September 21, 2006
Pay for Plagiarism
In a follow-up to its recent consumer guide to term-paper mills (The Chronicle, September 11), The New York Times highlights another ugly truth about papers procured online: Not only are they of deplorable quality, but they’re often brazenly plagiarized.
When the Times asked a company called Term Paper Relief to whip up an essay contrasting George Orwell’s 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it got little more than "a clip job, a collage assembled entirely—and hastily, it now appears—from other sources." In fact, the paper—cobbled together from an error-strewn free online essay, a digital version of Monarch Notes, and a United Press International wire-service story—didn’t even bother to correct egregious grammatical and typographical errors from its sources.
Any professor with access to Turnitin or even Google could sniff out the plagiarized material in a matter of minutes. And to make matters worse, the term-paper mills patronized by the Times seemed indifferent to deadlines, to say the least. "You have to plan so far ahead," according to the newspaper, "that you might as well do the work yourself." —Brock Read
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