I am looking to retire next year. I thought it might be worth working for (not establishing) one of those term-paper writing services. They seem to be based in either the US or UK.
Were I to undertake such projects, would I be committing a crime?
Make sure you don’t sell your services anywhere in Australia
I presume I would not be selling anything to anyone save the service. That is what I’m telling the judge.
I’m pretty sure this is like having a massage studio in a strip mall. There’s a completely above-board way to do it (in this case, by tutoring and coaching on writing without doing the actual research and writing for the assignment) and people doing it successfully, but it’s going to be difficult to attract the market for the above-board services while convincing the market for less-above-board services that you’re really not offering that. Plus the less-legal services are far more lucrative.
Or, did I misunderstand the question, and you are fine helping students cheat as long as you’re not legally on the hook?
First, to answer the question with any reliability, we need a lot more facts than you have offered. Where are you offering and performing the services? How are you advertising them? What representations are you making to customers? What have the users told you about how they will use the services? The answer to your question depends on the answers to these and many more. I will just say that I suspect there are many ways these services could be offered and performed legally in some places, many ways they could be illegal in those same places, and some places where I suspect they will be illegal almost no matter what you do.
The writing of a term paper is constituted of two separable components:
a) The argument, research results, or other intellectual content
b) The expression of that in coherent words and phrases, rendered in grammatically correct English
Composing part A for someone else (for money, or other considerations, or even for free) is illegal and violates the educational process.
Cleaning up and tuning someone’s paper – doing the Part B stuff – may not be, although that would depend on the class for which the paper was due. It pretty obviously would not be a legitimate endeavor for a grammar and composition class, an ESL course, etc. But if the course is Chemistry, or Anthropology? If the grade does not officially depend on one’s ability to write English well, the argument can be made that foreign exchange students, or students whose strengths lie in places other than the art of the well-written paragraph, should not be forced to work at a disadvantage, getting lousy grades because the brilliance or accuracy of what they’re describing or reporting on is obscured by the fact that they can’t write their way out of a paper bag.
I did it as an undergrad for awhile, advertising myself in the student newspaper as the “Mad Manic Term Paper Mechanic”. It was out in the open and professors knew I was doing it.
I got a shitload of students thoroughly expecting me to write the paper for them (the Part A stuff). It’s kind of like opening a legitimate qi gong tui-na massage place. There will be people who absolutely assume the service you are offering includes stuff you didn’t intend it to include.
I quit doing it pretty quickly because of that.
ETA: damn you Quercus! Ninja’d!
Whether or not it’s illegal, if my students are caught using such a service, it’s plagiarism and they could be expelled from the university.
The services may be based in the US or the UK, but per this article from last month’s New York Times, many of the writers are overseas in lower-cost countries where many people speak English but presumably are cheaper than Westerners. The article mentions Kenya, India and Ukraine.
I’m surprised they even still exist with sites like TurnItIn, where the student needs to upload their paper to some portal that compares it to a known database & other students submitted papers to check on the percentage of similarity. Too much & it flags it for the professor before they even see it.
TurnItIn is why these services exist; you need to get someone else to write an original paper for you now, rather than just copying and pasting one from the Internet.
is ghost writing term papers actually illegal in the U.S.? Sure, I’ll agree it is unethical, but I don’t have any knowledge of it actually being criminalized in the U.S.
Anyone got any citations for that?
I’m sure the schools would want to make everyone think it is illegal, but that could be a ruse.
What kinds of laws is the student breaking by turning in such a paper? The student obtained the paper legally, by contracting with PiQ to write it. I’m sure it’s against school policy to turn it in, but what legal laws are being broken? Would it legally be considered fraud?
How would what PiQ be doing be illegal? Would it be because he was an accessory to the crime the student was committing? Being paid to write a research paper is not a crime. It happens all the time for legitimate reasons, such as a company hiring consultants to do research and analysis. I would think that as long as PiQ didn’t explicitly know what was going to happen to the paper, he would be in the clear.
They got me doing my audition paper, Were the Dark Ages Really All That Dark? Would it be ethical if I asked someone to help me write it?
What statute does it violate? Obviously plagiarism is against the rules at all educational institutions, and can result in penalties up to expulsion and even deleterious consequences in later employment, but that doesn’t make it illegal. And in this case, the OP wouldn’t even be committing plagiarism; his clients would be.
I’m not trying to pretend that writing papers for pay is fine ethically, but that wasn’t the question asked. The OP asked if he would be committing a crime. Abetting plagiarism may be a crime in some jurisdiction so far as I know, but I am not presently aware of any such jurisdictions excluding the Australian draft legislation linked in post 2.
One of my nephews loved college so much that he got several different degrees. At one point he was employed by a company to write papers. He explained to me that the idea is for the student to read the paper and see how it was done, then to go write one on their own. (that was the justification the company told their employees, anyway)
It may have been shady af, but as far as I know he never broke a law.
Damn, there goes another irony meter.
Hmm, good point. I think I was thinking in terms of agreements that we as students sign on to when we enroll, and considering those to be legally binding… but the OP wasn’t positioning himself as a student within the institution so that’s not relevant, is it?
IANAL (is anyone who’s posted so far?) but it looks like this falls under the category of fraud. The student is attempting to gain something of value (a degree) and the term paper service is supplying the student with the tools.
I suppose the paper writing service would cite its disclaimers, “don’t use this to cheat,” to claim the student misused the service. And that’s why we have courts and lawyers to fight this out.
IAAL. It’s unlikely to qualify as criminal fraud because the link between the paper and the “thing of value” is attenuated. If the student submits somebody else’s paper to get a scholarship, there is a clear nexus, but that is not so clear when the prize is a degree since a paper is just one of many graded assignments. Plus, under federal law, the intent must be to secure money or property. A college degree is neither.
Again, the question isn’t whether the student committed a crime but whether the author of the paper did so.