These days you can find pretty much anything you want on the Internet. Some college students are finding the Web to be a great source of getting out of work. They’re buying other people’s finished essays and term papers online. George Leef, director of research for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, discussed this problem with Donna Martinez for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Martinez: Well, I have to say, cheating certainly is not new.
Leef: Not new.
Martinez: But this is pretty advanced cheating.
Leef: Very advanced cheating. What got me thinking about this topic of students cheating, in particular, was an article that appeared a few weeks ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the proliferation of what they’re calling “essay mills.” What that means is, companies – some located in the U.S. and some, who knows where they are, they just have a Web address – where students can go, click on what they want, enter their topic and the length of the paper and when they need it. And then if the company decides, yes, we can do this, they will give them a price, which I take ranges from about $20 up to $40 a page or more, depending upon the difficulty and the time constraints. Then what they will get back is a finished paper.
Martinez: And it sounds like it’s customized.
Leef: Well, it can be customized. Now, of course, what we’re seeing here is like the age-old battle between offense and defense. Here we have a new wrinkle in the offense of cheating, whereby the students don’t just cut and paste material that’s already available on the Web, which is now fairly easily detected. What they’re paying for is a fresh paper written on their topic – maybe the Gettysburg Address or something like that – that won’t have words that can easily be detected as having been copied from some source on the Internet.
They’re supposedly freshly written, so the student can get out of doing the work. It costs some money, but a few have plenty of money to begin with and don’t feel like putting in the time and effort of writing your own paper and doing your own research. A lot of students are getting out of it. And the funny thing is, sometimes the people who are doing the work aren’t even Americans. One instance they showed – in fact, the cover picture in this article – was a guy in Nigeria, pretty well dressed, wearing a nice watch, speaks good English. And his job is to write papers for American college students.
Martinez: Oh my goodness. You know, I’m accustomed, George, to getting e-mails from people saying they are from Nigeria and they want me to send them money, but I’ve never had a pitch for an essay or a term paper. Clearly, there are some ethical questions here. It seems to me it’s a question both for the buyer of a paper like this, but also the seller. Why would someone do this? A free market?
Leef: Well, yes, it’s a good way to make money. Now, they try at least to pay lip service to the ethics of this by saying, well, we’re not necessarily writing the paper for the students, we’re just giving some ideas. Well, the students usually are not interested just in some ideas for a paper. They don’t want a draft that they have to work over and check on. They want something they can turn in. Now it’s not necessarily good stuff that they’re turning in. In fact, I’ve found other students who were quoted as saying, well gee, it was really crummy, and some professors who said, yes, this was beyond crummy. It wouldn’t even have been passing work for a high schooler. Yet, apparently, there are still students who think, well, it’s worth a try.
Martinez: What might a professor do about this? Is there any way to spot this new wrinkle in this type of work?
Leef: I think the way to do it [is] not technologically. There is lots of stuff available now where you can scan the Internet for blocks of text, and you can see if students are just copying material. But since this is supposedly freshly written, how do you tell whether it’s bad fresh writing from someone in Nigeria, or bad fresh writing from a student in America? What I think professors need to do – and some of them have said, yeah, this is what we are doing – they meet with the students part way. They assign a paper and they say, but you’ll have to show me your draft in two weeks or three weeks or whatever. You know, the student is not likely to want to pay for a draft. And then, of course, you have to discuss the draft, and if he hasn’t done the work himself, it’s going to become obvious right then. So, further engagement on the part of the professor – not just giving the students an assignment and then collecting the papers on the due date – but walking through the process of writing the paper with them somewhat will deter this to a great extent.
Martinez: You mentioned professors and how they might address this new situation. George, we have talked previously about this issue of grade inflation.
Leef: Yes.
Martinez: And that seems to be prevalent across the country as well, and professors play a key role in that.
Leef: That’s right. There’s a connection here. Professors oftentimes inflate grades just because they don’t want trouble. It’s not uncommon these days.
Martinez: What kind of trouble?
Leef: You can get in trouble with the administration. Students and their parents are prone to complain about a low grade. That’s anything less than a B these days, by the way – a low grade. And so if the professor cannot justify that grade – which takes a good deal of extra effort – cannot justify the grade, or if he can justify it but just doesn’t want to be put through the ringer, the easy thing to do is just make sure no one gets a low grade. No Cs. Now the same thing will happen here. If you make an allegation of cheating and say, you didn’t write this paper, I’m giving you an F and you’re flunking the course, you’re going to have to justify that. A lot of professors just don’t want the hassle. And so the easy thing to do is perhaps give the student a low grade – a C, or C-minus, maybe a D – and hope that won’t rebound disastrously in the administrative proceedings, saying how do you justify this.
Martinez: The role of parents, I think, is very interesting because – I hate to say “back in the day,” but back in the day, when I was going to Arizona State University, when I got my grades and my parents of course wanted to know what my grades were, if they thought that something wasn’t quite up to par, they took issue with me. They didn’t go over to the professor.
Leef: Yeah, that was back in the day, Donna. Things have indeed changed. These days it’s not at all uncommon for the parents to automatically say, my son or daughter has been wronged. Or even if it’s not wrong, say, we just can’t have a low grade on the transcript, we’ve got to go and fight for it. And it’s pretty easy these days for students and their parents to make life miserable for the professor.
Martinez: Are administrators likely to back up their professor, or are they just going to give in to these parents?
Leef: It’s not uncommon for the administrators to say the easy road for us to take now is to smooth things out and try to convince the professor, well, maybe you ought to just play ball, give the gentleman’s B as things now stand, and make this all go away.