November 2001 — Features

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e-cheating: Combating a 21st Century Challenge

By Kim McMurtry

The easiest way is to type a topic into a search engine like Yahoo!, find a Web page that someone has posted on that topic with the requisite number of words, copy the text and paste it into a word processing program. Another possibility is to share assignments with friends at other schools - one student can simply e-mail a paper as an attachment to another student. For example, one of my students submitted a paper that I found to be the text from an online magazine article. When I confronted the student about it, he said he had never seen the online article; a friend at another college had e-mailed him the paper, and he assumed that his friend had written it. But the most blatant form of e-cheating is the use of "Web paper mills," sites that collect and distribute papers on the Web, either free or for a fee.

In a cursory search for these paper mill sites, I found more than 30. Such sites are easy to find - just type "free essays" into any Web search engine - and easy to use. However, many of these sites duplicate the same database of papers for whatever reason. For example, 15000Papers.com, Phuck School (www.phuckschool.com) and T.O.P. Thousands of Papers (www.termpapers-on-file.com) are all owned by The Paper Store and appear to offer the same collection of papers.

And with names like Evil House of Cheat, most of these sites claim to assist students in cheating and boast slogans such as "Download your workload." However, some offer interesting disclaimers, like this one from EssayWorld.com: "The purpose of Essayworld.com is to provide an additional resource for students to obtain information and additional ideas from the insights of fellow students. Plagiarism is a serious offense and Essayworld.com d'es not condone or encourage plagiarism. By continuing the use of this site, you acknowledge that Essayworld.com will in no way, shape or form, be held responsible for the improper use of the contents of this site. Information obtained from the essays on Essayworld.com should be treated as if it were acquired from a book and be cited in the references. Should you need instructions on how to cite information obtained from essays on the Internet, please visit our Resources section." Such disclaimers appear to be an effort to avoid liability.

Students perusing these sites can find papers in any discipline, from biology to business, from chemistry to computer science, from health to history, from philosophy to physics. The majority of these sites, however, provide papers on high school rather than college topics. For example, literature papers tend to focus on books like The Great Gatsby and A Tale of Two Cities. In addition, many of the sites, although apparently not owned by the same entity, offer the same papers. For example, I found the same essay on irony in Kate Chopin's Story of an Hour in EssayWorld.com, in Planet Papers (www.planetpapers.com) and in Other People's Papers (www.oppapers.com). Some of these sites even require you to submit a paper to gain access to their collection of papers.