Alarming Market Trend

This post is brought to you by kittens: 

Aria and Nilo from New York. According to their web page, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/aria-54881529/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/, they must be adopted together. Aria is female, Nilo is male.

 

Bubbles from Washington, D.C., sounds as if she's being fostered by a control freak who would really prefer to keep her. And she's actually three-colored, not solid black-and-white. Her picture is here because she has the same pattern of dark and white fur as Serena's young son Biro, which makes her seem extra-cute to me. All kittens are, of course, unbearably cute. If you don't want to pay $175 before the basic vet care, at your own expense, feel free to browse for another kitten. Bubbles' web page is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/bubbles-kitty-55741082/dc/washington/lucky-dog-animal-rescue-dc20/ .

Lemon from Atlanta...there are a lot of adorable kittens on Petfinder's Atlanta page, but many of their pictures are showing up blurred and/or skewed. Lemon's is one of the few pictures at that page that actually show up on my browser looking like a kitten. In fact, she looks a bit like Serena's daughter Pastel, though smaller and paler. Her web page is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/lemon-55650586/ga/atlanta/royal-potcake-rescue-usa-inc-ga512/ .

(It's not part of the actual post, below, but since regular readers want to know...There were eleven kittens this spring: Serena's, Silver's, and someone else's. One of Silver's was stillborn with major birth defects, and seven more died after exposure to airborne glyphosate vapors from the Bad Neighbor. One of the short-lived ones reminded me of Bisquit, who liked the nickname "Bic-bic," so it was called Bic, and the others were called after other writing devices corresponding to their colors. Biro, Crayola, and Pastel are still alive. They show no indication of being as clever as Serena but they do seem to have the instinct for hunting as a team.)

Now the actual post:

According to Google, this site's getting an alarming increase in traffic from sites that blatantly advertise that they sell term papers for students to use.

A few years ago I posted some observations about this practice. There's nothing wrong with students reading other students' term papers, I said. I enjoy doing the research to write sample term papers. And I've thought about posting some of my old papers here; they earned good enough grades, long enough ago, that if a student tried to pass them off as per own work the teacher would smell the plagiarism. If you have the money you can pay any number of people to write sample term papers for you, compare what they've said, follow their leads and links, and write a paper that's enriched by all of their different insights. That's expensive, but legal. 

There is something unethical about trying to pass someone else's term paper off as yours. At many schools it guarantees you'll fail the course; at many it guarantees you'll be expelled. 

How can teachers tell which term papers are plagiarized, with the proliferation of Internet publication? They look for papers that sound like their students' written "voices." Obviously anybody can put a little "spin" on the material in the textbook, or on Wikipedia, and let that form the bulk of a paper--but students are expected at least to rewrite each sentence they've read, except in quotations. And, to make sure it's really their students' work, many teachers look for references to discussions that took place in their classroom.

Once long ago, pre-Internet, I was really at a loss for anything to say about the material we'd been studying in a class. Then, a few hours before the computer center closed, I had a brainwave and cranked out a paper that was readable, a little too long, linking the material we'd studied in that class to things I'd studied in grade eight and things I'd gone over when my sister was in grade seven. It was an A paper in most ways--the teacher admitted--but he gave it a C. "I don't know where it came from, maybe some original work she did somewhere else, but it's not based on research she did in MY class!" 

I was indignant, counter-accused the teacher of being a sexist bigot and trying to boost the boys higher up the curve, which for all I know he really was doing. But over the years I've realized that he had a point. My last-minute inspiration was better than no inspiration at all, and I'd cited material from the textbooks, but I had not cited anything anyone had said in the classroom. That poor old teacher was teaching different sections of the same freshman-level class to two hundred total strangers, mostly freshmen. How was he supposed to know what each of them had done, or could do, if their papers did not refer to their participation in his class?

So my old blog post warned students not to try just handing in a professionally written paper as if they'd written it. Buy one or several sample papers but think of them as like getting into a conversation at the library and letting other people show you what they were doing, not like paying someone else to write your paper. 

This new post considers a new wrinkle: These new writing services are unfamiliar to me--and I'm glad. They're not just general writing sites. They specifically target students. They target students in English-speaking countries. The home sites are in non-English-speaking countries. 

In other words, somebody might be buying a document from some desperate foreigner who's trying to pretend to be me...and whose country might not be on the best of terms with the the student's native country...and who might have plans to use the student's use of their service for purposes of blackmail, later on. "Before electing this person to the city council, you should know that person scraped through college by paying professional writers to write per term papers!" 

Students of the world...In theory there's absolutely no reason why you can't be inspired by the research done by foreign hack writers as easily as you could by the work of American hack writers. Science is global. Not that I'm writing from a university library and citing material from medical, science, and legal journals here. But someone who's desperate enough to borrow the identity of an obscure,  penniless American might be sitting in a university library in Nigeria or Russia or Tuvalu, having studied written English for six or eight years and being fully qualified to translate the great works of English literature, feeding you cutting-edge scientific research for five dollars a day. 

What's wrong with that? Nothing--provided that you use such people's sample papers as part of your own research. You can even cite a professional writer's sample term paper as the source of a quote, if the pro put something really well; the form for that is something like "[Name or screen name]. Personal correspondence," or "[Name or screen name]. Unpublished paper." 

But just be quite sure that anyone who might some day go back and check would be able to see significant differences between the professional writer's paper and your paper, especially including a couple of phrases your teacher will recognize as things the teacher, you, or a classmate said in that classroom.