Is Plagiarism Big Business Online?

NEW YORK, May 7, 2002 — -- A college education is expensive these days: tuition, room, board and fees. And some students have further expenses they may not ask their parents to cover: term papers.

Yes, as students turn in end-of-semester papers this month, many will be partaking in a black-market academic subculture that has thrived for years: buying work instead of doing it. Only now, many of them will be purchasing papers online. As it has in so many areas of life, the Information Age has changed the business of academic cheating.

These days, term papers are no longer just available through tiny ads in the back of, say, Rolling Stone. Instead, dozens of term-paper companies — often referred to as "paper mills" — have sprouted like weeds on the Internet, offering essays on everything from the Bronte sisters to marine biology.

And while it's a matter of debate whether plagiarism in general is on the rise, many academics agree that the proportion of plagiarism stemming from the Web has grown dramatically. As with other vices — gambling, for instance — the Internet has added a level of convenience for those inclined to partake.

Is There A Plague of Plagiarism?

But professors, deans or parents worried about the proliferation of Internet cheating should not despair. Some educators believe the very nature of the medium places limits on it use, and remain unconvinced the paper mills are doing much business. Others think the real online money lies in legitimate tutoring services.

Why Wouldn’t This Business Model Work?

No matter how ethically dubious term-paper Web sites are, they may appear, on the surface, to have a good business model with a low cost structure. A paper mill can keep charging again and again for the same essay, while the Internet provides worldwide distribution of materials that otherwise would be difficult to obtain — just as it has aided legitimate academic research, for that matter.

Indeed, term-paper mills operate like a lot of other Internet sites. They provide free samples of content, accept credit cards and promise secure transactions over the Web. Sites tend to charge from $7 to $15 per page, per paper, although some charge yearly subscription fees.

And few make any pretense of legitimacy. Some brazenly note they will be providing work for students — in violation of virtually every university's academic code — instead of trying to cloak their papers as background research or source material of some sort. Others, like a site called School Sucks, cop an anti-academic attitude while offering the same service.

"I must say that the 'A' I got is truly dependent on the quality of work which was provided to me," says a student described as "Mel Ellison" in a testimonial on one term-paper site, Term Papers 4U.

However, a look at paper-mill sites reveals a consistently shoddy level of work — sometimes even in the structure of the sites themselves. In a section of sample papers on Term Papers 4U, an essay with the link, "Safety and Gun Control Laws The Issue " [sic] actually leads to a simplistic book report of sorts on Korea. ("Korea is an ancient land," begins one paragraph of historical background.)

‘Professors Are Catching On’

That's one reason why the paper mills may not be doing big business, says Patrick Scanlon, a professor of communications at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., who just completed a survey on plagiarism.

"They didn't report using online term-paper mills very often," says Scanlon of the students in his survey. He also thinks students are afraid that the ease of cheating via the Web can be matched by the simplicity of catching an online cheater: "If they wanted to plagiarize, buying a paper off the Internet would be kind of dumb."

Instead, says Diane Waryold, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University in Durham, N.C., "I think what they do is buy the paper and kind of doctor it up."

That may make it a little tougher for professors doing simple Web searches to find the original source of material they deem suspicious. But now professors are upping the ante. More and more are using or even writing programs to detect repetitions in prose, often tailored to specific fields. In this way, the technology that is allowing term-paper cheating to proliferate online could become the Achilles' heel of the business.

With "paper mills or sites like School Sucks," says Kathy Cooke, a professor at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., "there are a variety of sites out there that initially made it easier for students to cheat, but now professors are catching on."

Straight and Narrow — And More Profitable?

And then there are online sites that think they have a better business model than the paper mills. These are the sites that want to cash in on the lucrative, multimillion-dollar market for academic tutoring, offering test preparation, college essay advice and admissions guidance — and even term-paper help that, they say, is on the up-and-up.

For instance, Cyber Edit Inc., an online company, offers advice to students on term papers, college admissions essays and resumes. Students can submit their materials online and receive an edit from tutors within two days. CyberEdit's term-paper service, says founder Geoffrey Cook, aims to steer clear of practices that could lead to plagiarism charges.

"That service is purely tutoring," says Cook. "The edit that's done is purely for grammar — kind of what a helpful parent would do." After all, he adds: "It's hard to be an expert on everything."

And when it comes to college admission essays, Cook emphasizes, "We don't write essays for anybody. We get asked a few times a week and we just say no … And we don't expand essays. If someone says, 'I have a 500-word essay, please expand it to 750' — we don't do that."

Cook claims the site has "thousands of customers per month," a figure that has "more than doubled in the last year." Its fees are notably steeper than those of the paper mills: An edit on a humanities paper costs from $27.95 for a paper up to 500 words, and as much as $327.95 for a paper in the 7,001- to 8,000-word range.

Ultimately, with those kinds of prices, this may not only be more ethical, but a better business bet than offering up that same old book report on Korea, year after year.