Plagiarism: Your Key to Success
It has been said that 54% of all college students have plagiarized material from the internet in the past year, and 80% of all students have cheated in some form (plagiarism.org). Plagiarism has always been a problem for educational institutions, but as the anti-cheating website plagiarism.org states, “Before the internet, cheating was labor-intensive and obvious. Potential plagiarists had to find appropriate works from a limited pool of resources, usually a nearby library, and copy them by hand. Since these resources were almost always professionally written, the risk of detection was very high.” However, because of the current widespread use of the internet and the continuous stream of new technologies, cheating is now much easier to get away with.
Cheating and plagiarism can occur in all academic areas. However, the more basic the assignment given by a professor, the easier it is to cheat. When students are given a broad topic to research, it becomes possible for them to find a similar paper on the internet, which they can then copy and use as their “own” work. More detailed, specific, and personalized assignments can eliminate a lot of the opportunities to cheat; nevertheless, improving technologies and enterprising individuals make it nearly impossible to corral the widespread plagiarism epidemic.
While there are numerous web-based resources that allow students to cheat, we have identified three specific technologies that are making high-level, web-based plagiarism big business. These are: translating websites which let students convert English text into a foreign language, allowing them to complete foreign language assignments without any real work at all; online paper mills that simply have thousands of pre-written works that they sell to students; and websites that hire writers to actually write a student’s exact assignment for him or her, which, from the cheater’s perspective, is the most fool-proof method.
Translated Papers
Countless websites offer their services in free or paid translations of papers. Sites like Babblefish and Google Translation offer free instant translations of relatively short sections of text from English to just about any language. Other sites like Free Translation offer not only the instant, free translations of short sections of texts, but also sell subscriptions to their services that make it possible to translate whole documents from one language to another. Claiming that “if you can copy and paste it, you can translate it,” freetranslation.com sells subscriptions for their translation software for $3.50 a month. Translating a paper becomes no work at all once it’s easily copied and pasted into their software and the work is done instantly. The quality of these translation services is not always reliable however since many ambiguities can exist when translating from one language to another.
Other sites like Thousands of Papers have papers already available that are written in English and are able to be ordered in any language. This saves the work of even writing a paper in the first place. Other sites like Studyhood simply offer to translate your papers for a fee which is sometimes quite large.
These are just a few of the websites available for students seeking translation services online. Some are more reliable than others since hiring a person to write a paper in another language will probably result in a better paper than relying on a software application to do it, but it’s risky to trust in anyone’s translation service that is not professionally certified.
Paper Mills
With the turn into the 21st Century, the ease of researching via the internet has become increasingly more suitable to those students in the process of writing school essays. Unfortunately, the internet has become a little too easy to research school essays. Upon “Googling” the key words “Download Term Papers” one receives over 70 million hits. It has become ever so clear that the educational system has encountered a new version of plagiarism that is going to be tough to conquer.
If one is so inclined to access all 70 million websites regarding downloading Term Papers, one would notice three distinct types of services offered. These services are classified as either: Free Term Paper Sites, Pay to Access Term Paper sites, Pay per Term Paper Sites.
SchoolSucks.com is a good example of a Free Term Paper site (in fact, Schoolsucks.com was the first of these). This website features a collection of hundreds of essays written by students for the purpose of viewing and printing by other members. These types of websites strongly resemble blogs: information can be exchanged freely between viewers. The difference is this information is rather lengthy, and whether students want to hear it or not, is technically plagiarism. How do websites such as this fund their service if they do not charge their customers? Websites such as schoolsucks.com make use of advertisements from other websites that feature Pay Term Paper websites. Currently, schoolsucks.com contains nearly 50,000 types of essays, Term Papers, and book reports for their viewers.
The remaining types of Term Paper websites involve financial reimbursement for those websites that offer the service. As mentioned, Pay to Access websites, for example monsterpapers.com, will offer a monthly fee for a student to be able to access their entire essay collection. These membership fees can range from $10.00 for a month or as much as $60.00 for a lifetime membership. Also, Pay per Term Paper websites, for example term-paper.net, consist of different Term Papers sold for their own respected price. Prices are usually discerned by the number of pages, but other variables, such as the ability of the writer who constructed the piece, could cause a higher price. Prices can range as high as $60.00 for a Term Paper of eight pages. Though these websites may help students relieve stress with respect to writing a Term Paper they will ultimately pay a pretty penny for the services rendered.
“Non-Plagiarized” Cheating
An “Essay Mill” is an online pay-service meant to sell homework or essays, but since most of them sell pre-plagiarized works they are easy to detect. In order to beat this, a more expensive and less detectable form of essay writing is available. These are not really “essay mills” but actually companies writing essays from scratch. The services write custom essays of the student’s description for a fee, and are thus undetectable through the plagiarism scanners because the work is authentic. Many companies actually include a plagiarism report meant to show the student that the work will not get detected. With these sites offering full customization, cheating is pretty easy, and fairly reasonably priced when compared to the cost of textbooks.
So how can this particular web-based service work for you? The more commonly used websites ask you to give specific instructions on how the paper should be written, which can all be done through an online application. First you’re asked to state the main topic of the paper along with a short description and the education level in which the paper is to be written. Other features allow you to pick your desired style of citation, number of pages, as well as quotes and paraphrases you want to include. These websites guarantee that they will produce a good quality paper by the deadline you set. The catch to this however, is that the price per page varies depending on the allotted amount of time the writers are given. The majority of the websites we found were similar in price. For a deadline of a week or more is around $9.95 per page, $11.95 per page for around four to six days, $14.95 per page for a deadline of two to three days, and a price of $24.95 per page for urgent needs from anywhere between two to twenty-four hours. Because the papers are distributed by email you can be certain you get your paper by the completion date. For a little incentive many websites offer free bibliographies, title pages, and references. Websites such as “Term Paper Relief” even offer free revisions to ensure that the paper meets the expectations of the customers. This may be the safest route to go because with the option of personalizing your own paper, plagiarism detection can be avoided.
Popular Websites:
Non-Plagiarized College Term Papers
The Enforcers: Preventing High Tech Cheating
© 2006, Cheat To Win. All Rights Reserved