For students too bored, too busy or too burdened to write their own term papers, it’s tempting to turn to the Web for a little help.
As teachers wise up to the popular cut-and-paste method of Internet plagiarizing and the use of myriad online essay banks, some students determined to outsource their papers are taking a more unusual route: paying for custom jobs.
For as little as $9.95 per page if you give advance notice, to as much as $44.95 per page for same-day delivery, dozens of Web sites offer to write your paper for you, guaranteeing original, unplagiarized essays they say are written by professionals with master’s degrees or PhDs.
Buying custom papers is clearly cheating. But beyond the obvious ethical problems, can a custom-written paper even get you a good grade?
It didn’t for a 19-year-old DePaul University junior who told RedEye he paid $80 for a custom 12-page paper on ancient Israel the fall semester of his sophomore year. He ordered it from a Web site four days before it was due in his religion class.
The student, who asked that his name not be published because he didn’t want people to know he cheated, received the paper in his e-mail inbox the morning it was due. He looked it over, deemed it OK and handed it in as is.
And then he got an F.
“It was such a waste of money,” the student said. “I’m never going to do that again.”
RedEye had a similar experience. To test the quality of custom term-paper services, RedEye purchased two-page papers from three different Web sites on the following assignment: Discuss the themes of marriage and money in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.”
Loyola University English professor Thomas Kaminski, who suggested the topic because it’s one he would assign, graded the finished products at RedEye’s request.
He was not impressed.
Only one of the papers–from customresearchpapers.us–addressed the topic, but it was so poorly written that Kaminski said he’d give it a D, and then only if he were feeling generous.
The other two papers–from termpaperrelief.com and non-plagia rized-termpapers.com–were so off-topic that Kaminski said he’d be suspicious and give the student the dreaded “Come see me.”
Adding to the insult, one of the papers was found to be largely plagiarized once it was run through Turnitin, software designed to catch plagiarism. Turnitin did not detect plagiarism in the other two papers.
Perhaps the poor results shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“Would you trust the claims of firms that engage in fraud and deception?” said Tim Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University.
Representatives from the three Web sites did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the story once RedEye identified itself as a newspaper, but explanations on their Web sites insist they are merely helping students manage their time, overcome writer’s block and avoid failing.
“At Custom Research Papers we believe IT’S ETHICAL to get an [sic] outside help and delegate your writing assignments to professional writers same as if you would get your watches fixed or car repaired by third party experts,” says customresearchpapers.us on its site. Academics, of course, say that’s hooey and doubt many students are shelling out cash for custom papers–though the prevalence of Web sites offering the service suggests there is some demand.
Much more common is for students to copy information already available on the Internet and pass it off as their own, a practice both easy to execute and easy to catch with Google or systems like Turnitin, which is used in about 6,000 academic institutions around the world.
About 30 percent of the 70,000 papers Turnitin runs through its system daily are found to be plagiarized to some extent, Turnitin creator John Barrie said.
Custom-written essays–if they truly are original–would be harder to catch, but most students say they have no interest in going down that path. Teachers could recognize disparities in writing style, students say, and the risk isn’t worth it.
Russell Pride, a 27-year-old Loyola senior, said he wouldn’t even want to get away with turning in a paper he didn’t write.
“It would be a hollow victory,” Pride said. “I’d rather do it myself and get a C.”
Charles Lipson, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of the book “Doing Honest Work in College,” emphasized that most students don’t cheat. When students submit fraudulent work, it’s usually in large, impersonal classes where the students feel their papers are “just transactions for a grade.”
For the 19-year-old DePaul junior who wasted $80 on his custom religion paper, outsourcing was merely “an alternative” because he was swamped with other assignments during finals week, and he “wasn’t that into” his religion class.
While it’s the student’s obligation to do his own work, professors also should be responsible for reducing the temptation and opportunity to cheat, perhaps by requiring students to submit drafts of their work or by making more unpredictable assignments, Duke’s Dodd said.
“Where tests are used and reused year in and year out, and the same paper topic is assigned year in and year out, you will find that students cheat,” he said.
FAKING IT: THE EXPERIMENT
As a matter of course, Loyola English professor Thomas Kaminski runs his students’ papers through Turnitin, a plagiarism-catching system that checks essays against the Internet, a database of published information and more than 22 million student papers.
Catching one or two plagiarizers per semester, Kaminski said he’s noticed a decline in Internet plagiarism since it spiked in the mid-’90s, as professors have learned to fight cyber with cyber.
But how about custom-written term papers? Are those a real threat to academic integrity? Kaminski was as curious as RedEye, so he agreed to help us with our experiment.
At RedEye’s request, Kaminski suggested an essay subject he would normally assign to students in a core English course: Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.”
RedEye reporter Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, using her real name and personal e-mail address but not revealing that she is a reporter, purchased a two-page essay from three different Web sites, as any member of the public can.
The essay topic was presented to each Web site with the exact same wording: “Discuss the themes of marriage and money in Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ citing passages from the text.”
When the finished papers arrived, RedEye ran them through Turnitin to see if they were indeed “plagiarism-free,” as all of the Web sites guaranteed.
Kaminski then evaluated and graded each paper using the same standards by which he would grade his own students.
At the end of the process, Elejalde-Ruiz contacted each site, identified herself as a reporter and asked for a comment. None of the sites responded.
Here’s what we found. All punctuation, grammar and spelling errors were in the finished essays when we received them.
Termpaperrelief.com
Cost: $14.95 per page for delivery within 3 days
Arrived within: 10 hours
Paper excerpt: “Jane Austen’s imagination is unbelievable, because of the way she describes her characters and the sceneries in her novel. Furthermore, Austen’s uses her own writing techniques to achieve her goals to let her readers dream about her novels.”
Kaminski’s comments: “On the whole this paper is well written, but it never mentions money. It makes some intelligent reflections on the novel, but it is clearly not attempting to respond to the paper topic. If I received this paper from an undergraduate, I would find it suspicious. I would assume that the student found a paper (perhaps written by a friend) on the same novel but on a different topic. I would probably not put a grade on the paper and ask the student to come see me in my office to explain what is going on.”
Turnitin results: The paper is 77 percent unoriginal, with the last third of the essay found in papers available on essay banks like freetermpapers.com. Even misspellings were copied. When contacted via e-mail about the plagiarism, Term Paper Relief responded in an e-mail saying that it regretted the inconvenience and offered a free revision in case of “deviation from the ordered requirement.” Because ours was a “special case,” the service offered to redo the entire paper. Term Paper Relief also asked from what source the paper was copied.
Customresearchpapers.us
Cost: $19.95 per page for delivery within 48 hours
Arrived within: 44 hours
Paper excerpt: “By the moment when the book reaches its culmination in the marriages of the main characters, it is become clear how money and financial problems of the principal characters’ families influence feelings and how outer world interfere to the interior world of the principal characters.”
Kaminski’s comments: “This paper is the only one that mentions money, but it is very badly written. It looks like it was done by an incompetent undergraduate. If I was being very generous, I would give the paper a D; if I was being honest (my students would say ‘cruel’ or ‘hardhearted’), I would give it the F it deserves.”
Turnitin results: This paper is 29 percent unoriginal, but only because of direct quotes from the novel. No plagiarism detected.
Non-plagiarized-termpapers.com
Cost: $11.95 per page for delivery within three to four days
Arrived within: Three days
Paper excerpt: “Her plots, such as they are, are carefully thought out, and one of the pleasures of attentive reading is to mark the finger-posts on the road which indicate future developments by their truth to character at the moment, even if they do not catch our attention at first; such as Knightley’s dislike of Frank Churchill.”
Kaminski’s comments: “This paper, too, is suspicious. It does not respond to the topic (i.e., it does not talk about money), and it focuses on several insignificant plot elements. Also, it uses one or two words that most undergraduates would not know, and it makes a reference to a character from a different novel by Austen that the average undergraduate would not have read. Once again I would call the student into my office and ask him/her what is going on. I would ask him to define the term “finger-post,” which is used in the paper, and I would ask him who Mr. Knightley is and in what novel he is to be found. If the student can’t answer those questions to my satisfaction, he or she gets hustled off to the dean’s office and accused of academic dishonesty.”
Turnitin results: This paper is 3 percent unoriginal, but only because of the title and author of the book. No plagiarism detected.
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aelejalderuiz@tribune.com
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CHEATERS BEWARE
Most schools have policies that punish cheaters, with penalties ranging from failing the assignment to expulsion.
Some states–including Illinois–also have laws that make it illegal to sell term papers that a student would subsequently submit to an educational institution. The essay-writing Web sites try to get around that with disclaimers insisting that their papers are to be used for research purposes only and should not be submitted as-is.
— Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
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BY THE NUMBERS
Cheating in school has been around as long as school itself, with hand-me-down essays circulating in frat houses and students paying others to write papers for them. But the Internet provides unprecedented opportunities to cut corners. Some stats:
40
Percent of undergraduate students who admitted to plagiarizing from the Internet, according to a 2005 study by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University.
70
Percent of undergraduates who admitted to some type of cheating, according to the same study.
56
Percent of business school students who admitted to cheating, according to a study by professors at Penn State’s Smeal College, Rutgers and Washington State.
35
Percent of high school students who admitted to copying an Internet document for a classroom assignment, according to a 2004 study by the Josephson Institute of Ethics.
780
Number of Web sites that facilitate online plagiarism by giving students access to essay banks or offering custom-written essays, according to the Internet security firm Secure Computing.
2,376
Number of loyal customers claimed by Term Paper Relief, according to its Web site.
–Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
