A sad state of affairs!
The Desert Sun has published an article on the ever present threat of plagiarism in high school. The Internet, despite all its good attributes (such as one certain site whose title begins with “Austen” and ends with “Blog” . . .), also helps to promote plagiarism through sites that sell essays to students. This Humble Reporter was shocked and grieved to find the following:
Students download papers from online paper mills like CheatHouse.com or Other People’s Papers or even Jane-Austen-Essays.com, or they cut and paste paragraphs from Web sites, rather than doing their own research.
Having been unable to resist, I visited the last of those unmentionable sites, and was dismayed to find more than 7 pages worth of titles of essays on Jane for sale. Is it possible that people will bypass reading one of the great authors of our world, and buy essays from sites such as the one I visited?
Mags, may I please borrow Dorothy until I am able to recover from the fainting fit my visit has caused, or until my faith in the younger generations is restored (whichever comes first)?
January 23rd, 2005 at 6:32 pm
Dorothy will bring you a pot of Orange Pekoe and the vinaigrette directly, dear.
I found one of my essays on T&T (the one about CLUELESS compared to Emma) on an essay site–for sale. Naturally I had been offered no money in the transaction, which I would have refused in any event. I couldn’t find an e-mail address to ask for its removal, so I tracked down the site’s host and wrote to them and demanded it be removed. It was removed the next day. I believed my invocation of the DMCA might have had its effect, mmm?
The thing is, if someone was going to steal a paper, they could have stolen it from my site for free rather than paying these dweebs. But I suppose when we’re talking about plagiarism, we’re not dealing with the A students anyway, if you follow me.
(P.S. I received an A- on the paper, which I wrote for one of my university classes.)
January 23rd, 2005 at 6:34 pm
Oh, and another thing–you could buy papers before the internet. They always had ads in the back of Rolling Stone and similar. “Write for a free catalog!” I suppose online ordering makes it quicker and more convenient, though.