ONLINE WRITING ASSISTANCE SERVICES

Most basically, an online writing assistance service (or OWAS) is a Web site through which customers place orders for originally written texts on academic subjects for a prescribed fee. The Academic Writing Services Web site (http://www.academicwritinghelp.net/) is a typical example, in that it features customized papers starting at a low price, a rush delivery service, unlimited revisions, 24/7 customer support service, online credit card processing, automated ordering, discounts for referrals, and a money-back guarantee for originality. OWAS sites are often referred to as “paper mills,” but they are not. Paper mills are repositories of previously submitted student papers, while OWAS papers are original texts written by ghostwriters for profit. For this reason, OWAS papers are in their own individual class of plagiarism and are particularly despised by faculty, because, while they are easily recognizable, their purchase is exceptionally difficult to prevent or verify (Bauman Reference Bauman2009).

We began this project with the belief that the OWAS industry was an emergent social problem. But as we dug deeper, we discovered that this phenomenon is not the first time that organized plagiarism has been a serious problem. In fact, preliminary evidence suggests a relationship between organized plagiarism and enrollment surges. From 1944 to 1956, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act flooded universities, colleges, and technical institutes with 7.8 million World War II veterans, the vast majority of whom were young men aged 20 to 25 years of age (United States Department of Veterans Affairs 2009). It was during this time that concern about paper mills first became acute. In 1959, a New York City College instructor noted an alarming increase in the number of pilfered English compositions and conceptualized the problem as “fast becoming the collegiate counterpart of juvenile delinquency” (Hamalian Reference Hamalian1959).

Twenty years later, as the baby boom generation challenged the capacities of colleges and universities, a crisis of compositional plagiarism reemerged, but this time, the problem went beyond organized paper sharing between roommates and fraternity members. With advances in telecommunications, duplication, and package delivery technologies, the business of ghostwriting college papers became profitable. Under a system that operated much like today's FTD florist network, according to one report, students would place their orders for original compositions by long-distance telephone, and their orders would be routed to a shop where the order would be filled and delivered within a guaranteed time frame (Stavisky Reference Stavisky1973).

Just as telecommunications technology made plagiarism profitable, the World Wide Web has increased both the profile and accessibility of the plagiarism-for-profit marketplace. The actual breadth and depth of the OWAS industry is unknown. Coastal Carolina University's library catalogues 250 online plagiarism sites, but most are paper mills, not OWASs (Coastal Carolina University 2010). A Web search of terms like “writing assistance,” “writing services,” or even “plagiarism,” however, generates an extensive list of OWAS Web sites. In fact, the OWAS market is so extensive and diversified that Slate magazine publishes an annual term-paper buying guide (Stevenson Reference Stevenson2001).

While Slate's guide includes sources for the recycling of “A” papers via e-mail, most sites advertise customized papers that serve specific types of customers and their common needs. Ivey Research Services, for example, caters to undergraduates by specializing in essay and term paper writing assistance. Ivey Thesis, on the other hand, targets graduate students by offering a variety of theses and dissertation writing services. Custom-Writing.com's menu has the widest variety of writing formats, and Thesis Quest has the most extensive array of research assistance options. Although at first glance, these Web sites appear to offer coaching or tutoring in academic writing, the optional pull-down menus make plain that what is being sold is not assistance with academic work, but the academic work itself.

While the Web sites may differ in terms of the populations they target and the types of writing in which they specialize, all offer easy-to-read selection menus, automated ordering, 24/7 customer service, and rush-order service. The most notable promise, however, is the commonly advertised money-back-guarantee for originality. Most OWAS sites maintain customer distribution lists and deploy them on a regular basis to distribute coupons and announce discounts and upcoming specials. For example, several times a year, we now receive friendly reminders (“Spring break is just around the corner, are you ready?”) and discount coupons from an OWAS we contacted while researching this article. Receiving these e-mails has been a painful reminder of the temptations to which our students are exposed throughout the academic year.

PLAGIARISM DETECTION SERVICES

Alongside the plagiarism-for-profit industry has grown an equally substantial plagiarism detection services (PDS) industry. The EduTie online resource portal, the slogan for which is “What you need when you need it,” makes plain the symbiosis between these two Internet-based industries by linking through its “Popular Categories” to both online assistance writing services and plagiarism detection services. Thus, as students shop for made-to-order papers, their teachers can troll the same Web site for assistance in detecting their purchases. While the tools used to detect plagiarism vary, a commitment to minimizing faculty time and labor lies at the core of the PDS industry. One prominent PDS Web site (http://www.canexus.com), for example, features this testimonial: “EVE [PDS software] aced the test, finding everything I had plagiarized in fifteen minutes.”

The forerunners of the PDS industry, the Essay Verification Engine (otherwise known as EVE) and the Glatt Plagiarism Detection System are both computer-based software programs marketed primarily to individual faculty. More recently, though, Web-crawling search engines have usurped the market, and the current PDS state-of-the-art application is a program called Turnitin. As of this writing, about half a million educators use Turnitin and more than 100 million student papers have been checked by it. Unlike its computer-based forerunners, Turnitin searches 12 billion Web sites and 100 million student papers, highlights textual matches between submitted works and its database, and then produces a report of the results. From an instructor's perspective, a particularly helpful aspect of the site is that students can submit their work for automated checking. With large classes, this feature makes it easy for faculty to offload the time-consuming task of submission and turn their attention to other essential tasks such as course preparation and assignment grading.

Because Turnitin is designed to plug into an online course management system such as Blackboard or Moodle, an instructor's access is limited by his or her standing as a faculty member of any of the 8,500 institutions currently licensed to use it. When we began this project, for example, our university held a Turnitin license. But in 2009, our institution unplugged Turnitin as a cost-saving measure, leaving the instructors who had integrated the program's requirements into their course requirements to either return to pre-Internet practices or laboriously spot-check suspicious papers with engines like Google and Yahoo.

The more ubiquitous PDSs have become, the more faculty feel obligated to use them. As a result, some faculty have complained that by making submission to Turnitin a requirement, they are spending more time than ever policing their students' writing and less time teaching them how to write well (Diver Reference Diver2006). Similarly, some students have complained that faculty's overreliance on PDS tools requires them to spend an inordinate amount of effort proving their honesty. In 2008, for example, four Virginia high school students sued iParadigm, Turnitin's distributor, claiming that the program violated their intellectual property rights and rights to privacy as guaranteed by the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). On the dontturnitin.com Web site, students complained that the requirement to turn in all work for a plagiarism check before any evidence of cheating existed undermined the student-teacher relationship. Even though the court ruled against the students, iParadigm updated their use agreement to allow students the option to not have their papers searched and to keep the identifications of students whose works are searched confidential (A.V. et al. v. iParadigms 2009).

While these changes may have improved the trust of some students, they greatly undermined the promise of efficiency for faculty in two important ways. First, faculty must be prepared to negotiate alternative accommodations for students who choose not to submit their work for detection. And second, in cases in which a submitted text matches a stored text, it becomes the faculty member's responsibility to contact the original owner and obtain a copy of the stored paper. Many decide that the extra labor is not worthwhile. At Yale, for example, where an estimated 35 cases of academic dishonesty are investigated each year, an assistant dean claims the problem is actually larger: “There are lots of professors who read a paper, know something is wrong, and decide not to take it up. Sometimes people think of it as a ‘teachable moment.’ But for most it's a lot of work [to make an accusation of plagiarism] and you don't always find sources to prove it happened” (Dehnart Reference Dehnart1999).

Even more problematic than the lack of follow through in the face of a PDS report of plagiarism are the dilemmas caused by the false positive results that these reports commonly generate. Investigative reporter Andy Dehnart, for example, submitted his 30-page senior thesis to Plagiarism.org and was told that he might be guilty of cheating because the company found that the submission matched a legitimate, authorized posting of the same thesis on the Web. Reports generated by programs such as Turnitin list all matches, regardless of the cause. Matches often include commonly used phrasing and public domain material and are more often the result of sloppy paraphrasing or incomplete referencing. Analysis of reports can take time, and, if not done with care, false positives can produce accusations that may call the instructor's, not the student's, credibility into question.

Beyond the erosion of trust between students and teachers and the dangers of false positives, the most significant shortcoming of PDS technology is the simple fact that customized works purchased from an OWAS are guaranteed to be undetectable. If a purchased paper is found to include recycled material, the customer can demand his or her money back, and the ill will created by the sale of an unoriginal paper would be bad for business. OWAS sites, then, take extra care to ensure that their products can pass the PDS test.

THREE STRATEGIES TO CONSIDER

To this point, our overviews of OWASs and PDSs have highlighted a number of important challenges for faculty. While PDS tools do save faculty time in detecting and deterring plagiarism, reliance on these services has, at times, added tension to the teacher-student relationship and has not reduced the tediousness of the verification process. Most important, while PDS tools like Turnitin are useful for the detection of stolen or borrowed content, they do little if anything to thwart the OWAS industry's success.

The shortcoming of complete reliance on PDS tools is the fact that they focus exclusively on the outcome of intellectual dishonesty—the submission of a stolen, borrowed, or purchased text. Ironically, even though the Internet plays a key role in the detection process, this approach is congruent with a pre-Internet “free range” module of teaching research and writing that makes plagiarism too easy an option for students to choose. An alternative module to the “free range” approach would focus as much on process as outcome, and would integrate plagiarism detection at an earlier point in the process of writing and research.

For example, one physics professor employs a “studio model” of teaching in which students complete their assignments during supervised class time (Young Reference Young2010). We have successfully adopted a similar approach to our social science classes. Whenever possible, we require our students to write during class time. Thanks to electronic messaging, social networking technologies, and podcasts, listening to lectures and asking questions about them can become homework, freeing up class time for supervised (and perhaps off-the-Internet) note-taking, outlining, and drafting.

In addition to the studio approach, professors like Amy Cavender are reducing the temptation to plagiarize by holding students accountable for their honesty in earlier stages of research and writing projects (Cavender Reference Cavender2010). Cavender requires her students to record their citations and notes in Zotero, an online, networked information management system. However, there are other more low-tech strategies that can achieve similar goals. For example, we require our students to document their research process by submitting original handwritten notes, outlines, printouts of source abstracts, photocopies, or other materials used in the development of the paper along with the paper. The requirement of a personal essay describing the student's experience of completing a major writing project is particularly useful. The instructions may require the student to identify challenges they encountered, the part of the paper that makes them the most proud, and what they learned about themselves or their world by completing it. In a Chronicle of Higher Education interview, Pritchard noted that students who outsource their writing learn very little by doing so (Young Reference Young2010). The prospect of completing the personal reflection essay may be enough to deter students from purchasing a paper. If not, this exercise can serve as a useful tool for confronting suspected plagiarism.

Finally, the “free range” approach gives professional plagiarists too much maneuvering room. Thus, the more customized the assignment instructions and the more exclusive the resources for completing them, the more difficult it will be for someone not enrolled in the course to successfully complete it. Barberio (Reference Barberio2009), for example, advocates limiting students' resources to a set of instructor-prepared links to specific Web sites. We go further and require students to integrate unpublished class lecture materials, assigned textbook material, and original field or interview data into their papers. While prescribing resources has not always thwarted the submission of purchased papers, it has at least made it nearly impossible for purchased papers to earn passing grades.