Once upon a time, students wrote essays at university. Now they can hire unemployed profs to do that for them — or at least that's what one Montreal-based online service is offering.
Unemployedprofessors.com connects essay-dreading students with teachers willing to write papers for a fee.
The tag line says it all: "So you can play while we make your papers go away."
The site "unabashedly defends its actions on the grounds that education has already become overly commodified and academia is downsizing the tenure system," Karen Seidman
wrotefor
Postmedia News.
Student-run essay mills aren't new, Schubert Laforest, president of the Concordia Student Union,
told the
National Post, but "it's the first I've heard of professors doing students' work."
"It just seems to hinder the academic process. The focus should be on acquiring skills, not trying to get an easy A. But I'm sure some students will take advantage of it."
Plagiarism software is what drives some students to buy custom-written essays.
Unemployedprofessors.com explains: "The whole reason why you're using this services is so that your lazy ass doesn't itself have to plagiarize. Long answer? We source and cite everything we write on the basis of our long experience of non-plagiarizing. Short answer? No, you're not going to get caught unless you do something stupid like tell everyone that you bought an essay."
The problem of cheating isn't confined to Montreal or one website. Plagiarism seems to be getting worse.
As described on the website of
turnitin.com, a leading online plagiarism checker: "We live in a digital culture where norms around copying, reuse and sharing are colliding with core principles of academic integrity."
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One professor who works for the service
told the
National Post that students are told that the purchased essays are not to be used to fulfill an academic requirement.
According to the terms and conditions on the site, "Although you own the copyright to the work, and it is completely original, we do not recommend making use of the product to fulfill an academic course requirement. As such, in using your essay, you agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the company for any and all unauthorized use made of any materials available from this website, include any essay that you might purchase from us."
"This removes the ethical dimension on our side as we have no control over what a client does upon paying for and receiving the project,"
said the anonymous professor.
"In fact, it places the ethical burden squarely on the shoulders of the student."
Del Paulhus, a psychology professor at the University of B.C.
told the
Vancouver Sun that this evolution of plagiarism is hard for professors to catch.
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"Now it just takes a couple clicks and you have the exact paper you want," he
said. "In the past if you copied right out of a journal it looked too good, but now you can order a paper that has typos in it."
In Vancouver, city councillor Kerry Jang
is calling for a crackdown on companies selling custom essays to university students following an undercover investigation of "essay mills" by
CTV News.
University professors are also pushing to make these sorts of services illegal.
"I, like many other faculty members, am outraged by it," Simon Fraser University's Rob Gordon
toldCTV News. "They're ripping off the system."
While universities can discipline a student caught cheating, they have no power against the off-campus companies selling the essays.
Minister of Advanced Education John Yap
responded to
CTV News in an emailed statement:
"Post-secondary institutions are responsible for the academic integrity within their institutions."
If universities can't detect the purchased essays, and services like
Unemployedprofessors.com aren't shut down, what will become of a post-secondary education's value?
Maybe all essays should be written in-class. By hand. No internet allowed.
nah son thats fukked up
Cool I guess. I mean most likely if they are rich kids with trust funds they won't be getting a job. That being said though, anyone who ain't rich is fukked, because this shyt can get easily picked up in resumes. Just because you got a degree doesn't automatically get you a job. So when they get you in the 2nd and 3rd round of interviews, they will require you to know shyt and critical thinking and that's when they will fail.
