by Lorraine Messineo

Created on: December 30, 2008   Last Updated: August 27, 2009

A few years ago I considered selling some of my term papers to a few of these sites. The ones I considered claimed that they did not promote plagiarism; however, by selling entire documents, that concept appears to be beyond their control.

I have known students who bought papers or had papers written for them by someone else. This is against the rules of any university and a reminder of this fact has always appeared on every syllabus I received in my classes. Plagiarism is a huge problem and taken very seriously.

One student didn't think she was commiting fraud or engaging in plagiarism because she took each sentence of the papers she bought and rearranged them, using a thesaurus to change a word here or there. Obviously, she didn't understand exactly what it was to plagiarize another's work.

According to plagiarism.org, this kind of fraud takes several forms. It is not simply taking an entire paper and doing a copy and paste then putting one's own name on it. Even original ideas are protected under the plagiarism laws- for example: I wrote a paper on a text that has always been considered to be religious in its intent and literary analysts have generally agreed that certain parts of the text referred to specific incidents in the Bible.

Because I can often think "outside of the box" of general opinion I wondered how an atheist might view this work. I developed a contemporary analysis based on social values rather than Biblical allegory. Before presenting this paper, however, I did a careful check to see if anyone else had ever analyzed this text in this manner. Even though I could not find anyone who had published a similar analysis, I was careful to include that despite lack of documentation on my theory, it was possible that "someone, at some time" had read the text in the same way and developed the same theory of thought on it.

Other foms of literary fraud include:
- turning in someone else's work as your own

- copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit

- failing to put a quotation in quotation marks

- giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation

- changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit

- copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not (see our section on "fair use" rules) (www.plagiarism.org/learning_center/what_is_plagiari sm.htm)

I don't think that these sites that sell online term papers are as concerned about their clients committing literary fraud as they claim to be. I would not be opposed to selling blocks of research specific to a term paper subject, complete with citations, but in spite of the fact that these online papers contain citations, the author's work is not being acknowledge by the student who uses such a paper. The more "honest" sites reproduce the original work with certain typos (such as replacing certain consonants with a symbol) so that a simple "copy and paste" of the entire document is easy for the instructor to notice.

In my opinion, online term papers just make fraud easier to commit. They are not useful at all when one is trying to earn a degree. Thus, when they present themselves as an aid to education, they are simply scamming the stupid.

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