If I recall correctly, people used to charge to edit other's papers. I never thought of it as cheating. I made some pocket change editing papers for graduate students when I was an undergrad. I thought it was a legitimate service, but maybe I'm just a big undercover cheater!!!!!
Not going on vacation with hubby to stay home in case the kids need help with homework, that's just pathetic.
CUT THOSE APRON STRINGS ALREADY LADY!!!!!!!!!!
cheeesh
Incog
LOL! I don't think you were a cheater. Just an enabler, keeping your clients addicted to you.
When I was in grad school for English, I worked as a tutor in a position provided by the university itself. Generally speaking, we didn't just mark up a paper and hand it back to a student, since that would make the student reliant upon our service (Hint, hint, dentist's wife!). However, we were never instructed that doing such editing was cheating. Professors who place significant weight on spelling and grammatical errors rather than on content are around, but I'm a former English teacher, and I'd say that those who give an F for one error (or such extremities) are asking--begging!--for editors to pop up. I don't think that's cheating. It's just good sense.
Having other readers look at your work before you turn in a paper is smart. If you have to pay for that reader, then so much the better for the reader. I don't think that's cheating, as long as the content is not rewritten by the editor. It must be sentence-level editing, not idea-level revision. It's a fine line sometimes--how do you edit a paper that has no thesis statement, for example? (Correct answer: you don't! You tell the person that there is no thesis statement and return the paper to him/her!)--but as long as the ideas and examples remain those of the original writer, editing at the sentence-level is not cheating.
Still, I would argue that the mom's time would be FAR better used if she taught her kids how to edit their OWN work. Are they going to be sending their memos and reports from work to her to edit, too? If not (and I really hope not!), then I'm with 'Neato:
PATHETIC! CUT THOSE APRON STRINGS ALREADY LADY!!!!!!!!!!
