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Have a term paper due soon? Dreading the thought of all the work involved? With the advent of the World Wide Web, plagiarism has become as easy as point and click. Some websites list thousands of term papers on hundreds of topics—and the papers are there to be downloaded 24 hours a day. Boston University developed a plan in which a law student posed as a student wanting to buy a term paper to see how easily it could be done. The student secured papers from eight companies in seven states and paid fees ranging from $45 to $175. The university charged the companies in federal court with wire fraud, mail fraud, racketeering, and violating a Massachusetts law that bans the sale of term papers.

Some websites are not affected by current laws because they offer the papers for free. The sites are funded by advertisers who buy space on the sites. The owner of one such website says that the papers on his site are posted there not so that students can plagiarize them, but rather to show the substandard writing skills of many college students. You get the idea from the papers on the site that students are rewarded for length. The papers consist of pages and pages of junk, yet many instructors accept them. The owner notes that this says something about the mediocre assignments some professors give year after year. He thinks it is absurd that class assignments can be so vague that a student can go to the Internet, find a generic essay, and receive credit for it. He believes he is doing education a favor by forcing professors to give more specific writing assignments and to require extensive footnotes.

If recycling term papers is now so easy, why do professors continue to assign them? While the writing style used for term papers is different from that used in the workplace, writing develops critical thinking skills and the ability to express thoughts and ideas. Tom Rocklin, director of the Center for Teaching at the University of Iowa, puts it this way: "I have sat down with a group of businesspeople, and they say what they are looking for in new hires are skills developed by a traditional liberal arts education. Discussion, reading, and extended writing are a crucial part of that." Yet simply downloading a paper from a website does nothing to help a student develop these skills.

1			Would you consider purchasing a paper from a website and submitting it as your own? Why or why not? Consider that there is now a website that helps professors check for plagiarism by comparing student papers with millions of online pages using the top 20 search engines. The system even identifies papers composed of bits and pieces of online text. Does knowing this change your answer to the questions above?
2			Do you agree with the website owner who said he is improving education by posting certain term papers as the mediocre results of mediocre assignments? Justify your answer.
3			View this issue through the eyes of your professor. The websites are out there, and your students have access to them. What would you do to discourage your students from committing plagiarism?