Issue 12, Fall 1996

William A. McEachern, Editor

Term Papers for Sale

Another dark side of the Internet is the ease with which students can plagiarize research by downloading term papers over the Internet. For example, a company called High Performance Papers offers a custom-written paper that allows the student to specify the title, topic, page length, and even the number of references cited. The paper is written and sent to the student by e-mail within a day to a week; the price is $10 per page. At the lower end of this market, the Termpaper Warehouse charges only $6.50 per page, but its papers are off-the-shelf and the selection is extremely limited (for example, there are only 13 papers in economics, thereby increasing the odds that another student in the class might submit the same paper). At another web site, http://www.schoolsucks.com, students can download, for free, papers sent in by other students. This operation hopes to make money through advertising on its web page and licensing its logo.

In view of the ease of plagiarizing, we should be particularly watchful when assigning a research paper. Precautions might involve requesting an outline, an abstract, and an initial bibliography well before the paper is due. Also, get a first draft and ask for the student's notes with the final draft. If the class is small enough, you could ask students to present a brief summary in class and respond to questions. It was one student's inability to answer questions that led me to uncover the complete plagiarism of his paper from a single book (I found the book he used in the library, still marked with his instructions to the typist).

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