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September 11, 2006, 01:06 PM ET
With Term-Paper Mills, You Get What You Pay For (Or Less)
Paper-writing season will soon be upon the overworked college students of America, and it will bring with it a difficult decision: Should they spend hours upon hours in the library, researching references to Catholicism in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, or should they pay a Web-based paper-writing service to do that heavy lifting? Students, beware: You may want to know what your $50 or $100 will get you online.
The answer, according to The New York Times: plenty of tortured prose, but precious little in the way of real insight. For an article on term-paper mills, the Times ordered typical English-literature papers from three different paper-writing services. The finished products were, to put it mildly, less than polished.
Professors who reviewed the Times’s purchases said the papers would very likely earn a D+ or, worse still, a “see me after class.” And it’s easy to see why. One paper—a standard compare-and-contrast assignment on a pair of science-fiction classics—featured this finely wrought opening salvo:Although many similarities exist between Aldous Huxley’s ‘A Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ the works books [sic] though they deal with similar topics, are more dissimilar than alike.
But, hey, at least that’s something. One of the paper mills that the Times patronized, SuperiorPapers, never delivered on its promise to complete a study of colonialism in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. The company blamed “technical difficulties” for its inability to finish the paper, and then asked for a one-day extension—“the wheeziest stratagem in the procrastinator’s arsenal,” according to the Times, “invented long before the electronic age.” —Brock Read
Categories: Student-Life, Teaching
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