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Oct. 18th, 2008 08:59 pmTales of a term-paper miller
One thing that's interesting about this business is that it gives the lie to typical moralizing about plagiarism. Ordinarily, teachers equate plagiarism with theft: use of a person's words without attribution is implied to mean use without permission. But the whole business model here is that the student pays the author for rights to an entirely new paper, which the student may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with his own name. The original author is undeceived. Theft is not the true nature of the crime.
In other fields, of course, this is common practice: everything produced by the government is either ghost-written or has no author, and nobody comments about intellectual dishonesty there. But it also exists within academia, specifically in rec-letter culture, where it is not uncommon for teachers to ask their students to write their own letters, which the teachers may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with their own names. I don't see much difference between this and the above, but I've seen professors go to strange lengths to defend the one practice and not the other. (Fortunately, none of my own mentors has ever been this crass.)
One thing that's interesting about this business is that it gives the lie to typical moralizing about plagiarism. Ordinarily, teachers equate plagiarism with theft: use of a person's words without attribution is implied to mean use without permission. But the whole business model here is that the student pays the author for rights to an entirely new paper, which the student may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with his own name. The original author is undeceived. Theft is not the true nature of the crime.
In other fields, of course, this is common practice: everything produced by the government is either ghost-written or has no author, and nobody comments about intellectual dishonesty there. But it also exists within academia, specifically in rec-letter culture, where it is not uncommon for teachers to ask their students to write their own letters, which the teachers may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with their own names. I don't see much difference between this and the above, but I've seen professors go to strange lengths to defend the one practice and not the other. (Fortunately, none of my own mentors has ever been this crass.)