"For Sale by 'Author': Online Essay Mills and Authorship in the Academy"
About the AuthorDanielle Roach is currently pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric and New Media at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia where she is also serving as the Assistant Director of Composition Studies. She has taught writing for about seven years and is especially interested in multimodal composition and play in the writing classroom. Her research interests include digital communities, authorship, rhetorics of play, computers and composition, writing program administration, and digital humanities. ContentsWriting: The "Right Way" versus the "Wrong Way" |
Academic Perspectives on Plagiarism and Essay MillsMeanwhile, scholarly attempts to address these issues seem little better than what goes on in writing textbooks. Embarking on any comprehensive review of the academic literature regarding essay mills and its related issues (most notably, plagiarism and authorship) requires a moment of pause to consider strategies for properly canvassing the available research. As Zorana Ercegovac and John V. Richardson, Jr., point out, surveying existing literature on plagiarism and essay mills can be more difficult than it may seem at the outset because of the broad, cross-disciplinary applicability of the issue: At the outset of this search, the literature on plagiarism seemed well defined and sufficiently narrow in scope. However, as the authors went deeper into the topic, they discovered that this was hardly the case. The problem may be attributed, in part, to the interdisciplinary nature of the topic and the ethical challenges of accessing and using information technology, especially in the age of the Internet. Writings have been reported in the literatures of education, psychology, and library and information studies, each looking at academic dishonesty from different perspectives. The literature has been aimed at instructors and scholars in education and developmental psychology, as well as college librarians and school media specialists. Some writings have come from software houses that provide detection services; there were plenty of advertisements from paper mills announcing thousands of canned reports to students. However, the authors saw no attempts to connect these seemingly disparate bodies of literature. (301) However, as the sub-discipline of composition studies in English has begun to redefine itself as one of “writing studies” (see Downs and Wardle) in the past few years, scholars in that field have done a great deal to amass a body of literature dealing with plagiarism in general and the OEM in particular. Thus, much of the most current scholarship dealing with these essay mills comes out of composition studies’ larger conversation about plagiarism and authorship. When online spaces and composition began to be studied in earnest in the late 1990s, plagiarism began to be perceived as a sort of imminent threat. Logically, then, scholars began to seek out ways to combat the ways in which the Internet was supposedly contributing to plagiarism in the writing classroom. Dànielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati bring forward suggestions for helping students avoid engaging in academically “dishonest” work by posing that the solution should be rooted in a sort of pedagogy of avoidance. Other scholars like Kim McMurtry and Wendy Sutherland-Smith call for institutional policies that do more to clearly define plagiarism and “academic integrity” for students and faculty. Such policies, they argue, should then be buttressed by deliberate discussion of the policies in the writing classroom and pedagogy framed to help students stay on the straight and narrow. However, other scholars pushed back against the issue of plagiarism as a sort of plague that had stricken students. In several of her works, Rebecca Moore Howard insists that scholarship about plagiarism should focus not on solutions to some ominous and overarching problem of plagiarism, but instead on reexamining institutional and social notion of authorship and ownership. Other scholars, such as Andrea Lunsford and Margaret Price, insist the ways in which ideas of authorship have been constructed in the academy can be traced to the political and social contexts in which the academy exists. Thus, as the literature turns to look at OEMs in specific, several interesting trends emerge. Kelly Ritter suggests some reason as to why so little has been written about OEMs in a field that is so obsessed with plagiarism at large: "The purchase of essays from paper mill Web sites, as one of the more egregious forms of plagiarism, is generally undertheorized in English studies, perhaps because it is often viewed as a less complicated problem in the context of larger, more “forgivable” acts such as the visible rise of cut and paste and other types of academic dishonesty at the postsecondary level" (2006, 25). Hannah Ashley picks up on this sentiment, pointing out the perspective of some students wherein issues of academic integrity are obstacles in a sort of game. The ethical implications of engaging in such practices are secondary to the successful “playing” of the system. Additionally, Michael Murphy points out the commodity metaphor inherent in the researched essay: Much of the cut-and-paste dynamic is a function of a commodified notion of knowledge as content that, of course, lends itself to easy assessment (so that paper-reading becomes simply asking the question have students reproduced the information contained in readings and lectures?): in this model, knowledge is something to be not created by writers but gathered and collated. It’s writing-as-foraging. And if knowledge is property, as students often reason, on the basis of this model, and if one has made the effort to find and assemble a coherent set of relevant passages, well then . . . since possession is nine-tenths of the law, it must belong to the assembler. (38-39) This logical chain that Murphy suggests seems to underpin how some students understand “intellectual property.” Such an understanding finds itself at odds with the “right way” that the academy often prescribes: the student writer should think of him or herself as a singular author in conversation with carefully cited voices of authority. Ritter also comments on this disconnect between what students understand about writing and what is expected from them in academic writing situations, pointing out that “While cheating may arise from a complicated notion of personal worth and academic (in)ability, the purchase of essays from online companies strikes an even more basic chord in our students: the power to purchase this worth and ability, and by extension a new academic identity” (625). However, even though scholars like Ritter attempt to understand the function of OEMs for students, the overall body of scholarship addressing OEMs is fragmented at best, with scholars from across the disciplines grasping for some sense of how to define and understand the function and dynamics of this particular strand of plagiarism and academic dishonesty. Both the perspectives offered by writing textbooks and those put forth by scholars offer an interesting set of contradictions when set in play with the rhetoric used by OEMs to frame what seems at first glance to be a very different set of ideas about writing and authorship. However, before working through the implications of the juxtaposition of the definitions of authorship that are put forth by the academy and those offered by these online mills, we should pause to consider just how much these mills truly function in shaping student ideas about writing. Just How Big is the OEM “Problem”?Determining the pervasiveness of these OEMs can prove to be quite problematic. Even quantifying just how many sites exist can be tricky: a 2001 article suggested the existence of “about 200 ‘cheat sites’” (Atkins and Nelson 101). Sites like Plagiarism.org currently estimate that “hundreds” of cheat sites operate online. (Interestingly, Plagiarism.org is published by iParadigms, LLC, the same company that owns the nation’s largest online plagiarism detection software service, Turnitin.com.) Statistics about just how many students use OEMs are also hard to confirm, while the ways in which they use the material obtained from the sites is even harder to trace. Most of what we know about usage of sites comes from students' own admissions in anonymous surveys and the like. For example, a 2006 survey of Canadian colleges found that about 3% of undergraduates self-report using materials from online paper mills, while an American study in 2001 indicated a rate of about 5% (Hughes and McCabe 13; McCabe 41). Other reports suggest a higher rate, with a 2002 study indicating that over 8% of students admitted to using OEMs “frequently” or “sometimes” (Scanlon and Neumann). Of course, not all essay mills are created equal. In fact, there are varying degrees of essay mills. Generally, the term “essay mill” covers three categories of sites: student sharing sites, pre-fabricated essay purchase sites, and custom-order essay sites. Student sharing sites often require students to upload some of their own work before they can use the essays already on the site. AllFreeEssays.com offers these instructions for new users: “It's easy to access all of our free essays and term papers. We simply ask that students create a free account and submit one of their own research papers.” Interestingly, those same instructions also remind students that “you should always write your own coursework. Plagiarism is wrong and it's not worth the consequences.” The second group of sites offers a database of pre-written papers for purchase. Monsterpapers.com, for example, claims to offer “millions of papers - research papers, term papers, book reports and essays” for purchase and immediate download, touting the vast number of essays that users will be given access to through their database because, as their tagline points out, “size DOES matter.” Although these sites do charge students to use the papers, most do not make any mention of plagiarism and again tout their papers as “well written model essays to assist students writing a paper” (PaperStore.net). The third group of sites offers students customized papers, written-to-order, usually at a per-page fee that increases as turnaround time decrease (overnight jobs cost more than ones not due for two or three weeks). These sites tout benefits such as:
Clearly, this group of sites seeks to appeal to the more nuanced needs of what the site’s proprietors seem to envision as a more sophisticated audience (or at least one with more at stake in the academic writing situation). These custom essays are little more than ghostwritten projects, proposed to professional writers who the site suggests are highly skilled and capable of crafting made-to-order essays for all kinds of students. Although it would seem that each of these different types of sites caters to a slightly different audience, in reality, these distinctions break down with careful investigation of the sites. Many of the “share” sites link to sister-sites where students can opt to purchase either pre-written or custom essays, and in fact sites like eCheat.com (whose motto is “It’s Not Cheating, It’s Collaborating”) offer students all three options right from their home page. For the purposes of this paper, then, we will often conflate these various types of sites, but it is nevertheless important to realize that the varying degrees to which these sites offer students choices and options necessarily complicates how students and academics interact with the products and messages offered up by these sites. In all cases, however, these sites participate in the active construction and complication of the definition of the author as understood by both students and academics. Certainly when compared to other forms of cheating in the academy, these OEMs represent but a fraction of the ways in which students engage in writing practices that defy the conventional and ethical standards set forth by most universities. However, even if we consider these numbers to be minimal, an examination of the mills and the language they use to define themselves and their products can offer a critical glimpse into the complexities surrounding how students understand the “rules” of authorship and how they will respond to those rules. |