Near future SciFi story dealing with "academic dishonesty" & algorithms
February 29, 2016 6:32 AM Subscribe
Following a recent conversation about the increasingly sophisticated ecosystem of outsourcing papers and homework assignments, I was reminded that sometime in the Spring or Summer of 2015 I read a science fiction story that now seems eerily prescient. Help me find it?
It is entirely possible I encountered it through Metafilter. If it helps, the text of the story is definitely available online. The details I remember are hazy, but: there are fairly main male and female characters who have an odd romance, and throughout the story it becomes clear that they make their living performing on-spec, increasingly tailored plagiarism for undergraduate and graduate level students which evade the detection algorithms and other methods of cheating detection put into place. It has heavy themes of increasing surveillance and academic pressure being evaded by the well-resourced. I'm pretty sure it focuses on the mental landscape of a female character who chooses to stay in the university town for years honing this craft but becoming increasingly alienated from herself and from intellectual labor but basically makes a living writing people's dissertations for them.
Does this ring any bells?
It is entirely possible I encountered it through Metafilter. If it helps, the text of the story is definitely available online. The details I remember are hazy, but: there are fairly main male and female characters who have an odd romance, and throughout the story it becomes clear that they make their living performing on-spec, increasingly tailored plagiarism for undergraduate and graduate level students which evade the detection algorithms and other methods of cheating detection put into place. It has heavy themes of increasing surveillance and academic pressure being evaded by the well-resourced. I'm pretty sure it focuses on the mental landscape of a female character who chooses to stay in the university town for years honing this craft but becoming increasingly alienated from herself and from intellectual labor but basically makes a living writing people's dissertations for them.
Does this ring any bells?
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posted by Jacen at 12:06 PM on February 29, 2016