“For Sale by ‘Author’: Online Essay Mills and Authorship in the Academy”
by Danielle Roach | Xchanges 7.2
Academic Perspectives on Plagiarism and Essay Mills
Meanwhile, scholarly attempts to address these issues seem little better than what goes on in writing textbooks. Embarking on any comprehensive review of the academic literature regarding essay mills and its related issues (most notably, plagiarism and authorship) requires a moment of pause to consider strategies for properly canvassing the available research. As Zorana Ercegovac and John V. Richardson, Jr. point out, surveying existing literature on plagiarism and essay mills proves more difficult than expected because of the broad, cross-disciplinary applicability of the issue: scholarship has emerged from education, psychology, library and information studies, and even software companies that provide plagiarism-detection services, but no one had previously attempted to connect these scattered bodies of work into a coherent whole (301).
However, as the sub-discipline of composition studies in English has begun to redefine itself as one of “writing studies” (see Downs and Wardle) in the past few years, scholars in that field have done a great deal to amass a body of literature dealing with plagiarism in general and the OEM in particular. Thus, much of the most current scholarship dealing with these essay mills comes out of composition studies’ larger conversation about plagiarism and authorship. When online spaces and composition began to be studied in earnest in the late 1990s, plagiarism began to be perceived as a sort of imminent threat. Logically, then, scholars began to seek out ways to combat the ways in which the Internet was supposedly contributing to plagiarism in the writing classroom.
Dànielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati bring forward suggestions for helping students avoid engaging in academically “dishonest” work by posing that the solution should be rooted in a sort of pedagogy of avoidance. Other scholars like Kim McMurtry and Wendy Sutherland-Smith call for institutional policies that do more to clearly define plagiarism and “academic integrity” for students and faculty. Such policies, they argue, should then be buttressed by deliberate discussion of the policies in the writing classroom and pedagogy framed to help students stay on the straight and narrow.
However, other scholars pushed back against the issue of plagiarism as a sort of plague that had stricken students. In several of her works, Rebecca Moore Howard insists that scholarship about plagiarism should focus not on solutions to some ominous and overarching problem of plagiarism, but instead on reexamining institutional and social notions of authorship and ownership. Other scholars, such as Andrea Lunsford and Margaret Price, insist the ways in which ideas of authorship have been constructed in the academy can be traced to the political and social contexts in which the academy exists.
Thus, as the literature turns to look at OEMs in specific, several interesting trends emerge. Kelly Ritter suggests some reason as to why so little has been written about OEMs in a field that is so obsessed with plagiarism at large, arguing that purchasing essays from paper mills — though one of the more flagrant forms of plagiarism — has been largely under-theorized in English studies, perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more “forgivable,” ubiquitous problem of cut-and-paste plagiarism at the postsecondary level (2006, 25). Hannah Ashley picks up on this sentiment, pointing out the perspective of some students for whom issues of academic integrity become obstacles in a sort of game, with the ethical implications of cheating taking a backseat to the successful “playing” of the system. Additionally, Michael Murphy points out the commodity metaphor inherent in the researched essay: much of the cut-and-paste dynamic, he argues, stems from a view of knowledge as content to be assembled and collated rather than created, and if knowledge functions as property under that model, then — by a kind of finders-keepers logic — students may reason that whoever gathers and assembles the material owns the resulting product (38-39).
This logical chain that Murphy suggests seems to underpin how some students understand “intellectual property.” Such an understanding finds itself at odds with the “right way” that the academy often prescribes: the student writer should think of him or herself as a singular author in conversation with carefully cited voices of authority. Ritter also comments on this disconnect between what students understand about writing and what is expected from them in academic writing situations, suggesting that while cheating in general may stem from complicated feelings about personal worth and academic ability, purchasing essays from online companies appeals to something even more fundamental: the ability to simply buy that worth and ability, and with it, a new academic identity (625). However, even though scholars like Ritter attempt to understand the function of OEMs for students, the overall body of scholarship addressing OEMs is fragmented at best, with scholars from across the disciplines grasping for some sense of how to define and understand the function and dynamics of this particular strand of plagiarism and academic dishonesty.
Both the perspectives offered by writing textbooks and those put forth by scholars offer an interesting set of contradictions when set in play with the rhetoric used by OEMs to frame what seems at first glance to be a very different set of ideas about writing and authorship. However, before working through the implications of the juxtaposition of the definitions of authorship that are put forth by the academy and those offered by these online mills, we should pause to consider just how much these mills truly function in shaping student ideas about writing.
Just How Big is the OEM “Problem”?
Determining the pervasiveness of these OEMs can prove to be quite problematic. Even quantifying just how many sites exist can be tricky: a 2001 article suggested the existence of roughly 200 “cheat sites” (Atkins and Nelson 101). Sites like Plagiarism.org currently estimate that “hundreds” of cheat sites operate online (interestingly, Plagiarism.org is published by iParadigms, LLC, the same company that owns the nation’s largest online plagiarism-detection software service, Turnitin.com). Statistics about just how many students use OEMs are also hard to confirm, while the ways in which they use the material obtained from the sites is even harder to trace. Most of what we know about usage of sites comes from students’ own admissions in anonymous surveys and the like. For example, a 2006 survey of Canadian colleges found that about 3% of undergraduates self-report using materials from online paper mills, while an American study in 2001 indicated a rate of about 5% (Hughes and McCabe 13; McCabe 41). Other reports suggest a higher rate, with a 2002 study indicating that over 8% of students admitted to using OEMs “frequently” or “sometimes” (Scanlon and Neumann).
Of course, not all essay mills are created equal. In fact, there are varying degrees of essay mills. Generally, the term “essay mill” covers three categories of sites: student sharing sites, pre-fabricated essay purchase sites, and custom-order essay sites. Student sharing sites typically require students to upload some of their own work before they can access the essays already on the site; one such site, AllFreeEssays.com, frames this exchange as straightforward while simultaneously reminding new users that plagiarism is wrong and not worth the consequences.
The second group of sites offers a database of pre-written papers for purchase. Sites in this category emphasize the sheer scale of their offerings — millions of papers available for immediate download — while marketing themselves as collections of well-written “model” essays meant to assist student writers, with little to no mention of plagiarism.
The third group of sites offers students customized papers, written-to-order, usually at a per-page fee that increases as turnaround time decreases (overnight jobs cost more than ones not due for two or three weeks). These sites tout benefits like free revision programs, “completely original content” drawn from academic sources with proper citation, generous per-page word counts, and writers described as screened, educated professionals uninterested in plagiarizing anyone else’s work. Clearly, this group of sites seeks to appeal to the more nuanced needs of what the site’s proprietors seem to envision as a more sophisticated audience (or at least one with more at stake in the academic writing situation). These custom essays are little more than ghostwritten projects, proposed to professional writers who the site suggests are highly skilled and capable of crafting made-to-order essays for all kinds of students.
Although it would seem that each of these different types of sites caters to a slightly different audience, in reality, these distinctions break down with careful investigation of the sites. Many of the “share” sites link to sister sites where students can opt to purchase either pre-written or custom essays, and sites like eCheat.com (whose motto reframes cheating as “collaborating”) offer students all three options right from their home page. For the purposes of this paper, then, we will often conflate these various types of sites, but it is nevertheless important to realize that the varying degrees to which these sites offer students choices and options necessarily complicates how students and academics interact with the products and messages offered up by these sites. In all cases, however, these sites participate in the active construction and complication of the definition of the author as understood by both students and academics.
Certainly when compared to other forms of cheating in the academy, these OEMs represent but a fraction of the ways in which students engage in writing practices that defy the conventional and ethical standards set forth by most universities. However, even if we consider these numbers to be minimal, an examination of the mills and the language they use to define themselves and their products can offer a critical glimpse into the complexities surrounding how students understand the “rules” of authorship and how they will respond to those rules.