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Paying for Term Papers

By Justin Bathon

Well, my infatuation with AfterEd continues. In a new video, they look into the term paper industry. (Here is the transcript of the chat).

Couple thoughts. First, I am highly, highly concerned about this type of activity in educational leadership programs. Although I don't have any research to cite, the anecdotal evidence I have heard from many professors in educational leadership programs raises alarms. I have not heard a professor tell me that they had students actually purchase a completed term-paper online (although as the video shows, adult students in education programs are a large percentage of the online term paper market), but I have had professors tell me that many of their students pay to have their research done for them. We are not just talking about computing the math, we are talking about actually paying someone to find something interesting in a dataset that is dissertation worthy and then run those numbers and transfer that completed analysis to the student, who then writes it up in text form and turns it in. I have actually heard accounts like that from multiple sources to the point that at some places it is the expected norm in dissertation writing. Obviously, highly concerning.

Second,  again, I just want to continue to point out that there is a difference between plagiarism and cheating. Buying a term paper online is not plagiarism, it is cheating (and clearly academic misconduct). While their continues to be some debate about how to catch and punish plagiarism, there is no debate that cheating should be punished or how we catch it. Online sites like TurnItIn are really not designed to catch cheating, they are only designed to catch plagiarism. The only way we can really catch cheating is to have engaged teachers. The idea of someone else doing your homework for you is not really new -- this has been happening for hundreds of years. Our only line of defense against this type of misconduct are engaged teachers that know students and their work and intuitively know when something is not right. While technology may make it easier for students to cheat, it does not change the teacher's job.

Full post as published by Edjurist on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).