Paper Mills: Not all they're cracked up to be

Very interesting article in the New York Times this weekend about the quality of papers you get when buying an "original" essay from a paper mill. While the websites of these companies claim that buying an essay is not plagiarism because the essays are all original, universities also define plagiarism as passing off someone else's work as your own, not merely copying and pasting from a bunch of articles and websites. It's disingenuous to claim that it's not plagiarism, especially when it's very clearly cheating.

The essays themselves are a hoot, and demonstrate the lack of quality control at paper mills. The essay topics requested are also pretty banal and (in my opinion) would produce weak essays even if a student honestly worked on it just because they don't give students (especially first years) enough direction or a place to start.

In the past, I've wondered who actually works at paper mills, how much they're paid, how they're recruited/hired and why they do it. Suffice it to say that most people who would consider writing papers for other people don't have much respect for English literature, and would probably not excel at it. However, there are also more unusual cases, such as the former sessional instructor who wrote English papers to order for U of A students. Last year, a local TV station caught him selling a paper to a student in a sting operation at his usual table in the Students' Union Building. He seemed to have a steady stream of customers (some of whom were getting legitimate tutoring help) and even though campus security escorted him off the premises, he had set up shop at the public library downtown the following Monday. After all, what he was doing wasn't illegal, although it sure as hell was unethical.

The story of "Peter the Paper Peddlar" made me very angry, but it also made me wonder how someone could become so bitter that he would undermine his former employer like that. I hope that I never never never feel so bitter that I would resort to helping students cheat. I'm always hurt whenever I catch a student plagiarising. I take it personally, and the discovery always taints the rest of the papers I mark and makes me unfairly paranoid about other students' work. I think students need to realize that when they plagiarise, it hurts more than just themselves.