Lit Revire #3

1. Works Cited

Dave Tomar. “The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat” (2012)

2. Main ideas of the book

Dave Tomar is a graduate of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He published an article titled “The Shadow Scholar” in 2010. In the article, Tomar revealed certain ugly truth in terms of the prevalence of college cheating by describing his experience as an “academic ghostwriter”. Then in 2012, Tomar published this book and provided a more detailed elaboration about how he became a ghostwriter as well as how he came clean. Tomar believed that American’s higher education was poorly managed and has become a business rather than aiming for improving academic proficiency. There was one chapter in his book titled “The RU Screw” (22-39) that was relatively representative, where he particularly condemned his college (Rutgers) for having the structure of bureaucracy. Tomar described how a public University like Rutgers runs more like business and strives to ripe students off in stead of providing sufficient support.

3. Quotes from the book

1. “I wish that parking tickets had less of a defining role in my experiences in college. Problem is, Parking and Transportation Services as the most efficiently run department in the entire university. It was as if all of the school’s resources had been dedicated to punishing scofflaw parkers, and the manpower and resources left for meaningful academic assistance, quality control, and psychological counseling had been utterly depleted” (Tomar, 22).


2. “The school couldn’t issue you a schedule without two overlapping classes. It couldn’t approve your financial aid without losing your paperwork. It couldn’t print your transcript without accidentally faxing your medical records to the student listserv. But if your meter had expired twenty seconds ago, you could be damn sure that a parking attendant was already writing your ticket out nineteen seconds ago” (Tomar 22).


3. “Rutgers is also, like most colleges, a business. But colleges are a special kind of business. It’s not simply that some colleges are structured more like corporations than like places of learning. It’s that many colleges are shitty businesses that don’t give a crap about customer service or quality assurance” (Tomar 23).


4. “This is every symptom of a sick system; every consequence of designing an institution of learning to function like a multinational business; every demonstration of the university’s commitment to its corporate sponsors at the expense of its student body; every bit of evidence that the educational goals of the school are secondary tp its vitality as a firm” (Tomar 25).


4. Conclusion:

In this chapter of his book, Tomar revealed some ugly truth about Rutgers University’s bureaucratic system and the problems last even until today. Students are not even treated like customers. They receive limited amount of support and constantly get charged. Tomar described his experience of trying to call the Parking and Transportation Services in order to resolve some parking issues and for five and a half minutes, he merely received two voices telling him to hold. The situation is pretty much the same when many international students try to contact the admission office during their application process.  Although there was a department named “Center for International Students and Global Services”, it is getting difficult to receive help from them since you have to make appointments in advance or go to pre-determined walk-in hours which may be conflict with your class schedule. Nevertheless, international students still get charged twice the tuition cost as compared to in-state students plus many extra fees. However, some students use these difficulties as excuses to justify certain unethical behavior,  such as cheating and plagiarizing. The behavior can be explained by the theory of Techniques of neutralization.  The theory proposes that those who commit illegitimate acts temporarily neutralize certain values within themselves which would normally prohibit them from carrying out such acts, such as morality, obligation to abide by the law, and so on. In simpler terms, it is a psychological method for people to turn off "inner protests" when they do, or are about to do something they themselves perceive as wrong. Consequently, since some students experience the emotion of being owed by the university, they no longer perceive such strong guilt when performing unethical behavior. They tend to justify the act of cheating and plagiarizing as a payback towards schools' lack of support.  The problem will never be resolved if public universities continuously to function like business corporations and aim towards earning monetary gains instead of focusing on promoting support and services for students. The situation is even more detrimental for international students if public education fails to assure a smooth transition process when they encounter different cultural values and language barriers. It is therefore worth exploring the relationship between school support and the cheating/plagiarism culture in American public universities, especially why international students tend to cheat exams more under certain conditions.