SEATTLE (dpa) – Once the relaxed years of high school are over, the stress of being at the university takes its toll. Millions of Americans are beginning their four year odyssey to a bachelor’s degree this autumn.
Over this period they’ll write dozens of short essays, each of which will be expected to demonstrate at least rudimentary knowledge in their subjects.
This jump into the academic life is difficult for many, traumatic for a significant number. But some students now elect to make their lives easier by not writing these papers at all.
They buy them from the Internet instead.
This particular niche of e-commerce has been booming in the United States. Web sites such as www.cheathouse.com sell their customers complete essays, book reviews, and, upon request, even dissertations.
The texts are offered up by students who believe their texts to be of particularly good quality. These masterpieces are bought by lazybones who still have some money left over after tuition payments.
Working with these term paper peddlers, though, is not cheap. At www.fastpapers.com, typing in a keyword such as “William Faulkner” pulls up a long list of English papers for sale, with entries for most of the American author’s major works.
One paper offers a discussion of the most important themes from Faulkner’s masterpiece “Light in August” in about six pages. Access to the term paper costs around 50 dollars, not including shipping charges. Even when the essay is sent by email, fastpapers.com collects a one dollar fee for handling.
American professors hate businessmen like Kenneth Sahr. He was awarded the dubious honour by the New York Times of being the most criticized figure in the online industry of term papers. Sahr’s Web site www.schoolsucks.com has been doing brisk business for over five years, with up to 10,000 visitors daily, according to the site.
“We’ve been making a profit since day one,” says Sahr. He protests that he naturally has no desire to contribute to plagiarism. His offerings are intended for research purposes only.
But his pious claims fall on deaf ears in the academy. Professors complain about outrageous plagiarisms that are being handed in by students with increasing frequency.
For professors who feel that they have been deceived, however, help is on the way in the form of the same tools that the cheaters are using. At www.plagiarism.org, a non-profit organization runs refined search engines that can unmask cheaters.
The site was put together by John Barier, a doctoral student from California who grew angry at the brazenness of his students who were trying to pass off clearly copied material as their own. For a yearly fee of around 700 dollars, university departments can test their students for honesty.
Suspected papers are submitted to the Web site electronically for comparison with already-written term papers in thousands of databanks. Plagiarized texts stand out quickly.
This service goes after more subtler cheaters as well, including those who try to hide their forgery by piecing together a text from several sources. If the search engine encounters a plagiarized passage, it gets marked in a different colour.
Clicking on the marked passage will pull up the original text from which the passage was taken, so that the professor can decide on the submitted paper’s legitimacy. The penalties for plagiarism at universities can be harsh. For those caught passing off other’s work as their own, expulsion from their university usually awaits.
