Can't make grade? Click on cheat.com

New York Daily News | 12/26/02 | BRIAN KATES

[kattracks]

For college students throughout the metropolitan area, 'tis the season to be jolly as they recuperate from all-night study sessions and end-of-semester term papers.

But for many, holiday merriment will come to a prompt halt soon, as professors begin to issue grades. Then it becomes the winter of their discontent.

In numbers growing by the thousands, students have found a quick-fix cure for their academic headaches - on the Internet. In the wonderful world of Web sites, scores of online companies are eager and able to provide slackers with whatever they need - for a price.

Plagiarism has become big business.

If you type "Term papers for sale" into a computer search engine such as Google, you'll be bombarded with hundreds of thousands of offers.

They come from for-profit Web sites with names like - no kidding - CheatHouse.com, Schoolsucks.com and Gradesaver.com.

Search one site for papers on existentialism - a perennial favorite of English majors - and 15 options pop up. They range in price from $48 for a six-page paper on "philosophical approaches of idealism, realism, pragmatism and existentialism" to $136 for 20 pages on the classic Albert Camus novel "The Stranger."

The site also has a paper - just one - on what its customers are doing. It's called "Dishonesty: The Dynamics of Cheating." It runs six pages and sells for $48.

A free ride

At most schools, plagiarism - otherwise known as copying, lifting, cribbing or, as one wit once put it, "stealing a ride on someone else's train of thought" - can result in anything from an F to suspension.

But high prices and academic risks are a minor inconvenience to many students.

In a survey of students conducted in the 2001-02 academic year for Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity, 41% said cribbing written assignments was common.

Says CheatHouse: "The idea that students can simply find, download and hand in their homework is a recipe that is attracting over 6,000 visitors a day."

Many of them are from the New York City area.

"We have seen a fivefold increase in the detection of cheating in the last five years or so," said the Rev. Jeffrey von Arx, dean of Fordham University's Rose Hill campus. "We attribute that to the fact that there is much more plagiarism from the Internet."

He said that about 35 Rose Hill students a year face discipline for cheating. But, von Arx stressed, the increase is in detection. "We don't know if more students are plagiarizing, we just find more."

It's all so easy. Just log on and pull out your credit card. Whatever you need is yours in a keystroke.

Essayfinder.com boasts of being "highly capable of writing an essay for YOU on ANY topic by ANY date you specify. Need to read 10 pages on advanced thermodynamics by Thursday night? It's our job to get it to you!"

The cost of such custom research is $29.95 per page, with a minimum of five pages.

Just before winter break, a 23-year-old sophomore at Brooklyn College told the Daily News she had cribbed "at least three papers" this semester.

"There's a whole ring of people here, and you know who you can get papers from," said the student, who could face suspension if she gave her name. "You can always get papers in the core classes like English, history and political science."

Just ask Nick Summers.

The Columbia University sophomore, a solid B student, said he recently submitted every term paper he's ever written to Gradesaver.com, which pays $25 for each one accepted.

"I do all my own work," Summers insisted. "But I'm not bothered that other students probably will plagiarize from my papers. I guess you could say I have generally loose ethics about it, but I've had a lifetime - from middle school through high school and now in college - of E-mailing homework and downloading movies and music."

That's typical Generation Y thinking, according to Elizabeth Welsh, provost at Adelphi University in Garden City, L.I.

"Many students don't realize it's wrong until they get caught. They seem to think the Internet is free for all and they should get whatever they want from it," Welsh said. "To them, stealing a paragraph is the same as downloading music."

Adelphi adopted its first code of ethics last year. It includes extensive detail on plagiarism.

"The students felt cheating was a problem," Welsh said.

Well-heeled shirkers begin even before they set foot on campus. They turn to the Internet to find professionals who will write their college applications for them, at prices that soar to $5,000.

At many colleges, these essays - which let students show off their originality and wit - can boost marginal candidates over the admissions hurdle by giving counselors insights unobtainable from the raw data on transcripts.

Carol Zoref, writing coordinator at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, said that every year she is called upon to review questionable admissions essays.

"When the essay does not sound like other writing in the student's folder," she said, "it raises a red flag." Some, she fears, are the work "of an adult called in to pinch-hit as a ghost writer."

There is no shortage of pros offering their talents. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, more than a dozen Web sites cater to high school students seeking consultants to massage - or fabricate - application essays.

Company disclaimers

Several companies, such as Cyber Edit, do it all: term papers, admissions essays and résumés.

Cyber Edit insists it offers only "tutoring," and nearly all the term-paper mills contain disclaimers decrying the pirating of intellectual property and urging their customers to use the work only as research tools.

But the problem is so severe that in 1997, Boston University dragged eight online purveyors of term papers into federal court, alleging wire fraud, racketeering and violation of a Massachusetts law forbidding the sale of term papers. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 1998.

Since then, many schools have found a less radical remedy. Like their students, they've turned to the Internet.

Web sites such as Turnitin.com, based in Oakland, Calif., do a booming nationwide business ferreting out cheaters from middle school through graduate school.

"Schools have tried lots of things to check cheating, from honor codes to requiring students to turn in their note cards and show all the drafts of their work," said John Berry, founder of the site. "These are good ideas only if you live in fantasyland."

His plagiarism-prevention system involves "Web-crawling robots" that scour the Internet, retrieving "millions of documents" daily from online term paper mills and other sources.

Schools that subscribe to the service - for about 50 cents per enrolled student - require students to submit their papers to both professors and Turnitin. The work is then compared with the documents in the company's databases and returned - with potentially pirated material highlighted.

In New York State, 20 colleges as diverse as Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point subscribe to the service. So do 37 high schools, including Hunter in Manhattan.

"We use it mostly in grades 7 through 9 to train students about the proper ways to do research," said Carolyn Mayadas, a Hunter High computer science teacher. "It's reduced plagiarism by about 85%."

But in the end, as former State University of New York training center chief Leslie Mayville (now with Turnitin.com) put it: "It all comes down to the integrity of the individual student."

[vnix]

Where the hell was this stuff when I was in college?

[goldstategop]

Yeah... Education for the lazy. Just whip out your credit card and breeze through college in four straight years. Its not the college we attended.

[gunnedah]

Take a good look at todays America Folks! Morals and honesty are kicked out the door and anything goes.This once great country is in for a rude awakening.
When we have anarchy in the streets and American blood flowing freely on American soil it will be to late to wake up, but it will happen! The Liberal Clinton era has arrived. Zeig Heil,Bill, Hitlery and the Demoncrats!

[Drawsing]

Cheating and lying are wrong. Morality is not relative.

[goldstategop]

Academe wasn't concerned about Michael Bellesiles producing an outright academic fraud. One can pardon students for noticing the double standard and asking if its OK for the scholars to lie and cheat why can't students do the same thing. Until academe sets an example at the top students would suckers for being a model of integrity in school.

[billorites]

Google giveth, Google taketh away.

Both my wife teach and regularly assign term papers.

Frequently, students whose in-class essays reveal them as being dumb as a turkey dropping will pass in a paper that sounds coherent, organized and well thought out.

Just pick a phrase or sentence that sounds too good to be true, type it into the Google window and, shazaam, see the exact same essay pop up all over the internet.

Then watch the little darlings squirm as they assert, "I've no idea how that happened."

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, way too easy.

[goldstategop]

You are one of the good ones. But as I said academe has to set the example at the top. If professors and high school teachers take short cuts with the truth, students will notice. I'm afraid the lazy bones attitude just doesn't begin and end with the students. There's something about society saying hard work's for suckers. And it keeps getting worse every year.

[Gorzaloon]

Where the hell was this stuff when I was in college?

Some of us Old Folks consider it a mixed blessing.

It is SO EASY to excel in the workplace when the new "graduates" are unable to do their jobs, and the cult of mediocrity rules.

Cheating only cheats the cheater in the end. It may take years, but it always comes due. In commerce, "Plagiarism" becomes "Infringement".

[Kenton]

I used to have a little side business going in college writing term papers for a few people. I never got that kind of money, though. This sounds like a good side job.

[In my most Nixonian voice] ummm, but of course, that would be wrong...

[Vermont Lt]

And I thought the best deal in college was the kid who collected all of the tests, from every other kid. He filed them and we used them as "study aids." 99% of the profs changed their tests--but there were a few that hadn't changed the test in four years.

I am sure he wondered why all of his classes were chuckerblock full, year after year.

[Redmen4ever]

I have a colleague who gives take-home exams and EVERY SEMESTER catches a high percentage of students with identical answers. I myself take many precautions against cheating. For example, two or more versions of multiple choice exams. I find many students give the wrong answers that are the right answers for the students they sit next to, moreso than would be probable from random guessing. This past semester, I had three sections of one course, and finals on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. I included different essay questions on Tuesday and Thursday, and on those days got several answers to the essay questions I gave on Monday. I once gave an essay question on the topic of a term paper that I thought was plagiarized, and the student whom I suspected did not exhibit any knowledge of the subject.

The majority of students HATE cheating, as do my colleagues, but the administration doesn't care. They make it almost impossible to discipline those who cheat. The professor is somehow supposed to "prove" cheating other than by saying "I saw the students cheat." The only "punishment" for cheaters, effectively, is failing the course in which they are caught cheating - which makes trying to cheat a no-lose gamble for students who are going to fail anyway.

My "sneaky ways" insure that students who cheat fail, and I fail a high percentage of students, and save myself the time that would be involved in the process of proving that a student cheated. Nevertheless, I am criticized for grading harshly, and - if it wasn't for my scholarly credentials - they might go after me.

My colleague, the one who has pursued cheaters with some vigor, is viewed by the administration as anti-student. Supposedly, he "hasn't learned" how to deal with today's students. The man is brilliant, and a very good teahcer, and is being criticized by people two or more standard deviations of IQ below him!

It's "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Next" in higher education. The radical leftists of the 1960s are now in charge.

[MurryMom]

The Liberal Clinton era has arrived. Zeig Heil,Bill, Hitlery and the Demoncrats!

Correction: Clinton and Gore have been out of office for almost 2 years now. But the Blame Clinton for Everything Crowd will probably be blaming Clinton and Gore for Dumbya's failures through the next election anyway.

BTW, what has little Dumbya done to reverse the tide of the so-called Liberal Clinton era? Pay back his ill-gotten gains on Harken Energy stock?

Don't hold your breath!

[Reactionary]

What has ol' Dumbya done to reverse the tide? Let's see...

As we all know, Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. He didn't graduate the program, mind you, but his supporters never tire of telling everyone how he's, well, a *Rhodes Scholar*.

And Gore? He doesn't have a Master's degree in anything. But, again, we all know he's a genius.

And Dumbya? He actually graduated. He has an advanced degree. And he's a moron.

The "tide" has turned in that ol' Dumbya looks like a Smartya compared to the genuises liberals worship.

[gunnedah]

Facts are facts thank you. After most of us are gone the truth about the Clinton era will be shown one way or the other. The Clintons filled DC and every state capital with lawyers and have opened the floodgates. Next the Clintons sold every secret, nuclear and military the US had. America is more vulnerable than ever because of Clinton and time will reveal this.The Clintons are scourges to the country and those that follow are not any better.But is saying that I dont trust many,if any of the politicians in DC or anywhere else for that matter they are all for self.

[kmiller1k]

For years this same thing is available in fraternities and sororities.

[RikaStrom]

I can honestly say that I am not surprised at this turn of events. Children have been raised watching adults cheat on their taxes, resumes, etc. They have been conditioned to think that winning at any cost is superior to winning because you deserve to win.

They have watched while teachers who discipline them for cheating/forgery are ostrisized by the community and school board, and the teacher's grades were overturned.

Well, that certainly showed the kiddies that cheating was wrong, didn't it? /sarcasm

Cheating and websites that promote cheating will continue until it is taught at a basic level that it is wrong. It will continue until the people profiting from it; don't. And it most certainly will continue as long as certain parents/commmunities/teachers continue to put coming in first higher on the list than honor, ethics and morality. But then again, that's only my two cents, I could be wrong.

[MurryMom]

Facts are facts thank you.

One "fact" somehow omitted from your response is that Dumbya won 99% of the black vote. It's true. Look it up on Rush's website, if you don't already believe.

[gunnedah]

I dont listen to Rush,nor do I visit his web site. Sounds to me you are a liberal that also loves to play with race.
To each their own!Divide and conquer.