Write My Essay, Please! - The Atlantic

Richard Gunderman

These days, students can hire online companies to do all their coursework, from papers to final exams. Is this ethical, or even legal?

A colleague tells the following story. A student in an undergraduate course recently submitted a truly first-rate term paper. In form, it was extremely well crafted, exhibiting a level of writing far beyond the typical undergraduate. In substance, it did a superb job of analyzing the text and offered a number of trenchant insights. It was clearly A-level work. There was only one problem: It markedly exceeded the quality of any other assignment the student had submitted all semester.

The instructor suspected foul play. She used several plagiarism-detection programs to determine if the student had cut and pasted text from another source, but each of these searches turned up nothing. So she decided to confront the student. She asked him point blank, "Did you write this, or did someone else write it for you?" The student immediately confessed. He had purchased the custom-written paper from an online essay-writing service.

The teacher believed this conduct represented a serious breach of academic ethics. The student had submitted an essay written by someone else as his own. He had not indicated that he hadn't written it. He hadn't given any credit to the essay's true author, whose name he did not know. And he was prepared to accept credit for both the essay and the course, despite the fact that he had not done the required work. The instructor severely admonished the student and gave him an F for the assignment.

But the roots of this problem go far deeper than an isolated case of ghostwriting. Essay writing has become a cottage industry premised on systematic flaunting of the most basic aims of higher education. The very fact that such services exist reflects a deep and widespread misunderstanding of why colleges and universities ask students to write essays in the first place.

These services have names such as WriteMyEssay.com, College-paper.org, and Essayontime.com. Bestessays.com claims that "70% of Students use Essay Writing service at least once [sic]" and boasts that all its writers have M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. Some of these Web sites offer testimonials from satisfied customers. One crows that he received a B+ on a ghostwritten history essay he submitted at a prestigious Ivy League institution. Another marvels at the scholarly standards and dedication of the essay writers, one of whom actually made two unsolicited revisions "absolutely free." Another customer pledges, "I will use your essay writing service again, and leave the essay writing to the professionals."

Such claims raise troubling questions. First, is the use of these services a form of plagiarism? Not exactly, because plagiarism implies stealing someone else's work and calling it one's own. In this case, assuming the essay-writing services are actually providing brand-new essays, no one else's work is being stolen without consent. It is being purchased. Nevertheless, the work is being used without attribution, and the students are claiming credit for work they never did. In short, the students are cheating, not learning.

Most essay-writing services evince little or no commitment to helping their customers understand their essay topics or hone their skills as thinkers and writers. They do not ask students to jot down preliminary ideas or submit rough drafts for editing and critique. They do not even encourage them to pose questions about the subject matter. Instead, the services do all the work for them, requesting only three things: the topic, the deadline, and the payment.

Second, how do these essays manage to slip past an instructor undetected? If most institutions knew their students were using essay-writing services, they would undoubtedly subject them to disciplinary proceedings. But the use of such services can be difficult to detect, unless the instructor makes the effort to compare the content and quality of each essay with other work the student has submitted over the course of a semester. But what if the entire semester's work has been ghostwritten?

Another disturbing question concerns the writers who produce such essays. Why would someone who has earned a master's degree or Ph.D. participate in such ethically an dubious activity? One answer may be that many academics find themselves in dead-end, part-time teaching positions that pay so poorly that they cannot make ends meet, and essay writing can be quite a lucrative business. For students who can wait up to 5 days, one service charges $20 per page, but for those who need the essay within 16 hours, the price quadruples to $80 per page. The "works cited" portion of essays can generate additional revenue. The same service provides one reference per page at no additional cost, but if students feel that they need more citations, the charge is $1 per source. Some struggling academics may also view ghostwriting as a form of vengeance on an educational system that saddled them with huge debts and few prospects for a viable academic career.

A far deeper question is this: Why aren't the students who use these services crafting their own essays to begin with? Some may simply be short on time and juggling competing commitments. As the cost of college continues to escalate, more and more students need to hold down part-time or even full-time jobs. Some are balancing school with marriage, parenthood, and other family responsibilities. The sales pitch of the essay-writing services reassures students that they are learning what they need to know and merely "lack the time needed to get it down on paper."

But more disturbingly, some students may question the very value of writing term papers. After all, they may ask, how many contemporary jobs really require such archaic forms of writing? And what is the point of doing research and formulating an argument when reams of information on virtually any topic are available at the click of a button on the Internet? Some may even doubt the relevance of the whole college experience.

Here is where the real problem lies. The idea of paying someone else to do your work for you has become increasingly commonplace in our broader culture, even in the realm of writing. It is well known that many actors, athletes, politicians, and businesspeople have contracted with uncredited ghostwriters to produce their memoirs for them. There is no law against it.

At the same time, higher education has been transformed into an industry, another sphere of economic activity where goods and services are bought and sold. By this logic, a student who pays a fair market price for it has earned whatever grade it brings. In fact, many institutions of higher education market not the challenges provided by their course of study, but the ease with which busy students can complete it in the midst of other daily responsibilities. The shrewd shopper, it seems, invests the least time and effort necessary to get the goods.

But when students outsource their essays to third-party services, they are devaluing the very degree programs they pursue. They are making a mockery of the very idea of education by putting its trappings - assignments, grades, and degrees - ahead of real learning.. They're cheating their instructors, who issue grades on the presumption that they represent a student's actual work. They are also cheating their classmates who do invest the time and effort necessary to earn their own grades.

But ultimately, students who use essay-writing services are cheating no one more than themselves. They are depriving themselves of the opportunity to ask, "What new insights and perspectives might I gain in the process of writing this paper?" instead of "How can I check this box and get my credential?"

Some might argue that even students who use essay services are forced to learn something in order to graduate. After all, when they sit down to take exams, those who have absorbed nothing at all will be exposed. That may be true in a traditional classroom, but these days, more and more degree programs are moving online -- and in response, more and more Internet-based test-taking services have sprung up. One version of "Take-my-exam.com" called AllHomework.net boasts, "Just let us know what the exam is about and we will find the right expert who will log in on your behalf, finish the exam within the time limit and get you a guaranteed grade for the exam itself."

And why stop with exams? Why not follow this path to its logical conclusion? If the entire course is online, why shouldn't students hire someone to enroll and complete all its requirements on their behalf? In fact, "Take-my-course.com" sites have already begun to appear. One site called My Math Genius promises to get customers a "guaranteed grade," with experts who will complete all assignments and "ace your final and midterm." And why should the trend toward vicarious performance stop with education? How long must we wait until some intrepid entrepreneur founds ""Do-my-job.com" or "Live-my-life.com?"

Meanwhile, the proliferation of essay-writing and exam-taking services is merely a symptom of a much deeper and more pervasive disorder. For that reason, the solution is not merely tougher laws and stiffer penalties. We need a series of probing discussions in classrooms all over the country, encouraging students to reflect on the real purpose of education: the new people and ideas a student encounters, and the enlightenment that comes when an assignment truly challenges a student's heart and mind. Perhaps an essay assignment is in order?

How Plagiarism Happens - The Atlantic

 Ta-Nehisi Coates

When Fareed Zakaria was caught plagiarizing Jill Lepore, he offered the same defense that almost every person caught plagiarizing offers:

The mistake, he said, occurred when he confused the notes he had taken about Ms. Lepore's article -- he said he often writes his research in longhand -- with notes taken from ''Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,'' by Adam Winkler (W.W. Norton, 2011), a copy of which was on his desk at his CNN office.

This is a very old explanation for plagiarism, and one I have never found credible. When reputation rehab remains a possibility, no plagiarist ever says, "I stole it and got caught." There's always an unintentional mix-up. No one ever commits the actual sin of theft.

As Stephen Brill points out, this goes beyond Zakaria's treatment by his editors to how his plagiarism was actually covered. Here's Brill on the Times' coverage:

Zakaria's chief offense was in using as his own Lepore's description and analysis of what the Winkler book says. Even if the book was "on his desk," did he read it? Does he actually have any notes from his having read the book? Or did he confuse what the source of his notes was because he misremembered reading the book? And how could the notes from Lepore's New Yorker piece have been mistaken for notes taken from the Winkler book, if the notes refer to the book just the way Lepore does?

Why would he think notes taken from a book would describe the book and its author? Did the Times reporter ask to see those notes, not just to understand what happened but also to verify that they exist? Did the Times reporter ask to interview Zakaria's editor or anyone else on the Time or CNN staffs? Did the reporter ask to interview the Time and CNN "investigators"? Someone should.

These may seem like tough questions, but imagine the mainstream press's tough questions if a politician tried this kind of simple, trust-me explanation. Indeed, it's easy to imagine critics of the mainstream media charging that the "lesson" Zakaria says he learned is not too far afield from Newt Gingrich's explanation, mocked appropriately by the press, that he cheated on his wife because of all the pressures he was under trying to do good for his country.

Yes to all of this. I think what bugs about this is the basic power discrepancy. If a student in a journalism school plagiarized Jill Lepore, it is highly likely that student would be tossed from the program. What you see is something rather common in American life, wherein power allows for seemingly iron rules to turn to rubber.

More on Zakaria's past transgressions over at Goldblog.

A (Partial) Defense of Jonah Lehrer - The Atlantic

Robert Wright

This isn't a defense of Jonah Lehrer in the sense of arguing that he's blameless for his fairly egregious pattern of "self-plagiarism" (or, as he might prefer to put it, his pattern of "high-fidelity recycling"). And I'm not addressing at all Lehrer's alleged instance of actual plagiarism, which is a much more serious matter. My only point is that the current journalistic environment encourages recycling, and renders his misdeeds less surprising than they'd have been in, say, 1987, when I was his age and had never heard the word "internet".

There are basically three new factors at play:

1) More than before, success in journalism is about sheer quantity of output. In 1987 if you named the top young (say, under age 35) pundits and essayists, a number of them were people averaging maybe 1,000 or 1,500 words a week of output, perhaps in the form of a single weekly column. Now the young superstars average more like 5,000, even 10,000 words a week, broken up into 10, 20, 25 pieces. If you're young and you want to keep getting noticed, you've pretty much got to produce at this volume, unless you're sitting at one of the handful of remaining elite perches (The New Yorker, The New York Times)--and even at these places, quantitative expectations are rising as writers like Ross Douthat, Paul Krugman, and Hendrik Hertzberg blog in addition to doing their traditional writing. (And if you are going to try to get by on merely a couple of thousand words a week, you'd better get at least another 1,500 words onto Twitter to make up for it.)
2) As quantitative expectations rise, and the old revenue model of journalism continues to melt, pay-per-word drops. If Slate's Matthew Yglesias was getting paid the effective per-word rate I got when I wrote a column for Slate upon its launch in 1996, he'd be making over a million dollars a year. Judging by his position on tax breaks for the rich, he's not.

3) As the above two factors have strengthened the incentive to recycle your work, the ethos of the web has made old lines blurrier and has made recycling seem less obviously wrong. Every day blog posts appear in the Huffington Post that also appear on one, two, three other sites. Do all of the versions of the post mention all the other versions? Sometimes, sure. But it's not like anyone throws a fit when they don't.

This isn't a lament. I doubt the old world of journalism was any better for society than the new world of journalism, and it was probably worse.

To be sure, the new emphasis on quantity means that a lot of low quality stuff gets produced (some of it by me, as you may have noticed!--though by current standards I'm not a high-volume producer). For that reason, among others, I'd probably feel more comfortable living in a world where you're expected to produce one or two polished, well-thought-out columns per week, columns that have benefited from editorial feedback.

But maybe I just need to heed the advice of Felix Salmon. Writing about the Lehrer case, he suggests that the problem lay in Lehrer's thinking of every blog post as the vehicle for delivering a fully formed idea. Better to think of a blog post as just a snapshot of the process of your thinking something through, says Salmon. Blogs should be "wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time."

Or, as my Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates put it:

"Journalism is hard, and a writer focused only on the end-product--on the reveal, on the key insight--is going to struggle. There should be some excitement about the hunt, about having your assumptions overturned and blown up. There should be some love for the process. The baker can't simply live for the look of amazement on the faces of those who behold his latest creation. There has to be some joy in actually baking the cake."