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The paper mill problem.

Article Excerpt
Student cheating has long been noted as a problem, especially in the health professions where graduates are expected to hold high ethical standards in their practice. (1, 2) For years, services have existed that write papers for students for a fee or "recycle" a paper for a fee. Recycled papers are generally not as big a problem because instructors know how to focus their assignments in such a way that recycled or canned papers hold little value to the student.

Often these services are called "paper mills," a term probably based on "degree mill," an institution, often unaccredited, that awards a degree of little worth for cash and little or no work. Based on my experiences, these paper mills do little more than separate students from their hard-earned money, just as degree mills do. Paper mills are different from the "cut-and-paste" problem, (3) in which instructors report receiving papers that are little more than blocks of text or pictures stolen from varied sources such as online teaching files, newspaper articles, advocacy and professional society Web pages. However, many of the suggestions for detecting paper mill cheating can be used for cut-and-paste cheating as well.

For years, students had to seek out these mills through magazines or perhaps a campus fraternity that collected old papers for reuse. With the explosion in use of the Internet, one now can find literally hundreds of services offering students not only recycled papers (which are often quite bad and easy to recognize because they become dated quickly), but also to custom write papers for a fee. These papers are e-mailed to the customer, so they can be reformatted as needed and require little writing effort. Many of these services even offer to write theses for a fee.

But how prevalent is the problem? According to O'Leary, (4) "... there are so many easily reached term-paper sites that any student who has access to the Web...