Beating the Term Paper Artists

People have been writing about their experiences writing papers for term-paper mills lately.

The novelist Nick Mamatas, in an article entitled "The Term Paper Artist" published recently in Drexel University's interactive online magazine The Smart Set, tells of the years he spent writing papers on every imaginable topic for a term-paper mill. The job was lucrative--who says you can't live off writing!--and he was phenomenally good at it. He could write a five-page paper in 20 minutes. Intelligent, well-educated friends of his tried their hands at it, and ended up in tears, defeated. He reports:

The secret to the gig is to amuse yourself. I have [sic for "had"?] to, really, as most paper topics are deadly boring. Once, I was asked to summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three). Then there was this assignment for a composition class: six pages on why "apples [the fruit] are the best." You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers — several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups.

He also tells us that he never felt too bad about helping these students cheat the universities they were attending, because it felt to him as if the universities were cheating the students by taking their tuition and not educating them.

Scott McLemee, in an article entitled "Paper Money" in Inside Higher Education, is more remorseful: he meets and gets romantically interested in a grad student who hears through the grapevine that he's been writing term papers for students:

Now, cheating my customers out of an education had never seemed a cause for concern. They were doing a pretty thorough job of that on their own. But suddenly I could picture things from the vantage point of an earnest, hard-working instructor who would no more have gamed the system than she would have held up a bank.

All the rationalizations fell away in a second; the embarrassment, so long evaded, now finally hit home. The experience was mortifying. Twenty years later, I still feel it. Regret always comes too late to do anyone much good, but better late than never.

Okay. But let's be honest. Students are going to cheat, if cheating is at all possible and affordable. Some students cheat because they're what Mamatas's employer called "DUMB CLIENTS" who shouldn't be in college at all; others cheat because they're overwhelmed with work and need a shortcut. But they're going to look for ways to cheat.

The real question here, it seems to me, is not whether buying or writing bought term papers is ethical, but what institutional conditions make it possible for such an industry to exist. In fact, the crappy writing prompts Mamatas's clients had been given suggest that instructors who give such assignments are cheating too, for some of the same reasons the students give. They're ignorant--ignorant about teaching: willfully and obtusely ignorant about the very nature of the job the university is paying them to do. They're too lazy to seek out help in improving their teaching. They're overwhelmed with work and need a shortcut, so they slap down any old tired drivel and call it a writing assignment, and then bitch and moan about student stupidity when they get boring badly written papers in return.

It really isn't difficult, of course, to prevent students from buying term papers. Help students brainstorm their papers in class, in small groups and with the whole class. Require that they submit outlines and annotated bibliographies. Take them to the library and require them to find three sources off their list. Require three drafts of every paper, and mark students down for not submitting all of them, or for not improving their papers from one draft to the next. Hold paper conferences, and get students to talk about their papers. Hold peer-review and peer-editing sessions in class. Not only do students not buy papers for this kind of process; they don't plagiarize, either. Not only that: they tend to become emotionally and intellectually invested in their papers. They care.

The problem with the regimen outlined in that preceding paragraph, of course, is that it takes work. You have to learn how to teach writing, and you have to work hard at writing effective writing prompts, and you have to devote considerable time to preparing for and improving and grading student writing outside of class. It's not for lazy teachers.

That makes me uninclined to point fingers at people like Nick Mamatas and Scott McLemee who help students cheat, in fact. Lazy instructors who make it both easy and rewarding for lazy students to cheat deserve what they get.

More than that: universities and colleges that ghettoize writing in FYW programs are complicit in this cheating as well. As long as the reigning assumption at an institution of higher learning is that FY students should be "inoculated" against bad writing in a course or two taught by English adjuncts and grad students, so that professors in the disciplines can either not assign writing at all or give crappy writing assignments, nothing will change. Universities and colleges that think of writing instruction as something that is done by a cadre of underpaid part-time English instructors, rather than by every instructor on campus, are practically begging their students to cheat. They're generating the market for the term-paper mills. As long as deans and chairs and roster faculty in the disciplines believe that "summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three)," is a reasonable paper assignment, people like Nick Mamatas and Scott McLemee will be able to earn a decent living. After all, they're just giving the professors what they want: not a slow painstaking learning process, not critical thinking, but boring papers.

But note that, in calling universities and colleges that do this complicit in their students' cheating, I'm emphatically not saying that all universities and colleges are like this. Not at all. Drexel University, whose magazine The Smart Set published Nick Mamatas's article, currently designates close to 200 courses on campus as "writing intensive"--and every student has to take three to graduate. They offer a three-hour one-semester workshop that trains undergraduate students to work as writing-intensive tutors (WITs). They train faculty members to teach writing-intensive courses.

And Drexel is not the only university doing this. More and more universities are getting the writing-intensive bug (also called Writing Across the Curriculum or Writing in the Disciplines), and a new academic culture centered in learning-to-write and writing-to-learn is growing up. If those programs continue to grow, and university and college administrators and faculty continue to get excited about them, pretty soon the term-paper mills will have no clients, dumb or otherwise. The students will be writing their own papers, and caring about them, and maybe even--stranger things have happened--taking ownership of their own learning.

Course Blogs: Writing in a Collaborative Environment

Teaching Digital Composition with Blogs

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In "Teaching Digital Composition with Blogs," Krista Kennedy lists four different types of course blogs:

Individual blog by Instructor: an instructor's blog offers an alternative course-management system through class announcements, lecture notes, syllabi, policies.... But an instructor's blog preserves a traditional classroom hierarchy, reduces the students' understanding of writing to what the teacher can advise, de-emphasizes writing as a contextually determined practice, fails to promote the students' voices. And it offers absolutely no infrastructure to entice students to keep writing after the course.

Individual Student Blogs: promote ownership of work, encourage reflection, are less constrained by community norms, demand some technological responsibility, and increase the likelihood of a student's writing after the termination of the course. But individual blogs make classroom community more difficult, demand an outgoing personality, and require more time for assessment.

Small-Group Blogs: encourage collaborative reflection, are conducive to peer review, and are a good communication tool for other group projects. One of the problems of group work is the teacher's inability to assess who is doing the most/least work, and the students' frustration from this inequality of effort with an equality of grade. The blog infrastructure alleviates this problem. Because the blog documents the author of each post, the teacher can see who is doing the work and who isn't. But the group nature of a communal blog diffuses responsibility for (and pride from) the blog as a whole. And the students will not keep writing after the end of the course.

Class Blog: promotes ongoing discussion, is more conducive to comments, and is easy to assess. This type of blog is great for a literature course. But individual voices can get subsumed, and the lack of individual ownership diffuses responsibility and pride. And the students will not keep writing after the end of the course.

The last three of these four types of course blogs encourage students to have a voice in a community that extends beyond the classroom. Because of this transformation of the classroom's community, blogs provide opportunities for students to address multiple audiences simultaneously. In other words, not only do non-student readers increase the likelihood of a student's enjoyment from writing, they emphasize the role of audience in writing.

The first class discussion about audience has to address privacy concerns. The general guiding principle for online behavior is "Don't write or upload what you wouldn't want your parents, kids, or future employers to associate with you." Bring articles to class that exemplify potential problems and facilitate discussion.

Once students readily acknowledge privacy concerns, they're ready for the expanded community. This means the teacher has to find ways to draw external readers to her course blogs. One way to attract readers is through a free ad-exchange service, like Entrecard.

Don't think of an ad-exchange service as a distraction from the course. Entrecard's categories facilitate a discussion of how students can establish a theme for their blogs, and how those themes help to determine their blogs' audience.

Entrecard offers still other pedagogical opportunities. If a course uses individual student blogs or small-group blogs, then the students will have to create advertising banners like this one on the left. An advertising banner is an opportunity for a class discussion about image design, a popular topic for most composition textbooks.

While composition textbooks limit discussion to the interpretation of images, advertising banners enable a conversation about the creative process: how to use the image to define an audience; how to attract and control the viewer's eye movement through imaginary lines, color, contrasts, shifting planes; and how that eye movement plays a role in the viewer's interpretation. In other words, a teacher easily can transform an ad-exchange service into a pedagogical tool.

When used effectively, Entrecard can solicit a minimum of 300 extra visitors a day to a course blog. Of course, there are other marketing tactics that you can assign:

1) Students can label their posts with tags that will help search engines find the students' posts.

2) They can leave insightful comments on popular blogs; the comment template has a field where students can leave their blogs' URL and thereby link their comments to their own sites. (Teachers can have the students email links so the teacher can find them and give the students credit.)

3) Students can advertise the title and link of each new post on Twitter.

4) Students can join blogging communities through an interface like MyBlogLog and send a message to their communities with the title and link of each new post.

5) Students can Digg their posts. If a student adds the appropriate code to her blog's template, more readers can rate her post, and each post's rating will appear on the post itself. The higher the post's rating, the higher the likelihood that the post will attract even more readers.

But if you don't require it, the students won't do it, and if you require too much, the students won't do it. Although I would provide the students with a lengthy list of marketing tactics, I would assign only two or three that I as their teacher can easily keep track of--like their exchanging ads on Entrecard, commenting on popular blogs, and Digging their own posts. If you don't require any form of advertising, you're decreasing the likelihood of strangers commenting on your students' posts, which diminishes both the attractiveness of blogging and the learning opportunities that a blog provides. Students need a hearty traffic of visitors in order to practice addressing different audiences.

Of course, "visitors" are not the same as "readers," but this difference can promote a valuable classroom discussion about how to turn "visitors" into "readers": the timeliness of a post's topic, a captivating title that clues the reader into that topic, an image or video that draws the viewer's attention to the post (or a series of images that move the viewer's eyes throughout the post). Once the visitor is already looking at the post, stylistic devices, an effective sequence of information, vivid illustrations, and other standard topics of a composition course will transform that "visitor" into a "reader."

The next class discussion to have is how to turn a "reader" into a "return reader." Interestingly enough, the best advice for turning "readers" into "return readers" doesn't come from composition textbooks. Students will find the best advice in other blogs--on blogging-resource sites like Problogger and Blog Assistance, as well as buried in marketing and money-making blogs. Have your students run a Google blogsearch on "return readers" and "blog building." Ask them to bring advice from the blogosphere into the classroom. This will acclimate them to research, include them in the teaching process, and encourage an active-learning environment.

Free services like Google Analytics show a blogger how many new and repeat readers she has each day, which posts they read, how long they spend on the site, how they encountered the site, etc. If the course blog doesn't belong to the teacher, require the students to sign up for such services, because they help students determine what what worked and what hasn't, what has given them a voice, and what deprived them of it. Services like Google Analytics provide rhetorical mirrors that reassign the pedagogical role from the teacher to the student--in her desire to enhance the inherent draw of her writing.

Another important class discussion to have is how to encourage comments. Timely posts catch readers while they're still experiencing an event, before they've had a chance to intellectually process their opinions; in other words, a timely post can capture a reader's desire to discuss its topic.

Polarizing statements help a reader to identify her own stance in a debate, which increases a reader's recognition that she has something to say. But this can have negative consequences, too. Consider these comments on a post about the last presidential debate:

TheBoBo says:

Obama is still stuttering around Ayers and ACORN - I sure hope McCain hits him hard on those again because he just completely sidestepped that altogether. Obama just continues to lie about his associations.


pak lah says:

i dont really follow this presidential debate but isnt mccain suggesting nuclear energy that seems blurry on its policy and may cost burden to taxpayers? but anyway i dont side to anyone and im not american either. Should any of these men wins it is time to walk the talk.


Jenny Lynn says:

BAHZING! Finally! I kept yelling at the tv screen, and THIS debate he was finally listening to me! LOL! Thank god for Joe the Plumber, we just needed a good clear example, and "poof" thank you Joe. Still would hav like Romney, but I really like John McCain and Palin. AND! (I swear HE could hear my screaming at the TV because when I said to him WHAT ABOUT THE PALIN is a C*NT t-shirts, McCain brought it up just a breath later!) BAHZING!!!


Akira says:

Remember Obama? : "If you have something to say to me, say it to my face!" Finally McCain realized the friendly old fair-minded grampa routine is not getting respect or support.

I think McCain is still too polite. If he's gonna go down, he should at least go down in a blaze of glory, not pretending that Obama is just another mainstream politician.

Too little, too late?


Eowyn says:

Yes, McCain was much tougher in this last debate, but I was exasperated by how inarticulate he is. But at least he provided more specifics, instead of the usual mantra of "I can do it. I know how to get it done."

It was Obama that truly amazed me, changing so many of his prior positions. He sure sounded like a moderate. This is yet another reason why I find him frightening: It takes a very very facile liar to be able to lie so smoothly. He is the biggest con-man this country has ever seen. God save us.


Zephyra says:

I didn't like either McCain or Obama in the debate. What do you think about Bob Barr?
A is A


Robin says:

I thought McCain was much better than in the previous debates. I'm not American but I've been following the campaign because, like it or not, whoever gets elected in the States affects the rest of us as well. We've just gone through an election here in Canada where the campaign lasted a total of 38 days and there were 2 debates. It amazes me how Americans can put up with a process that lasts almost 2 years and that to become President you have to spend in excess of 500 million! Watching the news the day after the debate, I think Joe the Plumber received more coverage than the candidates!!!


AVROHOM BILGREI says:

When is B.O. going to talk "ENGLISH" rather than "FIGERIN" and start "FIGURING" out how to talk ENGLISH rather than EBONICS ?
TO MENTION LOUSY DICTION IS VERBOTEN ?
HEAVEN FORBID ONE NOTE HIS "BLACK" ENGLISH !
Perhaps he should be more "discriminating" and articulate the final "g" , not to do so is "N.G." !
Eloquent is one thing, inarticulate is another !
Verbal detail is one of the building blocks of "eloquence" !


Anonymous says:

Apparently you haven't noticed that Palin rarely pronounces 'g's in words ending in 'ing'.

Three different types of readers commented on the post: named (and linked) conservatives, named foreigners who don't have a vested interest in the post's topic, and an untraceable anonymous commenter. Although the blog's conservative slant helps readers to identify their own positions in the argument, its polarizing statements prevent dissenters from feeling that their comments are welcomed.

Notice that the commenters are not replying to each other. This is the result of the post's failure to acknowledge different viewpoints. Because the blog preaches to the choir, those who feel comfortable enough to reply don't express different enough opinions to get a conversation started. When dissenting readers get the gumption to reply to such a post, their responses are likely to appear both agitated and agitating, like they're flaming a war by just responding. By simply acknowledging different viewpoints, even polemic bloggers can reduce the likelihood of this conundrum.

Timely posts and polarizing statements are not the only way to solicit comments. A post can directly ask readers a question.

But when this tactic appears forced, it ultimately fails. Not only do questions have to be relevant to the post as a whole, but the readers' answers have to provide missing pieces to the puzzle. In other words, the post becomes a collective effort at understanding.

Once a post attracts comments, the student's replies to those comments can either encourage future comments, or dissuade other readers from contributing. Dave Taylor reminds us of what a blog's reader looks for: "I don't want to read just your [the blogger's] opinion. I want to read other people's responses to your opinion and, ideally, your retorts to them" (See Michael A. Banks' Blogging Heroes, p.9). The experienced blogger routinely has to think of answering one reader in terms of writing to other readers. Taylor offers the following advice: "Instead of reacting defensively--or offensively--what you want to do is what any business needs to do when they encounter criticism. Take a deep breath, and then come at it from the perspective of 'How can I make this a plus?'" (7).

But this should be open to debate in yet another class discussion. Bring a post's comments to class. Discuss how the blogger's replies affect the students' desire to join the conversation. Role play "blogger," "commenter," and the "silent reader." Ask the "silent reader" to explain how the "blogger's" response affects her desire to pay attention to or participate in the discussion. Let the students use their observations to make their own authorial decisions.

Internet popularity won't appeal to every student, so I encourage students to earn an income from their blogs. I tell my students they can use their blogs to host advertisements, sell their own products, write reviews, or collect donations (tips for their posts).

I also recommend that they Google the term "widget" to learn how to modify their blogs for self-expression.

While I'm a strong supporter of course blogs, I have to discourage teachers from assigning technology and marketing tactics that they themselves don't use. If you're thinking about assigning blogs next semester, sign up for a Blogger or Wordpress account. Start blogging and applying these marketing tactics ASAP.

If you encounter problems or develop any questions, feel free to reply to this post or contact me.