Term Paper Mills

What? Lack of ethics with term paper mills? I wish I could say I am shocked... but in my opinion, online companies that sell papers to students should be hauled into court for any reason. We English instructors used to be dismayed at stacks of essays that could be found in dormroom hallways—free to anyone who wanted to plagiarize them. With a computer and a credit card, however, companies have now created huge virtual vaults of essays available to any student who wants to avoid doing the work that general education requires. We could argue that “the market” demands this service and these companies are just victims—but realistically the buck needs to stop somewhere. This is why I don’t work at the “Cigarettes For Less” shop in my neighborhood. I don’t want to be part of the problem; of any problem that brings our society down.

So I’m not surprised that these companies are taking information offline that is not theirs and selling it for profit. In searching their archives to catch students who cheat, I’ve also noticed that many essays they sell are posted at several sites—indicating that either the author is reselling the same product to competitors OR the companies themselves are paying to download a paper once and then selling them as their own.

The hilarious news is that the papers I’ve read from these online services are *bad*. I mean really, really bad. I mean a “C” or “D” level paper in college. So the few students who have bought these papers and turned them in? They do poorly and can’t even go back and fight for a grade. They’ve been ripped off in the worst way. It’s sad really. My university guards against this by having airtight “academic dishonesty” and “plaigiarism” policies—and we require drafts and outlines of papers as students progress. I also stipulate an in-class midterm and final—which is the greatest teller of all. Sigh. It’s too bad we have to go to these lengths, but most of us are realists.

The funny thing is that I LOVE the internet. I love doing research online, I love downloading materials online, I love getting e-mail, but like any tool, it can be misapplied.

Shari Wilson, Instructor at University in the Midwest, at 12:34 pm EDT on September 2, 2005

You would fight plagiarism with fraud? Paper mills may face fines. You could go to jail. They could trace back the computers the uploads came from and subpoena the hard drives.

Mike, at 10:31 pm EDT on September 3, 2005

Mike is right. Does anyone really think that defrauding a “term paper mill” and the suing them is an effective way to deal with these problems.

There are a number of legal tools that can be used to combat these paper mills which don’t involve trickery or lies, and we are seeing just another battle in a way that only some schools want to fight.

I think that colleges are to blame. Most people can pretty much tell the type of kid that will cheat. Likewise, everyone knows what kind of courses these kids are attracted to, and what kind of assignments “beg” to be cheated on.

I have suggested many times on here that an effective weapon is posting the written work of students on the web, and, if there is some plagiarism from a non-copyrighted source, posting the original paper next to it. (And posting as much as possible from a copyrighted source.) This way, when someone Google’s the kid’s name, they will know that he is a dirty cheater. The kid, of course, should have an opportunity to prove that he didn’t cheat by showing contemporaneous documentation of his thought process.

If professors really don’t want cheating (and most, in my experience, they don’t care) they can simply assign very narrow paper topics, and require multiple drafts. But doing this takes more time and will result in a lot more whining from Brads and Ashleys.

Larry, at 1:03 pm EDT on September 6, 2005

I agree with John Halasz. There are also companies, like Essay Town, that are extremely strict and actually maintain some ethical guidelines. EssayTown will absolutely refuse to provide example research services to a given customer if that customer openly suggests that he or she intends to cheat. I sent EssayTown an email asking them if I could “turn in” the model paper, and they responded, “Absolutely not. We provide reference material that facilitates learning-by-example, and you must properly cite our company when writing your own paper.”

Amy, at 3:35 pm EDT on May 14, 2006