.
‘Knowledge is power’
World’s
encyclopedic
knowledge
compacted
in
your
hand
Please raise the vol to listen to the
lady airing awe @ the SINGLE author ncyclopedia
You may also like:
Future humans to look like Pokemon characters sound
Saudi writer urges groping of women to make them stay at home
?DNA Proof of 6" Tall Extraterrestrial: 2013
Sixth sense technology that'll empower humanity -TED lecture
Academic plagiarism is no longer just sloppy “cut and paste” jobs or students cribbing large
chunks of an assignment from a friend’s earlier essay on the same topic. These days,
students can simply visit any of a number of paper or essay mills that litter the internet and
buy a completed assignment to present as their own.
These shadowy businesses are not going away anytime soon. Paper mills can’t be easily
policed or shut down by legislation. And there’s a trickier issue at play here: they provide a
service which an alarming number of students will happily use.
Managing this newest form of academic deceit will require hard work from established
academia and a renewed commitment to integrity from university communities.
Unmasking the “shadow scholar”
In November 2010, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article that rocked the
academic world. Its anonymous author confessed to having written more than 5000 pages of
scholarly work per year on behalf of university students. Ethics was among the many issues
this author had tackled for clients.
The practice continues five years on. At a conference about plagiarism held in the Czech
Republic in June 2015, one speaker revealed that up to 22% of students in some Australian
undergraduate programmes had admitted to buying or intending to buy assignments on the
Internet.
It also emerged that the paper mill business was booming. One site claims to receive two
million hits each month for its 5000 free downloadable papers. Another allows cheats to
electronically interview the people who will write their papers. Some even claim to employ
university professors to guarantee the quality of work.
Policing and legislation becomes difficult because the company selling assignments may be
domiciled in the US while its “suppliers”, the ghostwriters, are based elsewhere in the world.
The client, a university student, could be anywhere in the world – New York City, Lagos,
London, Nairobi or Johannesburg.
No quick fixes
If the companies and writers are all shadows, how can paper mills be stopped? The answers
most likely lie with university students – and with the academics who teach them.
The anonymous writer whose paper mill tales shocked academia explained in the piece which
kinds of students were using these services and just how much they were willing to pay. At the
time of writing, he was making about US$66,000 annually. His three main client groups were
students for whom English is a second language; students who are struggling academically
and those who are lazy and rich.
Empowering Newsletter
WOMEN’S POWER: ITS PAST, ITS PRESENT, ITS FUTURE: FEMOCRACY
WEB PAGES
OUR OFFERING
UPLOADED ITEMS
OUR EMAIL
kri200@womenspowerbook.org
QUESTION
