Hi everyone,

You may have seen the headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend about cheating amongst Year 12 students being ‘endemic.’ This makes me immensely proud of the service we provide to our students which provides them the tools to support them with their essay writing. This means that they can ‘own’ their essay when they hand it in for an assessment task or write it in the actual exam room.

In our 20 years plus experience with HSC Essay Writing we have found that our students don’t want to find the easy way out by using someone else’s essay as they understand that by doing so they will not be developing their own HSC success story. More importantly they know that this kind of behaviour will not generate the results that they are looking for.

The practice reported in the Sydney Morning Herald involves paying a ghost writer to complete the essay for you in a set amount of time. Having someone write your essay for you from a Neuroscience perspective is untenable as a serious proposition.  The student who chooses this path will not have developed the neural pathways, which will allow them to negotiate questions in the exam room. If a student simply regurgitates an essay they are easily identified by HSC markers as having written a generic essay that lacks engagement with the question. Such essays don’t achieve high marks.

This why at HSC CoWorks we place such a high premium on exam style start tasks, managing Basecamp projects to keep students accountable, constantly encouraging them to submit essays to our HSC markers and running mock trial exams.

Whether it be the HSC, University, or white collar crime, there will always be a few who are attempting to “game” the system to avoid having to think and create some of their own work. In todays world anyone who chooses this path is looking at a lifetime of hiding from showing up and  not having the opportunity to do work that matters. (Seth Godin’s favourite phrase at the moment).

 Interestingly, we recently received a request from an ex – student of HSC CoWorks who asked me via Facebook if I knew anyone who could do her University assignment for her as she was on holiday in Bali and clearly had more important things to be doing than her assignment that was due in 6 days time. I am deeply disappointed for this student that she feels that her University degree is simply a process of going through the motions rather than her opportunity to develop her ideas and do work that matters.

At HSC CoWorks we are extremely committed to supporting students to develop the skill of writing. Just like any skill, it is a skill that needs to be worked on otherwise there will be no progress.

Interesting timing with an article from today’s SMH about the increasing problem of youth unemployment which is worthy of a separate blog.