Need an essay on the Vietnam War? That will be $66. An analysis of The Odyssey? That's $54.
These are a few of the term papers for sale on the Web site 1sttermpaper.com.
As midterm season continues, the service recently handed out its business cards on Locust Walk.
For $6 per page, the site -- which claims to be "the nation's oldest and largest term paper and thesis source" -- will reproduce an existing paper, and for $16 per page it will custom-write a paper.
The site is one of 780 that facilitate what many regard as online plagiarism -- a 10 percent increase from the year before -- Internet-security organization Secure Computing Corporation reported last month. Most of the 780 sites are "essay banks," which provide term papers for a price or for free.
Pennsylvania is among several states in which the sale of term papers over the Internet is illegal, and plagiarism can result in suspension or expulsion from Penn.
Each year, there are 60 to 100 cases of academic dishonesty reported to the Office of Student Conduct. OSC Director Michele Goldfarb said that about a third of these cases involve plagiarism and that the purchase of papers is a small fraction of that.
A survey of nearly 2,000 Penn students by the University Honor Council in the spring of 1999 -- the most recent academic dishonesty survey at Penn -- found that 61 percent of students would not report a case of academic dishonesty to the OSC.
Debbie Feldstein -- who is currently a freelance writer in New York -- spent six months in 2001 writing term papers for Internet sites. She left the business after discovering some of the laws that surround term papers for sale.
Feldstein wrote for companies that were looking for people to write book summaries.
She charged $25 to $50 for papers on American and European literature but said she did not initially realize what her work was being used for.
"The more the business itself grew, the more I saw it as the opposite of education, the worst possible application of Cliffs Notes," Feldstein said.
She added that many sites now try to pass themselves off as "research assistance" services in order to dodge legal issues.
"I think like a lot of 'truth in advertising,' it's deceptive," Feldstein said. "It's specifically designed to protect people who are on the edge of what's legal or what's moral. ... They know that they're in a gray area, and they're OK with that."
Employees of 1sttermpaper.com and several other similar businesses refused to comment.
In 1998, Boston University sued eight such companies, accusing them of selling papers to students who intended to turn them in as their own.
A federal judge dismissed lawsuits against five of these companies, ruling that the federal court was the wrong place to challenge the practice and that federal racketeering statutes did not apply.
Others settled and promised not to sell papers to BU students in the future or to close their Web sites.
The university had sued several term-paper companies 26 years prior and won the case, forcing the Massachusetts legislature to ban the sale of term papers.
History professor Michael Zuckerman said the only case of plagiarism he has seen in nearly 40 years at Penn was that of a student who copied sections of a paper from another student in the class.
Zuckerman said he tries to prevent plagiarism by assigning "papers that are quirky enough and idiosyncratic enough so that there isn't anything out there that could be used."
However, some services, including 1sttermpapers.com, offer custom-written essays that tailor research to meet all the specifications of an assignment and cite books from the class.
Despite this, English Department Chairman Jim English said it is usually easy to tell if a paper was not written by a student.
"It lacks any kind of individual style," English said. "It shows no serious engagement with the work that we did in the class."
However, College junior Jeff Ransom said it may not necessarily be so difficult for a paper to go beneath a professor's radar, especially in a large class.
Although Ransom did not know anyone who had bought a paper online, he said as long as there are heavy workloads and lazy students, there will be a market for term-paper sales.
Nonetheless, Ransom said that he would not trust one of the sites.
"The majority of us have a certain amount of pride in the work that we do," Ransom said. "I know that I could do better work."
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