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U.S. exports cheating
An Australian newspaper reports how easy it is for college students to pass off bought essays as their own work--and how eager U.S.-based companies are to assist cheats down under:
THE American woman on the other end of the phone could hardly have sounded more professional. Without ever using the word, she asked if she could help me cheat."We noticed you started to place an order on our website but didn't finish it," she twanged. "We wanted to check everything was OK."
Er, yeah. Thanks for asking."
Well, if you would like to finish the order and have any questions, please give me a call."
Her manner suggested she could have been selling steak knives but this polite, businesslike stranger was from masterpapers.com, a web-based US company that provides made-to-order essays for the global student cheating market.
Advertised as the "world's finest custom writing service", Masterpapers is one of a growing number of sites that promise essays overnight and PhDs within five days for between $A30 and $A40 a page.
Their rise has prompted academics to warn that cheating is becoming nearly impossible to detect and could cheapen the value of degrees unless something is done to curb it.
It prompted The Age to investigate whether Australian students prepared to buy their way through a degree get what they pay for. And whether universities, which largely deny cheating websites pose a threat, should be more concerned than they let on.
Three academics agreed to supply questions on topics from international relations to indigenous history and then mark the essays and analyse whether they needed to do more to thwart cheats. The Age picked the websites and footed the bill.
In some cases the results were impressive enough to raise serious questions about the way university degrees are assessed.
The essays provided by two sites - Masterpapers and Deveraux and Deloitte - were flawed but, depending on how specific the question was, could have scored a pass or better at an elite Australian university - more than enough for a student chasing a university degree but not the knowledge that comes with it.
Nick Bisley, a senior lecturer at Monash University who specialises in international relations, set the first 2500-word essay: "Has political reform changed Indonesia's role in the Asia- Pacific region?" A five-day order was placed with masterpapers.com, costing $328.
The essay that arrived back was alarming, Dr Bisley said, largely because it did not "set alarm bells going".
It was an average essay, enough to earn a pass or maybe a credit. It had a mix of good and bad references, some factual errors and too many words eaten up explaining background before arriving at its unsophisticated conclusion - that Indonesia's instability has caused some regional problems.
Prediction: As foreign universities realize the threat to academic integrity posed by American paper mills, another American enterprise--internet services that detect cheating, such as Turnitin.com--will make a killing.
As for whether Turnitin.com works, some swear by it, and others don't. Some are concerned about the intellectual property issues it raises (students must post their essays to the website in order for the service to compare them to its database; the essays then become part of the database). And some are concerned about the damper the service places on learning environments (some teachers feel that using the service chills the learning environment because it openly assumes students are cheating; they also argue that teachers who find themselves needing to use such a service to combat cheating have failed as teachers).
Readers are invited to post their thoughts on student plagiarism, paper mills, online detection services, and the expanding culture of cheating that underlies them all.
Posted by acta online at November 25, 2006 05:41 PM
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Comments
I find the absence of comments on this post revealing. A real and prevalent problem in academia, but no real political angle to it.
So no one cares.
It's not really about teaching them, is it? It's about indoctrinating them.
Posted by: Winston Smith at November 29, 2006 01:32 AM
Possibly, Winston, because this site is mainly frequented by folks like yourself looking for a particular political angle ... now what would that angle be?
Most of us who teach, and who have the duty of reporting plagiarism, care deeply. To confront it we need good, regularized, legal-challenge-proof procedures for adjudicating misconduct. That means that the administration of the institution has to be seriously involved (my institution is very good on this; not all are). Faculty need to set questions that are not easily answered by off-the-shelf essays -- you can't just say write me a paper on Middlemarch. It helps to take student papers through a draft stage, and where appropriate to insist that papers analyze real evidence rather than rehashing 2ndary sources which is what way too many undergrads think research is. You need a lot of concerted attention to writing.
If you're seriously interested in this question -- and anyone who has a stake in the value of the degree should be -- ask whatever place you're an alum of what its policies are and how well they're implemented.
It would be a great ACTA project -- y'all support standards, right? Find some folks with legal, teaching, and admin experience and write up a best-practices plagiarism process. (Key is process and not just policy, 'cause if you're serious about this you'll have a depressingly steady flow of cases and they need to be dealt with promptly and consistently.) Do some surveys. Ask faculty -- if an instructor can't tell you exactly what their institution's policies and practices are, there's a problem. Ask administrations. You'll find some interesting variation and you might do some real good.
Posted by: atomic dog at December 2, 2006 10:06 PM
Actually, the bulk of the few comments I've made here my have to do with the political obsessions of other commentators and the fact that there is a small group of people whose sole reason for frequenting this blog seems to be coming in and spouting the academic party line in every thread and trying to shut up the dissenting voices. Some of you make it quite clear that more conservative voices are simply not welcome in academia. So much for pluralism.
As for plagiarism, I already do all of the things you recommend. It has, for the most part, alleviated the plagiarism problem in my classroom. Save for those who *buy* essays written to the assignment. These I can generally catch through discussing the various points they make in "their" essay and discovering they have no idea what's even in it. I do that with the first draft. Then I generally get a hastily written POS for the second draft.
But the fact that a students has no idea what they've written about isn't always enough proof for our lawsuit-shy administration. They generally want me to be able to produce the source from which the student plagiarized, which is impossible when it's been bought to order.
It's also amazing how many pre-written essays there are out there for the buying. It's becoming harder and harder to come up with topics that aren't addressed by one of the various paper sellers on the internet. I have found abstracts on essays for sale that match topics I'm pretty sure were original to my course. Perhaps students sell copies of essay prompts to these companies to make extra cash?
As for knowledge of my university's policies, I know what our practices are *supposed* to be. But I also know that what's written in the student handbook and what actually comes to pass are two very different things.
Posted by: Winston Smith at December 4, 2006 11:27 PM
WHY EMPLOYERS ARE THE END-GAME JANITORS OF HIGHER-ED
The little geniuses produced by the public K-16 system wind up on our doorsteps. Given the continual downslide of quality, we administer our own, internally-developed exams.
Unfortunately, many of the little geniuses fail our exams -- lack of detail, lack of specific knowledge, no basic social skills.
They blame us -- instead of themselves and their ideological masters. Yo -- less ESPN, more studying, little geniuses.
Bob Dylan said it best --
Posted by: Bart at December 5, 2006 04:46 PM