The Daily Adventures of Mercat

If you watched Hawaii Five-0 tonight and saw a red-headed girl in the photos in the house they raided, that is my good friend Kim. :D

Have you seen this article about the college essay writer? It's so fucking depressing, on so many counts. That these students are okay with it. That the school isn't catching them. That they're so inept in the first place, and getting no real help. That entitled people are just paying their way to a degree. My only recompense is that they likely won't be able to get or hold onto the jobs they think they deserve, which is actually sad for the people who have just been forgotten and pushed through the system. ANYWAY. Poor ethics piss me off and if I ever meet a person who admits to using a service like that I... will no longer be friends with them. And will probably be paranoid. (An easy solution though, honestly? It looks as if these teachers just had in-class writing assignments they would probably be a lot more suspicious, at least based on the communications supplied in the article.)

Also, this metafilter comment wins for the Sneakiest Use of Xkcd in Serious Discussion Without Drawing Attention to the Fact:

If you pretend that the degrees are evidence of your mastery in some subject, and that this mastery will allow you to produce good work in some area that you could not without this mastery, ie, that colleges are not a waste of time in general, then this is a misrepresentation of your abilities to your future employers.

Imagine you buy a chair on e-bay, and it has a certificate of Being a Chair, and instead, it was a bob-cat who hired someone to forge its certificate of Chairitude. You have essentially had your money stolen. If you try to sit on it anyway because you also forged your certificate of Being Able to Tell What a Chair is, you will sit on it anyway and it will RUIN your butt.

Cheating on papers is ruining the butts of society.
posted by EtzHadaat at 6:38 PM on November 14

Wow.. the first day of senior year. And what a day it has been! I got up 15 minutes late, hopped in the shower, ate a great and yummy breakfast of Corn Chex, milk, orange juice, and bacon... got in the car and listened to Newsies on the ride in. That definitely got me pumped. Band is good, music theory was just plain fun, World Religions is exciting, US politics and government, however... that is one class I could live without. Oh, well. English, fun, as always, Mr. Hemmert is hilariously "grumpy." Fifth period Spanish was not too bad, Senora Perfilio is MUCH nicer than I expected (and heard), and I am glas that this year is lots of culture, and less language. And AP Calculus... Dr. Carter is freakin' hilarious. Then sectionals, which did not go too well... ugh, we have to set the third movement this week! Afterward, I listened to Newsies on the way home, and determined that Alan Menken is better than Andrew LLoyd Weber... mind you, Andrew Lloyd Weber is awesome, but Menken is THAT MUCH COOLER. Want to know why? Newsies, Little Shop, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid. That's why. Hm, what else? Well... Pat stole Mrs. Fisher's elf this morning before school started and we moved several times but have not yet found a hallway spot for this year... unfortunately it looks like we'll be stuck in the Lobby. Oh well. =^n.n^= Gotta go finish my AP Calc summer work for tomorrow... yikes!