Can't find this post - student asks blogger to write paper for her

June 17, 2012 11:41 AM

Looking for a post about a blog--the blogger was asked to write a paper by a college student who was offering money. They had a lot of back-and-forth communication, and eventually he published the whole thing on his blog.

This was not the post about the guy who wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about how he'd made a living writing papers for college students. I remember that, in the comments, there was a discussion about his morality w/r/t making their communication public.

posted by tzikeh to MetaFilter-Related at 11:41 AM (20 comments total)

Was it this: "It's about as far from the theme as you could possibly get."
posted by shoesfullofdust at 11:55 AM on June 17, 2012

shoesfullofdust - no, this was several years ago now. I should have said in the OP.
posted by tzikeh at 12:00 PM on June 17, 2012

Gah! I know exactly what you are referring to (I think) but cannot find it. It was a guy who ended up posting a load of instant messaging records between the two of them, was it because she refused to pay for them? It must have been around 2007/08, maybe? Does that sound right? This is driving me nuts now.
posted by Elmore at 12:02 PM on June 17, 2012

Elmore - yeah, it was something like that... I'm not sure if he posted because she wouldn't pay, or because the whole thing had spiralled into the worst kind of farce. Either way, I can't find it, and ARGH.
posted by tzikeh at 12:06 PM on June 17, 2012

This was the Laura K. Pahl (he later changed her name to Laura K. Krishna on the blog, then deleted those blog entries entirely after a while) incident.
posted by UrineSoakedRube at 12:18 PM on June 17, 2012 [3 favorites]

Oh, man, that was it, UrineSoakedRube! But bummer that the pages were deleted. I wonder if they're somewhere in the Wayback Machine...
posted by tzikeh at 12:23 PM on June 17, 2012

How far we goin' back? Way back.
posted by box at 12:34 PM on June 17, 2012 [4 favorites]

\o/
posted by tzikeh at 12:35 PM on June 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

Before Krishna, and the Krishna Era.
posted by box at 12:38 PM on June 17, 2012

I knew I did the right thing going off and eating my dinner. Thanks USR.
posted by Elmore at 12:41 PM on June 17, 2012

That blog is great, I hadn't seen it before. What was the outcome?
posted by arcticseal at 1:02 PM on June 17, 2012

If you poke around the other blogs that talked about it, there were a bunch of kids at a nameless school claiming she was their English teacher, circa 2010. No idea whether they've got the right person, of course.
posted by SMPA at 1:58 PM on June 17, 2012

Wow, I remembered (upon reading this post) that thread pretty well. But I didn't recall how heavily I participated in it. That discussion was, I think, the exact time and place when some of my related (to the discussion) current ideas/beliefs about ethics firmly crystallized. In hindsight, it also is unnerving how some aspects of that discussion (the self-defense/retribution stuff) would feature so hugely in my own life only eighteen months later.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:09 PM on June 17, 2012

I missed that thread entirely at the time; I read up on the Laura thing much more recently, maybe just in the last year or so, and I don't think I saw that thread in the process so it must have been some other source. Huh.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:12 PM on June 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

Oh man. I remember that thread. I also remember trying to guess her email address and sending her a "head's-up" note with a link to Nate's blog. Didn't get a response, but I don't remember if they were bounced back. (Email acct I used back then is no longer active.)

I had completely forgotten about that until this moment.
posted by zarq at 4:54 PM on June 17, 2012

Was this the post...


“It's about as far from the theme as you could possibly get.”
May 16, 2012 4:39 PM Subscribe

A Grade 11 student, with a summary of Sean Dixon's novel The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal due in two days, gets help from the author. It does not go particularly well.

posted by snaparapans at 9:50 PM on June 17, 2012

OH got it... not the post..
posted by snaparapans at 9:52 PM on June 17, 2012

I wrote a paper for booze once.

I feel much less bad about that than I would taking money.
posted by allkindsoftime at 4:14 AM on June 18, 2012

allkindsoftime: "I wrote a paper for booze once.

I feel much less bad about that than I would taking money"

Goodness! By the way, we're still waiting for the results. How'd your brother do?
posted by barnacles at 5:55 AM on June 18, 2012

The Laura K Krishna thread was the one that made a regular reader out of me (as opposed to sporadic), and started me on the eventual road to membership (which I didn't get for about another year or so). I've used the LKK thread here and on the original blog as examples in cyberethics (undergrad) and internet research methods (grad) classes, too. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 2:13 PM on June 18, 2012