No bang for the buck

You have a paper due tomorrow that you haven't started. You haven't even done any research. And it has to be 10 to 15 pages. Frantic, you search online for information about your subject to see if you can throw something mildly presentable together in the next 12 hours. But in looking for that information, you find something entirely different -- term papers bought and sold online. And there's one about your subject. By simply typing in your e-mail address and credit card number, all your problems could be solved within two hours. What do you do? Perhaps you remember signing something like this: "I have agreed to abide by the provisions of the Code of Academic Integrity and I certify that I have complied with the Code of Academic Integrity in taking this examination or preparing for this assignment." Sound familiar? This is what most professors ask us to sign at the end of our exam blue books. Usually, most of us just sign it and move on with our sweaty palms and chewed pens to take our exams, not giving it a second thought. But clearly, professors at Penn have been taking it quite seriously. One professor even said at the beginning of a course this semester, "If you don't follow these regulations, you'll be under penalty of death. And I will follow through on that." (They never mentioned that on the admissions video.) With the accessibility of papers online, getting closer to that academic guillotine has never been so easy. Having read a classified ad in the DP last week promoting a Web site that offers to buy and sell term papers online -- does that seem stupid to anyone else? -- I decided to investigate. The Web sites I browsed through usually had the same format: Cheesy names like "GeniusPapers" or "FastPapers," costs from $5 to $14.95 a page -- depending on speed and quality -- and sample papers demonstrating how "excellent" their work is. To find out if these papers would actually work, I bought -- excuse me, brought -- a paper on Macbeth to English Professor Peter Stallybrass, who teaches the introductory Shakespeare class; a paper on The Great Gatsby to English Professor Al Filreis; a paper on Kate Chopin's The Awakening to English Professor Joseph Dimuro; and a paper on Roman paintings to Art History Professor Larry Silver. They seemed less than pleased. Professor Stallybrass read the paper on Macbeth and commented: "[This paper] does everything I try to get students to avoid in a paper. It tries to deal with a very big topic (Aristotle's views on tragedy) in a very general way -- and the result is unsurprisingly a string of cliches. The writer has only one point to make and s/he makes it again and again and again." He summed up the paper best when he says: "It's one great achievement to say nothing -- at length.... The paper is a disaster." I think he didn't like it. Professor Filreis didn't seem thrilled by the paper "analyzing" Gatsby. "The essay is superficial," he said. "It is a typical 'B+' paper at the level of high-school English." Worse yet, Filreis says, "no student at Penn who wrote in this way -- making no references to language as language, writing only about 'themes' -- would do very well with such a paper." Similarly, Professor Dimuro said: "All this paper wants to do is talk in a very general way about marriage in the 1990s, which reduces a brilliant literary text to something like a segment of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus." Having read the Roman paintings paper, Professor Silver concluded: "It is an honest summary and a useful precis -- if one were using it as a Cliff's Notes study aid. Of course, submitted as a student's original work for a class, it is something else again. The only academic sin is plagiarism (or misrepresentation). "Whoever wrote this used his/her sources ably, though certainly did not provide any level of analysis in this rather brief paper. Anyone using that student's summary as his/her own here is as guilty of misrepresentation and unauthorized replication as those Napster downloaders." Touche.

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