At least they are being honest about their dishonesty

Jonathan Bailey, a consultant for iParadigms (the company that markets Turnitin) and author of the "Plagiarism today" blog, noted in a recent article that the "free" plagiarism detection software Viper moves papers that it checks to its paper mill subsidiary about 9 months after the paper has been submitted for checking. They market primarily to students, so they will be harvesting papers that students have either written themselves, or may have plagiarized and then didn't read the fine print.

They do make this very clear on their site, but only at the very bottom of the download page and only on a page that is linked as "How does Viper use my essay?":

Aside from that, 9 months after your scan, we will automatically add it to our student database and it will be published on one of our study sites to allow other students to use it as an example of how to write a good essay.

Right.

We tested the system in 2010 a the HTW Berlin, where it not only came in last as far as effectiveness goes, but we also observed that there was an essay mill at the same street address and with a telephone number just one number on from the Viper number. We called and tried to obtain more information, but the number only gave us an email address to contact, and our emails there were returned as undeliverable. We also observed that the email address that was used for the system was now getting regular emails like this:

 or this:

I find it highly dishonest for a company to be so blatantly offering to write papers for students. The reason for attending university is to learn how to do research, structure information, think things through, and write about the experience. People who purchase and submit ghostwritten papers are cheating themselves.

I suppose we should be happy that they are at least publicly stating what it is that they do with the papers submitted. As Bailey points out, however, they also encourage universities to use the system, but since teachers do not hold the copyright to papers written by their students, they must violate the terms of service in order to use the system. What a tangled mess ...

No Free Lunch

Found on a "free essay site":

The next time you see language like this on a paper, it may not be the student writing, but an "excellent" free essay from an essay mill.

Paper Mills

Two things in my inbox today that fit so well together, the links need to be noted here:

• Reader HD found this on China Daily: Fake papers are rife at universities. It includes a number of statistics for China and notes that teachers often write papers in order to make a living wage. Imagine getting a paper handed in that you wrote yourself....
• My Googlebot on Plagiarism keeps turning up articles at suite101.com. Yesterday's link was "The Danger of Online Essay Services" by Cynthia Jones-Shoeman. This is a rather strange site - they have a lot of great articles on proper studying, but the navigation soon sucks you into a vortex of advertising.

Students don't realize that one of the reasons they are in college is to learn to think, structure, and write. Many just want the degree to earn more money...

Blogspam - Buy Term Papers Online

Nice try, Suzi.







She puts an encouraging comment on a year-old entry from my blog and hopes that I don't see the spam link to buy term papers online. Luckily I check all links. What a shame that Suzi's profile is locked.

I surfed to the site which promises high-quality term papers. Might I note that their home page could use a spelling check? And maybe a brush-up on English grammar?

Oh, and this is a great one - on the order form you have to give them your library login (which is normally also your email login and other such):

If you have your University/College Library access, please provide it for the writer. Our research has shown that customers who provide the research resource get a very high quality paper. We basically need 3 things: a. URL or website address of the library login page b. Login ID c. Password Your information will not be shared by anyone.

Curious, I did a whois-lookup. The domain was first registered in June of this year. They are hiding behind a "protected domain service" that does not enter in any human being names, but just the registrant.

According the the web site, it has been up since 2003 and has 5 people with doctorates on the "board":

• Dr Russell Conroy
• Dr Travis Walter
• Dr Vincent Holmes
• Dr Alistair Boswell
• Dr Maria Huggins

Should these people exist, and be running a term paper mill, I think that their doctorates should be rescinded. Russell says that his doctorate is in Chemistry from Alabama State University. I wanted to ask ASU what they think of this, but they don't appear to have email yet. A search of the (rather bad) home page turns up a few telephone numbers, but no email or home pages.

A quick Google for the other four names turns up another paper mill that just happens to have the same people on the board, but no other links. Just as well - if you buy a fake paper it should be from a fake company.

Tour of an Essay Mill

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a video tour of an essay mill. It is great. The funniest thing for me is the notice for essay authors after logging in (mark 3:20):

Please, stop using Turnitin Software!

Since Turnitin stores the papers in its databases, if a plagiarism-free paper is checked with Turnitin and then submitted again by the student, it will be now be flagged as a plagiarism, causing much dismay for the dishonest student.

What I find dismaying is that the essay authors are only paid so little for there work. The mills are making an enormous amount of money on this operation. I find ads that charge 30$ / page for an original paper, but the authors seem to only be offered 3-5$ a page.

Blog post on plagiarism detection

I am busy round the clock tidying up and getting my report about plagiarism detection finished for Thursday, and one major online publication has requested that we also write an article for them, so sleep is down to a minimum at the moment.

But I must post this link from "Hardcore Ambiguity" entitled "A few more stabs at plagiarism". The author is spittin' mad about services such as www-dot- academicintegrity -dot-com. We had found a different one during our tests, but this is just outrageous. I won't link to them either (but you can easily find the page). They write about academic integrity on the same page that they offer you their paper-writing services. Just disgusting.

Now back to work