By which I mean: what specific sites/forums/IRC chat rooms do students use to find people willing to produce “original” works of scholarship? When I search for such services online, all I find is an endless sea of spam. There must be somewhere—perhaps localized at the level of individual schools—that students go to make these sorts of arrangements. Would it not be incredibly useful for instructors to know what those sites/forums/IRC chat rooms are? (And isn’t it odd that there hasn’t already been some sort of collective effort to create a list of this type?)
If you know the locations of some of these sites, I would love it if you left the address in the comment or send me an email (scotterickaufman at gmail dot com). Anonymous is fine. I want to create a sort of master list so I can play Leverage in my spare time because I’m curious.
UPDATE 1. The answer, from my initial investigations, is that it’s not craigslist. I found a few ads there, but after a brief investigation, learned that they were all spam.
The Edge of the American West 
21 comments
August 28, 2009 at 1:02 pm
SEK
(Alternative title: “You’ll never guess what I’ve been up to all week.”)
August 28, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Buster
I think that you are asking the wrong folks. I’d try a forum on something like the Daily Jolt (http://www.dailyjolt.com/). I bet that either by searching their archive or by posting the question while posing as a student, you’ll get some answers.
That said, I don’t really see the use in creating such a master list. I think the only reliable way of solving the plagiarism problem is at the point of assignment-creation and building relationships in the classroom/lecture hall.
August 28, 2009 at 1:34 pm
SEK
Actually, that’s sort of exactly the thing I was looking for: I’ve never heard of the Daily Jolt, and looking around there, I see some promising, shall we say, “material.”
And I appreciate what you say about building relationships and unique assignments, but 1) sometimes the former is very, very difficult to do (online courses), and 2) sometimes the latter isn’t an option (community colleges, sessional work).
August 28, 2009 at 1:50 pm
todd.
I found this in a few minutes of Googling. It looks as legit as I can imagine such a thing looking. What does the spam look like?
August 28, 2009 at 1:55 pm
SEK
Stuff like this, this, and this. Very similar URLs, quasi-professional looking sites, but clearly the sort of material already tracked by Turnitin.com because it’s so easy to find.
August 28, 2009 at 1:59 pm
todd.
Oh man, this (from the last of those) is rich:
August 28, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Matt L.
Why do you care SEK? I mean, there has been plagiarism since the universities were founded in the Middle Ages. The plagiarists are idiots who will never get the point of earning an education.
I know its not a victim-less crime, but really, is it worth your time? Use turnitin.com and then spend your spare time and energy doing something that counts, like publishing. Will catching a plagiarist get an adjunct contract renewed or help advance a tenure and promotion file?
August 28, 2009 at 2:07 pm
SEK
Why do you care SEK?
I can’t in good faith answer this question at the present moment. Needless to say, I do care, and have valid reasons for doing so.
August 28, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Vance
I can’t in good faith answer this question at the present moment.
Here I imagine Scott frantically googling for arguments against plagiarism.
August 28, 2009 at 2:47 pm
VERY anonymous for this one
So…
I used to work for a service that wrote custom papers for students. We advertised on Google AdWords (terms like Hamlet essay were successful, but judging by the lack of advertising on these search terms now, I wonder if Google banned them?), through flyers on college campuses, and through word of mouth. We got A LOT of repeat business as well.
In case you’re curious, our most common customer type was older students (generally with jobs and families) who had gone back to school and felt they “didn’t have time” to do their papers. Second most common were undergrads for whom money was clearly not an issue – we charged $200+ for a five page paper, as much as $500 for a rush job, and kids in this category would usually order well ahead of time and not complain about the price. Third most common were students that were clearly in over their head in a particular course. They tended to feel most conflicted about purchasing the paper, and also tended to be most stressed about the price.
So far as the actual papers we produced, your best bet for identifying them would have been by a shift in writing quality or tone. The papers were all original, and the writers were actually competent. We tended to write papers with a very simple structure…the first thesis that came to mind, followed by 3-5 major supporting points and a conclusion. People who came back to us generally said they’d gotten an A or a B. Our savviest customers would ask for the same writer to do all of their assignments for a semester, and some of them told us they went in and added typos because they thought it made the paper more believable.
August 28, 2009 at 3:09 pm
North
VERY anonymous, I’m curious how you got into that business – not in a how-to way, just how it happened for you. Did you go looking for it or did someone approach you?
August 28, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Jackmormon
And how was the pay? Are they hiring?
August 29, 2009 at 6:00 am
Karl Steel
Scott, have you never seen this essay?
August 29, 2009 at 6:12 am
Matt L.
SEK – OK – fair enough. But In General: Does the university reward professors for catching plagiarists? Do universities and colleges really want to enforce their own academic honesty policies?
I have come to the conclusion that my university does not. The Rules make it onerous to pursue an academic misconduct charge beyond the classroom and I have never heard of a student being punished for misbehavior.
I have caught students plagiarizing stuff from the “Internets” and they generally do it stupidly. But I am not sure I would catch a paper written by someone like VERY… so long as the author made reference to the assigned readings, then it sounds like a paper that would earn an A or B. You know, something with a beginning, middle, & end with thesis statement and evidence. Its unfortunate that its not written by the student, but what the hell can you do, its their education.
August 29, 2009 at 6:50 am
Karl Steel
I have never heard of a student being punished for misbehavior
I’ve failed students for plagiarism several times.
August 29, 2009 at 8:44 am
VERY anonymous for this one
1. I got into the business answering an ad off of Craigslist. I believe it was billed as something like “academic research assistance” in the ad, but it was pretty obvious pretty pretty shortly into the process what it actually was. What can I say? I was young and broke and my fancy education wasn’t helping me much otherwise.
2. The pay was $15 an hour, plus 10% of the total cost of the essay if you were the one who sold it, and it was a new client. You were expected to complete 2 pages an hour of undergrad-level work, and 1 page an hour of graduate-level work (we charged more for that).
I quit after a month because the people running the place were scumbags (surprise) who tried to stiff me on my fee.
August 29, 2009 at 9:39 am
James B.
Graduate-level work? Damn… Not that I’m prejudiced against any particular graduate degree, but were they perchance being written for MBAs?
August 29, 2009 at 11:23 am
Aunt Deb
Not MBAs. Education grad students, I’m betting.
August 29, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Robbie
I read a very interesting article on this very topic earlier this year that might be helpful in your own quest. I recovered the location of it after a couple of Google searches:
Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply
By THOMAS BARTLETT
http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-Global-as-Ess/32817/
It appears that the article is now behind a pay wall (I don’t remember paying for it, but I may have been using campus internet at the time which could have provided free access to the subscription to me without my knowledge). Still, it’s a very good article so if they don’t charge very much for a onetime pass for the article it’s probably worth it for your purposes.
September 2, 2009 at 8:39 pm
iakul
In Sepetember last year I wrote an article about Academia-Research.(http://writinghood.com/online-writing/academia-research-exposed-as-a-scam/) I did look around in a number of forums and sites before writing that article, and then I found a few more sites/forums after it was writen, mainly by tracking backlinks to the article.
There’s http://www.essayscam.org, which I gather was set up by former term paper writers and students of fradulent term paper mills. As far as I can tell, they are just out to expose the dishonest companies and most of the regulars there believe that there are legitimate term paper companies (Although it’s likely you’ll get a different answer from each one)
Then there’s MyLot (and other sites/forums not wholly devoted to writing, but do have a section for writers) It’s a paid to post forum, which has the unfortunate effect of making a number of members believe that posting there means being a writer.
It’s not so much a site where people actively go to find a term paper company though. It’s just that a large number of the members on MyLot generally only ask “Does this company pay?”, “Do you have proof?” and just assume that the company in question is engaging in a legitimate business when they get a positive for both, so it’s possible for a term paper site to get recommended every now and then. It’s equally likely that you’ll never get such a “recommendation” after spending a few months there.
Most of the other sites I have fall into this category. Member joins a term paper site, gets paid and recommend it, posting proof of payment to show that he/she gets paid, then one of the more diligent members does a simple Google search and turns up an article that says otherwise and links to it.
September 6, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Jeremy
Try coursehero.com.