicians, mostly Republican. This “industry” is so dependent on the good will of politicians, in fact, that the reform bill alone may be enough to queer the deal in which its biggest player, Sallie Mae, is supposed to be bought by a private-equity firm for $25 billion. Even before taking over, the private-equity firm booted Sallie Mae’s CEO on the explicit grounds that he did not have good relations with Democrats. To run this so-called company, in other words, you don’t need to know how to make widgets or even how to make loans. You just need to know how to make nice. But don’t feel too bad for this CEO who suddenly found his Rolodex obsolete: He made $40 million last year and will get millions more if the deal does go through.

But why do Republicans love student loans? Oh, in part the usual reasons: lobbyists and campaign contributions. There is almost sure to be at least one of these firms in your district the local bank, if no one else. But there is more. Student loans are the clearest example of the common Republican confusion between free-market capitalism and business. Capitalism is an economic system that is held, with some justification, to be the best guarantor of prosperity. Business can be capitalism in action, or it can be something entirely different. There is very little about the student loan program that has anything to do with free-market capitalism. Yet whenever the student loan system comes under criticism, lobbyists, “industry” leaders, and supportive politicians haul out the same old clichés as if they were defending Adam Smith’s famous pin factory itself.

During the recent reform bill debate in the House, for example, a Republican from Texas, Jeb Hensarling, declared that the very notion of reducing the subsidy to private companies was “all part of a Democratic tax-and-spend program.” Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, declared that “we should call this the new Democratic welfare bill,” because it was “taking away personal responsibility from people and giving them out and out payments for loans that they take out.” This may be referring to a part of the bill that would forgive loans after many years for people who devote their lives to public service. Or it may just be nuts.

A so-called “analysis” by an industry expert, which (according to the Washington Post) circulated on Capitol Hill during the debate, worried that the big boys would survive, but the subsidy reductions “may leave smaller lenders unprofitable.” Concern for “small lenders” was a common theme, as if a loan from a ma-and-pa bank, if such an institution exists, would be warmer and cuddlier than a loan from Citibank. Another common theme was that the subsidy cut was part of a covert Democratic effort to drive people into the direct federal loan program or, as one lender CEO described it, the “one-size-fits-all direct loan program.” This would be no bad thing, but it doesn’t seem to have been the case. I’m not sure what “one size fits all” means here, but if it refers to the interest rate that students and their families have to pay, it’s true that there is only one rate in the government program, compared with many in the private one all of them higher, but maybe there are people for whom the variety is worth it.

The author finds that three out of every five young Americans could not find on the world map Japan or France, and even more-70% – failed to show even the location of Great Britain.

With regard to Afghanistan, which was shown only 17% of respondents, or Israel, Iraq and Iran, which is on the map knows only one out of every ten young people of the United States, complained in an article. Incidentally, the same number of young Americans – 11% – miserably to find United States on the map. So, according to the survey, the situation with literacy has not changed for the better over the past 14 years, although not long ago, Americans were in Afghanistan war. “But the less people know about other countries, the more difficult to understand it,” with sadness Oppenheymer comments on the situation.

The map has been drawn up based on a survey of Americans with withdrawing from the calculations.

This advertisement ban was welcomed by university authorities but not so much by writing companies who have been in the business of writing for pay activities. Moreso by freelancers who are employed by these companies. Claiming that their business is legitimate, the writing companies said that when they are engaged by students, who incidentally are mostly foreign students, they make it clear to their clients that they should not in any way claim or allude that the article these companies wrote are written by the students themselves.

I think Google is over reacting to the complaints of university authorities. I would have to side with the writing companies argument. After all, they too are legitimate companies which have the right to purchase advertising spots not only from Google, but from other online companies as well.

As for students, better save the name and particulars of the writing companies they are currently dealing with. They might lose valuable services provided by these companies if they don’t bookmark their sites. Sooner or later, you wouldn’t find a good link to a reliable writing company once Google bans advertisements of these companies.

May 22nd, 2007 by Arnold Zafra