Having someone else write you college term paper is cheating. There is no ethical debate. If you use one of these services you are passing off another person’s work as your own.
Since I was in college and law school before the rise of the internet, these services were not easy to find during my school years. Occasionally you would find an 1-800 advertisement in the back of a magazine. Maybe you heard through the rumor mill that someone could help.
Now, it’s easy to find hundreds of services to help you with your paper. I’m sure they are tempting after blowing off a class all semester.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an essay from one of the people working for a term paper mill. What caught my eye was not the topic of term paper mills, but the subject of the paper discussed in the story: business ethics.
The student used the term paper mill to help with the proposal for the paper, then came back for the seventy five page report, for a response and revision based on the professor’s criticisms, and finally used the ghost writer to produce the 160-page graduate thesis. All of it written by the term paper mill and none by the student.
Clearly, the business ethics professor did not get through to this student.
In an different story from another term paper writer, that writer when given an open topic assignment on ethics, would “write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the [term paper mill] broker’s Web site as a source.”
Sources:
- The Shadow Scholar by Ed Dante in the Chronicle Review
- The Term Paper Artist by Nick Mamatas in the The Smart Set
- This pen for hire: on grinding out papers for college students by Abigail Witherspoon
- Adventures in Cheating by Seth Stevenson in Slate