After writing a prompt for a paper based on one of Eric’s books, I decided to google it and found this. You can buy a term paper on Murdering McKinley for $20.95 per page; rather steep, I thought, but then graduate-level papers are even more. My prompt is quite different than the one offered by the site, but the company will write a paper to fit the assignment if necessary. I wonder what Eric would charge.
Every quarter I refer at least one student to judicial affairs for this sort of thing. But the plagiarism-industrial complex is getting so sophisticated that it’s harder and harder to outwit the cheaters.
31 comments
January 7, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Ahistoricality
I should start doing that: googling when I write the questions, not after the first three papers all sound kind of familiar….
For the most part, I don’t refer students to higher authorities anymore: I have enough authority to punish within my course. But then, I haven’t seen evidence of actual paper-purchasing, just garden-variety cut-n-paste.
January 7, 2009 at 2:44 pm
ari
The real injustice here is that only the very rich undergraduate can afford artisanal plagiarism. The middle-class and poor students are stuck with mass-produced crap. Perhaps Eric should consider ghost-writing a paper or two every quarter pro bono.
January 7, 2009 at 2:45 pm
ari
I have enough authority
It’s authority day here on the Edge of the American West.
January 7, 2009 at 2:45 pm
kid bitzer
i’m going to start googling when i write a book.
January 7, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Ahistoricality
only the very rich undergraduate can afford artisanal plagiarism. The middle-class and poor students are stuck with mass-produced crap.
Yeah, I had that thought, too. More importantly, I think, is that students from higher social status are more likely to know that they are violating serious norms, and I’m much more inclined to punish malice than ignorance.
January 7, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Anderson
Hopefullly the hacks who write the papers will get lazy and plagiarize them from a google-accessible source.
January 7, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Blume
Now I’m singing Bowie, and in my head Bowie’s face and Eric’s are sort of melding.
January 7, 2009 at 3:26 pm
ari
Eric’s glam-rock years were his best, Blume.
January 7, 2009 at 3:27 pm
soup biscuit
Talk like this makes me happy to be in math.
I wonder if anyone can interest Google in scanning all incoming papers like they’ve been scanning books. Google Plagiarism (TM) could rapidly search millions and millions of undergrad papers in mere moments. That would put all but the one-offs out of business, I suppose.
Still have to deal with people taking finals for them.
January 7, 2009 at 3:34 pm
rosmar
There is a service (I don’t remember the name) that keeps all student papers uploaded to it on file, and also automatically compares them to papers online. It came under serious attack by students as an invasion of their privacy and intellectual property (since the company, and not just the professor, got a copy of their paper). Also many students felt that it meant the professor didn’t trust them and that it created a negative atmosphere.
My college has an honor code, and research suggests that honor codes help a lot. I still catch people plagiarizing now and then, but it isn’t too bad.
January 7, 2009 at 3:48 pm
sdh
Perhaps it is time to go back to giving oral exams?
I’ve actually administered oral exams (to medical students), and found it to be quite a good tool in discerning a student’s mastery of the material. You can help students who have it ‘mostly’ right with nudges, and you can see students who fully understand the principles shine. They also needn’t be long — 15 minutes can suffice.
I can see how they might be hard to administer for large classes, but an oral exam might be just the thing for medium and small classes.
(The oral exams I helped administer had many different questions one could chose, ranked in order of difficulty. No student’s exam was exactly the same. I think that helped as well.)
January 7, 2009 at 3:55 pm
eric
There is a service
Turnitin.com — our fair institution briefly subscribed to it, then gave it up. Perhaps because it was expensive, perhaps for the reasons you cite.
January 7, 2009 at 3:59 pm
SEK
We still have a subscription, and it’s incredibly, incredibly useful. Granted, it’s more peace of mind than anything else, because you read a paper, have that funny feeling, then see that it’s 92.3 percent plagiarized from Sites A, B and C.
January 7, 2009 at 4:38 pm
grackle
artisanal plagiarism hmmm.
There are so many ways in which you folks make my day.
January 7, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Kevin
This is the first reason given under “Why PaperMasters”:
“Plagiarism free term papers are what every student who pays hard earned cash for term papers deserves.”
Indeed! Now, if only the hack who wrote the paper was enrolled in the class it’s being written for all would be good with the world.
Man, I am feeling like an old fuddie-duddie (UCDavis ‘87)! How can kids do this and think they aren’t cheating? Do they even pretend to be innocent when found out?
January 7, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Brad
I can’t remember whether or not this On the Media interview was referenced here or not. It sure is amusing, though.
January 7, 2009 at 6:31 pm
silbey
We have turnitin at my college and some of the same issues have come up. I do use it, though, and the justification that swung it was that I didn’t think it fair to the students who *didn’t* plagiarize to take the chance that a fair number of those who *did* would get through without getting caught.
January 7, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Charlieford
In Harpers Magazine in June, 1995, there’s a fascinating and sad expose by an academic reduced to working for one of these mills. “This pen for hire: On grinding out papers for college students,” by Abigail Witherspoon. It’s available on-line to subscribers.
January 7, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Russell Belding
I remember back in the ’70s, Rolling Stone had a perennial classified ad, featuring a picture of a bespectacled, honest-looking, yet stressed-out “student,” and a caption something like “Term Paper Blues? We Can Help!” So, the “industry” has been around for awhile.
January 7, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Carl
We have turnitin here. I don’t use it, although I think it’s silly to avoid capturing some murderers because you can’t capture all of them, so that’s not why. I’d be more on board with an argument that it’s regressive to inconvenience and anxietize the honorable to intercept the dishonorable. I’d be even more on board with a foucauldian argument that active participation in the installation and extension of disciplinary surveillance systems is a form of self-defeat.
I don’t use it because I design essay assignments that are unique to each class, its discussions and resources (“Using only the course texts for evidence, analyze the relation of agency to happiness in rural Ming China;” later, once they get good habits, they get to do research too), and therefore can’t be plagiarized effectively from mass market boilerplate. It works great, plus I get much better papers to read. I sit on our school’s Honor Board, and the colleagues who I see again and again are the ones who assign yet another reaction paper to famous poem/source/article/book/event X.
January 8, 2009 at 4:24 am
tona
Doesn’t Turnitin only catch papers that match ones previously submitted to Turnitin?
This term I found it hard to track down a couple of papers that were clearly not the student’s own work, because the paper mills only post the first paragraph or abstract, not the entire paper, and so Googling a sentence from the middle brings up nothing.
What do you do then?
And I, too, cannot figure out why those places advertise to students that they provide “plagiarism free” products. Um. Hello, it’s the very definition of?
January 8, 2009 at 5:52 am
teething ring
My book group will cover Eric’s Depression/New Deal book next week. Is there a service that will sell me witty insights to make in that setting? $6.99 per bon mot?
January 8, 2009 at 7:38 am
ari
Go to the source, teething ring.
January 8, 2009 at 8:03 am
silbey
and therefore can’t be plagiarized effectively from mass market boilerplate
Forgive me, but I think that’s highly optimistic. In that situation, could students plagiarize an entire paper? Probably not. Could they cut and paste chunks from a variety of different sources? Probably.
Doesn’t Turnitin only catch papers that match ones previously submitted to Turnitin?
No–from the Turnitin web site:
Over 10 Billion Web Pages Crawled & Archived
Over 70 Million Student Papers
Over 10,000 Major Newspapers, Magazines & Scholarly Journals
Thousands Of Books Including Literary Classics
And it’s certainly caught things that were directly from the web, a book, or journal.
What do you do then?
Google the first sentence?
Also, papers are normally sold mutiple times and turnitin will catch them frequently.
I hate to sound like an advertisement for turnitin, but I do think it’s useful, and in these situations I think my primary responsibility (as I mentioned earlier) is to students who *didn’t* plagiarize and would be operating at a disadvantage to those who did.
I also don’t think that I catch everybody who plagiarizes. Having said that, I think I catch enough to make it a reasonable deterrent.
January 8, 2009 at 8:07 am
eric
Is there a service that will sell me witty insights to make in that setting?
There’s this link, which is free.
January 8, 2009 at 8:55 am
sirkraab
My book group will cover Eric’s Depression/New Deal book next week.
Sigh. That used to be my book group before I moved out of town. I miss it. The pseud isn’t suggesting anyone in particular to me, so I don’t know if we know each other.
January 8, 2009 at 11:33 am
Ahistoricality
I hate to sound like an advertisement for turnitin, but I do think it’s useful…
My main problem with it is the need to have electronic versions of the paper.
You can set it up so that all papers go through turnitin, but that strikes me as excessive and — given their imperialistic information policies — unfair to my students. Failing that, you have to send in select papers, but to do that you have to have an electronic version: you can either scan it, make special requests from students, or require all students to hand in electronic versions instead of paper ones.
I still prefer grading on paper, but that’s not going to last more than another decade or so, anyway…..
January 8, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Lori
I use turnitin (students just drop stuff in the course thing on blackboard and then poof). In the recent past I caught someone who didn’t know you should not buy papers online, and several from the same class who turned in virtually the same work (with 150 students all the essays begin to sound alike after awhile and I trust turnitin more than myself). My guilty thrill is catching a freshman who plagiarized over 80% and bringing them in and asking them to explain their paper. They get a zero on the assignment and maybe get scared enough not to do it again. Maybe.
January 9, 2009 at 11:49 am
Carl
“‘and therefore can’t be plagiarized effectively from mass market boilerplate’
Forgive me, but I think that’s highly optimistic. In that situation, could students plagiarize an entire paper? Probably not. Could they cut and paste chunks from a variety of different sources? Probably.”
Of course. But look at the sample question: most of the ways they could do that would result in an incoherent, nonresponsive paper that would fail on its own merit without getting into plagiarism detection. Furthermore, they’d fail if they didn’t regularly and accurately cite the course texts, which are idiosyncratic (even in intro world history we use mixed publishers) and I know well enough to recognize. I’m not interested, after all, in their unsupported opinions or anyone else’s.
Now, what they could do is scour the ‘nets for snippets of information about agency and happiness in Ming China, stitch them together with topically-relevant analysis, then invent plausible citations to the course texts. To do that, they’d have to understand the assignment and its rationale, properly identify relevant information, produce focused and coherent analysis, and know the course texts well enough to target the fake cites effectively. At that point they might as well write the A paper those skills indicate they’re capable of writing.
January 12, 2009 at 2:29 pm
How to plagiarism-proof your essay assignments « Dead Voles
[...] by Carl on January 12, 2009 A short, droll post by Kathy at Edge of the West concerning an instance of the “plagiarism-industrial [...]
January 12, 2009 at 4:23 pm
silbey
At that point they might as well write the A paper those skills indicate they’re capable of writing
Sure. I’ve seen lots of plagiarized papers where the amount of effort that went into them probably exceeded the amount that would have been required actually to write the paper.
My main problem with it is the need to have electronic versions of the paper.
Yeah, and that’s a major stumbling block. I moved to having folks turn in their papers on blackboard a few years back, anyway, so it’s not a problem for me, but it’s certainly not good if you want to have physical copies.
Finally, turnitin has proven useful in two, unexpected ways:
1. Catching students who recycle other student papers from previous semesters (No, I don’t repeat assignments, but students cut and paste things from earlier).
2. For senior seminar, using Turnitin to see how much students change from rough draft to final copy of their semester long research paper (not a cheating issue, but an effort one).