SECTION: Pg. 15

LENGTH: 1537 words

HEADLINE: CYBERCHEATS

BYLINE: John N. Hickman

HIGHLIGHT:
Term-paper shopping online.

BODY:


It's four o'clock in the morning, you're just one page into a 15-page term paper that's due at ten o'clock, and the teaching assistant isn't giving extensions. A few years ago, that would have been it: You would have passed in the paper late, if at all, and dealt with the consequences. But this is 1998, and so, in your most desperate hour, you try a desperate ploy. You log on to the World Wide Web (the university has very generously connected every dorm room to the Internet), enter "term papers" into an online search engine, and find your way to www.a1-termpaper.com. There you scroll down past the big red disclaimer ("All work offered is for research purposes only"), find a paper that fits the assignment, enter your credit card number, and then wait until the file shows up in your college e-mail account. You feel a little ashamed, but, hey, the course was just a distribution requirement, anyway. You put your own name on the title page, print it out, and set the alarm for nine o'clock. A few years ago, "A1 Termpaper" would have been just another tiny ad in the classifieds of Rolling Stone or National Lampoon--hardly a temptation for most self-respecting students, and hardly a worry for any serious institution of higher learning. But the Web now features dozens of similar sites--from the "Evil House of Cheat" to "Research Papers Online"--which enable students to purchase ready-made term papers on a wide variety of subjects.

The companies, of course, maintain they are merely providing learning materials for inquisitive students. But there's good reason to think online plagiarism is becoming a real problem on college campuses. The Evil House of Cheat page now boasts over one million hits; A1 Termpaper claims thousands. Although a "hit" is a visit, not a sale, it is hard to imagine that thousands of students--at least 8,000 a week--are visiting these sites, and no one is buying. A spokesman for "The Paper Store" told me that his company's yearly traffic in papers was "well in the thousands." The owner of A1 Termpaper says that he has sold between 1,000 and 2,000 papers in his first year of operation. According to Anthony Krier, a research librarian at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire, and a widely quoted source on Internet plagiarism (he maintains a database of term-paper websites), the number of term-paper sites has swelled from 28 in the beginning of 1997 to 72 today. "Does the increase in the number of sites translate into an increase in cheating? Certainly," says Krier. "There's no doubt about it. People have got to realize the problem is not going away until they start taking it seriously."

At least one school, Boston University, is. Last year, it became sufficiently worried about online plagiarism that it launched a sting operation, in which a law student posed as an undergraduate in search of a paper on Toni Morrison's Beloved. In October, the university--which has been dogging term-paper mills for 25 years--filed suit against eight of the companies it claims to have snagged in the ruse, charging them with mail and wire fraud, racketeering, and breaking a Massachusetts law against term-paper sales.

But B.U. is the exception. Harvard University's Thurston Smith, secretary to the administrative board, is serenely confident that Internet plagiarism is not a problem at Harvard. "I'm sure it's going on somewhere," he says. "I just have to believe Harvard students would have too much respect for the faculty." Just as sanguine are administrators at Bucknell, Dartmouth, and Yale. Terri Barbuto, secretary of the executive committee, Yale's disciplinary body, insists, "It really hasn't been a problem at Yale."

My own sampling of student opinion suggests otherwise. One Yale student, for example, told me that, while researching an essay on Shakespeare, he inadvertently stumbled upon a term-paper site and, after asking around, realized that he wasn't the only student tempted by the ease of Internet plagiarism: "Everyone was finding them and keeping their mouths shut. I mean, at Yale, who would admit to having to buy a paper?" A Princeton freshman admitted to me that he had passed in a pilfered English paper: "Come on," he said, "it's just so easy, and the class was a waste of time, anyway."

Just how easy is it? Punching in "term papers" to an Internet search engine like AltaVista yields more than five million matches. The vast majority of these sites are, ironically, administrative warnings about online plagiarism, but among the first 100 listings are links to a handful of term-paper sites. If you click on the link to the Evil House of Cheat (www.cheathouse.com), a dark, fiery-fonted homepage will appear on the screen, featuring links to about 40 other term-paper sites. Many of these linked sites are staggering, librarylike catalogs of thousands of prewritten papers. At A1 Termpaper's website, which claims to offer "approximately 20,000 prewritten term papers," you could, for example, purchase the 20-page essay, "Hegel's Theory of Religion," for $179, or acquire ten pages on the IMF for a mere $89.50. Or, if that just-right paper isn't already available, The Paper Store will be happy to compose a special one that fits your needs, for about $15 a page.

The proprietors of these services claim that what they do is legal and honorable. "I help people," says Abe Korn, the man behind "The Term Paper, School, and Business Help Line." Korn, who talks a mile a minute in thick Brooklynese and claims to have been a professor at "a very major university," explains that his clients say, " Abe, help me, I don't know how to write a paper.' I write them one, as an example, and then they go and pass it in. Is that my fault? No. If I help you in physics and work one problem, and you turn that problem in, am I to blame? No. I'm just a tutor."

Of course, a 1973 Massachusetts law forbids the sale of a term paper by someone knowing or "having reason to know" that it will be submitted as somebody else's work. And Texas passed a similar law last year. But, even if selling term papers is potentially illegal, the law can't do much to shut down sites like "School Sucks"--sites where students generously make their own papers available to others for free. By one count, there are 38 free term- paper sites like School Sucks, a page started in 1996 by a former Florida International University student, Kenny Sahr. By last July, School Sucks, which started with one English paper Sahr borrowed from a friend, had grown into a megasite with 2,000 free term papers and a convenient search engine to locate essays by key words. As of January, according to Sahr, his site registered 1,140,690 hits and advertising revenues of $5,000 a month.

Some of these free papers are, by anyone's standards, awful. One paper on Macbeth begins: "Macbeth is primarily about villains. And the villainy that the play has knows no bounds." Yet other free-paper sites, such as the one designed by Harvard sophomore Dorian Berger, are gems. Dorian's swanky homepage posts about 20 of his generally quite good Harvard papers, free to download.

Even more helpful are pages like "1 Stop Research Paper Shop," which links to 32 scholarly sites, each with free papers posted by altruistically minded academics. Linked to the site: economics papers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, research works from the nasa Laboratories, papers from the Center for Cognitive Science, like "Mechanics of Sentence Processing," and a trove of essays from an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Casey Mulligan. The homepage of J. Michael Miller, a teacher at Virginia's Episcopal High School, who has a master's degree in history from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in Russian History from George Washington University, features five of Miller's college papers, ripe for the picking. Miller is only slightly troubled by the prospects of plagiarism. "It's really up to the individual reader," he says, "to do with the information what they will, good or evil. I belong to the school that says teach people to do the right thing and then turn 'em loose."

Concern over Internet plagiarism has led at least a few educators to contemplate high-tech solutions. Two employees of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Ned Feder and Walter Stewart, have designed a computer program to scan text and recognize word-for-word similarities as short as 32 characters long. Still, the programs have their limits, and, in the end, it's a losing battle. The whole point of the Internet is to share information. To get the benefits of online technology, universities have to cope with the costs. The only real solution to cyberplagiarism, then, is old-fashioned vigilance. Having spent millions of dollars wiring their students to the Internet, universities may have to invest in smaller classes and a better teacher-to- student ratio. A return to some good old analog, face-to-face teaching may be the only way to keep online plagiarism at the fringes, where it belongs.

John N. Hickman is a 1997 Yale graduate and currently works as a journalist in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(Copyright 1998, The New Republic)

LOAD-DATE: March 19, 1998