College Prepared This Grad for . . . College Papers (and He Learned from Them)

As it turned out, helping students cheat on papers was the only available job for which my college had prepared me. More than that, I was suddenly receiving an education. My god, the thought hadn't even occurred to me until right then. I had taken this job because it had found me. It had been the one job in my field that had responded to my habitual claim: "I can write anything. Just give me a chance."

This job had taken me up on my offer, embraced my talents, and found more outlets for them than a normal occupation could possibly have dreamed up. I was learning more stuff in a week than I'd learned in four expensive years of college. It was like kindergarten all over again. Suddenly, I was learning without the hassle of grades, the dictates of dickhole professors, or the looming pressure to declare myself a major and imagine a career therefrom. 

I had no obligation to a course of study, no registrar's office to tell me a class was full, no admissions process to navigate. I was interdisciplinary, unregistered, and unadmitted. And without all the artifices, impositions, and expenses, all the things that made me hate school . . ., I rediscovered a love for learning that really only travel and psychedelics had satisfied for quite some time.

Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 64

The Informal Hospital Experience

"Fred!" the nurse said, though they had never met. "How are we today?"
Reading the nurse's name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, "Bernard! We're mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?"

Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 61

One Student Finds a Big State University Something of a Let-Down

All of my classes graded for attendance. All of my classes were so big that the professors had to speak using microphones. All of my classes used multiple-choice tests with Scantron forms so that grading could be done by machine. All of my professors gave lectures with content lifted directly from the text. All of my courses seemed extraneous, unnecessary, and uninteresting. When I was counting down the last days of high school, I never imagined that freedom would be so mediocre.

Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 6.