Suspicions.

     A student in the course for which I am T.A. turned in a suspicious paper.  She is a Chinese student, not a native speaker of English, who is quiet and retiring in class, and whose earlier paper for the course I failed, more for its want of coherent or accurate argument than for its broken English.  But she, who wrote earlier of ancient Greeks as a Mesopotamian people, and of the Maya as an ancient Near Eastern civilization, and who wrote of the storms caused by 'Typhonius', writes for me now a most polished essay, submitted days early, succinctly comparing Dumézil, Müller, and Campbell, and organized into paragraphs of such uniform length that they seem to march in formation down the page, and within these are scattered almost irritatingly glib parentheticals and asides.  There is almost a smirk behind the words, and it hardly required the skills of a philologist to feel that these were the words of a rather sardonic young poseur, with a wry smile on his lips like one of the less sympathetic characters in a Dostoevsky novel. 

     I commented on her paper that I could scarcely believe that the authors of her two papers were the same person.  Let her pause at that.  But I am very impressed and pleased with her progress.  And indeed I have graded it as an honest piece of work, though picturing in my mind the advertisements, written in Chinese only, that I had seen posted around our building offering the services of academic ghost-writers.  For it occurred to me that, no less likely than that she paid for the present paper, it could well be her genuine work: on her first paper, she, insecure and anxious, hires a ghost-writer, who, knowing nothing of Greek myth, writes nonsense and tries to cheat her.  Failing the paper, she thinks, Why am I wasting my money on this rubbish?, and sits down to write her own paper.  Am I wrong to give her the benefit of the doubt, and to deem her a sapient who learned her lesson, instead of a fool twice over?