A person who identified herself as clinical psychologist Carol Rockwell from the Boston area offered to write the term paper for $210. “Much of what we do involves repeat clients that will use us for one assignment and then use us repeatedly until they reach degree attainment,” Rockwell said in an email exchange. “In some cases, as funny as it sounds, we even have ‘regulars’ that once they complete their degree, we will write their applications for their next degree, complete their work for that program, [and] often do their master’s thesis.”
Many professors fight back against term paper cheating by crafting very specific assignments or by requiring students to turn in drafts. Many universities also use plagiarism-detection software. TurnItIn.com, the industry leader, provides its software to 10,000 client institutions in 110 countries that pay $1 per student per year for unlimited use. Available in 31 languages, TurnItIn will analyze 80 million term papers in 2010 for plagiarism, or more precisely, “matching text.”
One-third of all papers processed by TurnItIn are “less than original,” according to TurnItIn president John Barrie. “Plagiarism is absolutely pervasive,” he says. “It’s a cancer. If students don’t do their own work, their schools turn into degree-printing houses.”
In interviews with local college students, most said they had never bought a term paper or known anyone who had. But Renee Lee, a 2008 graduate of UMass Boston, said she knew two or three students who wrote papers for many students at her school.
Officials at several Boston area universities had little if anything to say about the subject of plagiarism. Officials at Craigslist did not respond to repeated requests for their views.
“The epidemic of cheating is one of the biggest problems facing higher education, but there is almost no interest in addressing this problem,” said David Callahan, who has written extensively on cheating in America and is cofounder of Demos, a nonpartisan public policy organization. “Taxpayers are subsidizing a higher education system to the tune of tens of billions of dollars that turns a blind eye to fraudulent results.”
Colman Herman wrote a longer version of this article for CommonWealthMagazine, a public policy magazine published by MassINC.
