August
22, 2004,NYTimes Book Review, page 11
By SUZY HANSEN
COLLEGE,
as we all know, costs a frightening amount of
money
-- the tuition, the new wardrobe, the shower
flip-flops.
Even cheating, that historically thrifty task
of
rifling an upperclassman's desk drawers, runs college
kids
a steep tab. These days, stressed-out perfectionists
and
lazy no-goods alike can Google their way to an
astounding
array of plagiarism Web sites. Many companies
sell
term papers, essays and book reports by the thousands,
for
as much as $250 a pop, all just a click and Mom's
credit
card away, and all in the privacy of an
undergraduate's
dorm room.
Each
site appeals to a different type of student. There's
the
sleek and cocky Geniuspapers.com; the modest and
amiable
Superior-Termpapers.com; and the outsider
CheatHouse.com,
to name a few. While 10 percent of college
students
admitted to Internet plagiarism in 1999, that
number
rose to around 40 percent in 2003, Donald L. McCabe,
the
founder of the Center for Academic Integrity (C.A.I.)
at
Duke University, said in a telephone interview. Many
students
simply crib what Google dredges up free, but
McCabe
estimates that 2 percent of students purchase papers
online.
That's how many admit it, anyway.
The
sheer ubiquity of the sites, and what is now almost a
lifetime
of habitual Internet accessibility, might explain
why
the majority of college students tell McCabe they don't
think
copying a sentence or two from the Web is a big deal.
Students
are fuzzy on what's cheating and what's not. ''A
lot
of students will tell us, 'It's out there, it's on the
Internet,'
'' Diane M. Waryold, the executive director of
C.A.I.,
said in a telephone interview. ''They say, 'Isn't
it
for public consumption?' ''
I
wanted to see whether the online atmosphere made cheating
easier.
I was also curious about what exactly these little
Internet
elves wrote about and if the papers were any good.
I
bought a couple of book reports, those three-to-five-page
papers
students write for introductory English classes,
from
Superior-Termpapers, or the Paper Experts.
(Superior-Termpapers,
like most of the sites, features a
disclaimer
about plagiarism, stating that their papers are
merely
for research.) Superior-Termpapers is special
because
it offers the ever-tempting, but costly,
custom-written
book reports, an option that other sites
stay
away from. Customers can buy an original paper written
on a
specific topic for anywhere between $20 and $45 a
page,
depending on how quickly they need it. So, for
example,
a five-page custom paper, written and delivered
that
day, adds up to $225.
For
the budget-conscious, however, there are hundreds of
prewritten
book reports to choose from, some as cheap as
$25.
The topics, advertised in short blurbs, range from a
standard
book report on ''The Scarlet Letter'' to the
surprising
discovery ''a personal response to the book 'Who
Moved
My Cheese?' '' to a review of a story by the eminent
writer
''Carol Joyce Oates.'' David Remnick's Pulitzer
Prize-winning
''Lenin's Tomb'' is, strangely, deemed a
journalistic
failure: ''Facts and truth will not be gotten
from
this book,'' the blurb declares. Dave Eggers's
''Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius'' suffers a
similar
fate, albeit in more mysterious language: ''We can
see
obvious hypocrisy in the work that is resented [sic]
here
in the author's opinion of irony in the scope of the
writing
he shows.''
We
also learn a few hard truths from these snippets: that
''A
Farewell to Arms,'' which is called ''Hemingway's first
book,''
is ''much more than a love story'' (this is a
''high
school level'' paper, but still); that Newland
Archer's
fundamental problem in ''The Age of Innocence'' is
his lack
of ''tools'' to deal with Countess Olenska; and,
reassuringly,
that the crucial theme in ''Invisible Man''
is
''the subject of race and racial relations.'' Just
think,
your children might be spending their drinking money
on
this stuff.
I
bought a prewritten paper on ''The Great Gatsby.'' Dr. T.
J.
Eckleburg, ash heaps, stupid rich people -- what could
go
wrong? I also ordered a custom paper, on what I
innovatively
titled ''The American Dream and 'The Great
Gatsby,'
'' to see if there was any difference between the
two
types of book reports.
Surprise:
the prewritten paper, on the idea of the hero in
''Gatsby''
(''What is a hero?'' it begins, and later:
''Muscles
do not make a hero''), coming in at a reasonable
$35,
was terrible. The sentences run on, as in this
clunker:
''Moreover, the fortune that Gatsby did amount was
gained
through criminal activities as he had experienced
the
finer things in life and wished to have a better social
position,
again he knew that this could only be gained
through
the status of wealth, in this way Gatsby sought to
win
the heart of the woman he had fallen in love with,
Daisy.''
Faux-elegant words like ''whilst'' butt up against
the
jarringly conversational: ''Then Nick the narrator
discovers
who he is bang goes his secret.'' Bang! The paper
becomes
increasingly sloppy, mimicking the writing patterns
of a
tired and confused freshman. Maybe this is the point.
Another
surprise: the custom-written paper, delivered in
three
days for $180, a tenth of a community college's
annual
tuition or the weekend allowance of a wealthy Ivy
Leaguer,
was a decent piece of work. One passage that
probably
few undergraduates could dream up even on a good
day,
after a couple of writing workshops, reads: ''Those
who
go from rags to riches don't find nirvana or some
special
land where they are immediately happy, content and
removed
from earthly worries. They, like Gatsby, find that
the
reality is that the world is still ugly . . . and that
money
and power just allow one to ignore those dichotomies
a
little bit easier.''
Occasionally,
the paper even strives for the poetic:
''Idealizing
that which has little substance is like saying
that
once you draw a perfect circle, all of life's secrets
will
be discovered therein -- the circle is still hollow,
no
matter how perfectly round and beautiful it is.'' It's a
little
much, but this paper goes way beyond the green light
at
the end of the dock.
And
compared with the standard paper -- whose dizzy take on
the
American Dream goes like this: ''Gatsby is the
archetypal
hero figure, yet he has tasted the bitter ashes
of
poverty, but then there were so many poor during the
turn
of the century that he is not alone in that and so
like
many others of his age he wished never again to be
poor''
-- the custom paper is worth coughing up more dough.
A's
don't come easily, after all.
But
wait. So if you're a cheap cheat, your paper will be
shoddy,
but believable. If you're willing to dig deep for
the
custom-written papers, you might raise eyebrows. What a
bind.
Considering that it takes three to four hours to read
''The
Great Gatsby'' and perhaps a night to write a short
paper,
what's actually more amazing is that students would
risk
their integrity, their education, their unlimited
access
to sexual experimentation -- all for freeing up 10
measly
hours of their already limitless college time.
FINE,
I'll admit I was impressed by how efficiently the
paper
happily popped up in my e-mail in-box. The process is
alluring
in its simplicity, and more so in its anonymity,
except
that, in my case, Brenda from the Paper Experts
called
to tell me, in keeping with the
irresponsible-undergraduate
theme, that my credit card was
maxed
out. That unsettling human contact in the midst of my
cyber-cheating
was creepy and gave me pause. Even had I
been
a desperate, craven student, Brenda might have been
enough
for me to call the whole thing off.
And
although these sites may proliferate, thanks to the
hungry
Web marketplace, they won't go completely unchecked.
Colleges
can sign up for plagiarism-detector Web sites like
Turnitin.com,
which allows professors to submit papers for
an
originality check (incidentally, newspaper and magazine
editors
might be interested in checking out its publishing
arm
-- iThenticate.com). But can those search engines
detect
custom-written papers, like my $180, A-plus
''Gatsby''
paper, assuming it's an original? No, not this
book
report, anyway. It passed with flying colors. Now that
it's
part of Turnitin's database, however -- and supposing
that
even the hard workers at the Paper Experts get lazy
once
in a while -- pity the 19-year-old who goes shopping
online
for some quick help with the American Dream.
Suzy
Hansen is an editor at The New York Observer.