Plagiarism
...the Cuckoo's Nest: An Analysis of Character Motivation in the Seminal Novel of the 1960s Malaise. This three-pager costs $26.85 and has no footnotes (Milford). Others, which can charge anywhere from $5 to $9 per page, list the grade the paper received and the university from which it came. And some even custom wrote papers for as much as $40 a page, adding citations from the customers' university library and other deluxe features (Milford). Not only undergraduates stand to advantage from internet plagiarism. ACI Writing Assistance Center Home of Foster City, Calif., says papers are personally directed by a ``Harvard graduate and published author'' who has ``taught at college level in six different subject areas.'' ACI charges $30 per page at the undergraduate level; $35 a page at the master's; and $40 at the doctoral level. Minimum fee for any job is $150 (Milford). There is a lot that can be done on behalf of the professors and academics to help prevent or curve the usage of paper mills and plagiarized research papers. “There's no way to put such Web sites out of business,” says Karen Kostaszek, president of Ingenia Communications, an electronic communications company with Internet expertise in the field of education. As long as the authors of the papers consent to having their papers distributed, there's no legal route for shutting down the operations. Plagiarism is most likely in large classes during the busiest times of the academic year when teaching assistants mark undergraduate papers. Universities can fight the use of such sites by not allowing advertisements promoting them on campus and stressing to students the large financial investment they are making to be in school (Silverman). On the instructor level there are many options open to help eliminate plagiarism. Since writing is, in essence, formalized thinking, the educational purpose of writing assignments is to learn the process of organizing and disciplining one's thoughts about a topic. Therefore, the most academically productive approach to such assignments is one where the teacher is intensively involved throughout the development of the paper, rather than just being the passive evaluator of the finished product. Not only would students learn more from policies such as the nature of the topic, references, an outline, and a rough draft prior to the final draft, with each stage subject to comments and suggested changes by the teacher, they would also effectively eliminate the possibility of buying or otherwise using someone else's work. An annotated bibliography, with synopses of all references, could be required rather than just the usual listing. In the same vein, an abstract of each paper could be required, as for a professional article (Galles). Graded oral presentations of papers, with students required to answer questions and defend their arguments, would force students to learn their material better, plus give them valuable experience speaking in front of others, as well as dramatically reducing the grade-point return of using someone else's work. Assignments could require a description of the research process, particularly how the utilized sources were found, which would make it extremely difficult to "defend" the use of another's paper. Papers shorter than six pages (the minimum length available from most paper mills) can be assigned, which also trains students to be concise rather than training the...