How is academia responding to the growing essay writing industry? (From Quora)

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www.quora.com/How-is-academia-responding-to-the-growing-essay-writing-industry

There are websites that scan the web for plagiarism. See, for example, Online Plagiarism Checking | PlagScan. which I know about only because my website's analytics showed someone accessed my website from that site (probably because I have some sample essay answers in my blog. According to their site, they check the web, academic databases, a “pool” of information designed to prevent plagiarism, and so on.

Essay-writing services, often advertised as “research assistance” (I believe that was the name of one such company that advertised in magazines and/or comic books) get by on the grounds that it’s perfectly acceptable to cite the research of others in your own research paper, as long as you cite it properly. Of course, they’re “shocked, just shocked!” to find some people simply submit the research paper they bought as their own work, instead of using it as “research assistance.”

Would you trust people who’ll help you defraud your high school, college, etc., so you can get grades you didn’t earn NOT to sell the same paper to others taking the same course? Even if they don’t do it the same semester or the same year, an odd turn of phrase or factual or grammatical error can stick in a professor’s or high school teacher’s mind for years.

I heard some of my college classmates got in trouble when one of them copied another’s old paper from one course and submitted it in another, without wondering why the professors in both courses had the same last name. As it turned out, they were a married couple, and they discussed some unusual feature of the two papers, which led to the plagiarism being discovered. But I digress. I can’t imagine this NOT happening if two students order the same research paper. Also, schools could simply be proactive and order papers from these “paper mills” and put them in anti-plagiarism databases.

This may be a bit melodramatic, but someone who’s evil might use your plagiarized paper to blackmail you, etc. Imagine this phone conversation between a term paper mill owner and a person who submitted such a paper as his or her own work “Hello, Judge Smith? Congratulations on being appointed to the bench at such a young age! Hey, I’d like to use your name and picture as one of our satisfied customers… Oh, you wouldn’t like that? Well, we already printed up flyers at a cost of about $20,000 - oh, you’ll pay us to destroy them? Well, that’d be a shame, but we’ll do that as soon as we get the money - have a nice day, Your Honor…” People in professions where they can lose jobs and licenses for “moral turpitude” (e.g. judges, lawyers, doctors, teachers) can suffer real consequences from cheating YEARS after the fact…

Even after you’re dead, people will accuse you of plagiarism - I believe both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Nixon were accused of plagiarism or cheating in school in the late 1990s, LONG AFTER THEY HAD DIED.

Don’t cheat - everything is really easy to upload to a database. That’s how many college papers are “handed in” these days, so it’s not as though colleges wouldn’t take an extra few minutes, or even hours, a week to upload everyone’s papers to a database. It could easily be done at say, 3 am on Saturday or Sunday, when computer resource use is at a minimum. So it’s super easy to get caught these days. Just do your own homework; don’t be a putz.​

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