How to thwart students who buy their work online.

This CHE article (via Andrew Sullivan) is an absolutely amazing examination of student paper mills (in other words, places to buy your writing assignments online):

In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you’ll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work.

Mumbai? Somewhere Tom Friedman must be smiling.

Go to Google and type “buy an essay.” Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is “Providing Students with Original Papers since 1997.” It’s a professional-looking site with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver “quality custom written papers” by writers with either a master’s degree or a Ph.D. Prices range from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.

To place an order, you describe your assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in. Simple.

Sounds scary for us education-types, but do these people actually read the book for you? I doubt it. Therefore, the easiest way to thwart students who want to go this route would be to assign papers that are actually based on the readings you assign. If you’re an English professor, and you suspect there are 30,000 papers on Jane Eyre floating out there, then assign comparison papers. I tend to do so for history texts anyway because they require more thought.

Of course, I’m assuming the papers buy online are actually good and that seems to be a pretty big assumption:

The writers for essay mills are anonymous and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week, hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to $40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose. Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

Along the same lines, this has got to be my favorite paragraph of the whole piece:

Mr. [Charles} Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well. He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of his papers was too high. “People would come back to me and say, ‘It’s a great paper, but my professor will never believe it’s me,’” says Mr. Parmenter. “I had to dumb them down.”

So how do you thwart students who don’t care if they’re handing in bad, plagiarized work? Here’s the solution in the article:

So what’s a professor to do? Thomas Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow writers to bid on students’ projects. Their paper concludes that because there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and disciplining students is the exception.

In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they’re doing. “You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within hours of it being released to them,” he says. “Which has to mean that they were intending to cheat from the beginning.”

What he recommends, and what he does himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or project they’ve just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and shrugged shoulders, there’s a chance they haven’t read, much less written, their own paper.

OK, but isn’t that a little late? I require drafts. In my Historiography Class, I even require multiple stages of the key paper assignment to be turned in before the final paper arrives. That way, I can get a good idea of how students’ thinking develops and if they’re not thinking at all, I’ll fail them for not completing the necessary portions of the assignment in a timely manner rather than wait to see what someone in Mumbai has turned out.

I know this is more work for me, but I get better writing this way and it helps avoid those horrible conversations which both parties involved absolutely dread.