# Term Paper Writing Services; How Illegal? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 18, 2019, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947 "2019-10-18T12:19:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/21 "2019-10-18T16:13:06Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Again, the question isn’t whether the student committed a crime but whether the author of the paper did so. If the student commits a crime (and I’m not certain about that question) then the author has to be (theoretically) concerned about conspiracy and aiding and abetting charges. The “wink wink, this isn’t for you to turn in as your own” would not get you very far with a prosecutor or jury, if it ever came to that. ---
**Author:** ![tricoteuse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tricoteuse/32/4334_2.png) [@tricoteuse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tricoteuse)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/22 "2019-10-18T16:38:09Z")
> [@susan](#): > > 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. And if I found out that either of my kids were having someone else do their work for them, they’d be in seriously deep trouble. I wish the OP would answer the questions people are asking him instead of trying to be cute. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/23 "2019-10-18T16:43:21Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > 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. > … Illegal? In the USA? Cite? Unethical, sure. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/24 "2019-10-18T16:43:54Z")
> [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](#): > > 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? According to Wikipedia, so-called “essay mills” have found themselves [civilly and criminally liable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay_mill#Legal_status) in various jurisdictions for abetting educational fraud. ---
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/25 "2019-10-18T16:44:48Z")
Unethical, yes. Illegal (in the US), no. [Cite](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/getting-paid-to-write-essays-and-term-papers-1360163). ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/26 "2019-10-18T16:48:04Z")
> [@HeyHomie](#): > > Unethical, yes. Illegal (in the US), no. > > [Cite](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/getting-paid-to-write-essays-and-term-papers-1360163). This is false. [Selling College Term Papers Online May Be A Crime](https://fatvox.com/essay-mills-101-selling-college-term-papers-online-may-be-a-crime/) (the link details the various applicable statues). ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/27 "2019-10-18T17:00:23Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > This is false. > > [Selling College Term Papers Online May Be A Crime](https://fatvox.com/essay-mills-101-selling-college-term-papers-online-may-be-a-crime/) > > (the link details the various applicable statues). So,\* in some states \*it can be illegal, depending on which services are sold. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/28 "2019-10-18T17:06:41Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > So,\* in some states \*it can be illegal, depending on which services are sold. As I said, it is false to make the blanket statement that selling term papers is not illegal in the US. There are heavy caveats as to jurisdiction and exactly what sort of service you’re providing. Boggles the mind how people insist on answering a GQ with their own intuition, when tons of legal cites are just a Google search away. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/29 "2019-10-18T17:11:23Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > As I said, it is false to make the blanket statement that selling term papers is not illegal in the US. There are heavy caveats as to jurisdiction and exactly what sort of service you’re providing. > > Boggles the mind how people insist on answering a GQ with their own intuition, when tons of legal cites are just a Google search away. Sure, which is why I asked for a cite. It isnt illegal under _federal_ law, of course. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/30 "2019-10-18T17:56:07Z")
Well, it might be. There’s a good chance that there is a federal law mirroring one of the state laws mentioned in that post (though I should note that only two of the laws referenced are criminal statutes). ---
**Author:** ![D\_Anconia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/67e7ee/32.png) [@D\_Anconia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/D_Anconia)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/31 "2019-10-18T18:34:02Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > Boggles the mind how people insist on answering a GQ with their own intuition, when tons of legal cites are just a Google search away. You mean like post #6 that people are replying to? It’s just as false to make a blanket statement that selling term papers IS illegal in the U.S. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/32 "2019-10-18T19:09:36Z")
> [@D\_Anconia](#): > > It’s just as false to make a blanket statement that selling term papers IS illegal in the U.S. Indeed it is, which is why I didn’t say that either. ---
**Author:** ![Helena330](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/helena330/32/531_2.png) [@Helena330](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helena330)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/33 "2019-10-18T19:18:43Z")
> [@Spiderman](#): > > 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 isn’t that great. I’ve only had a handful of professors use it. If everyone has to name their work the same thing (Like PSY 483: Essay #3) it will flag the name of the work on the title page as well as in every header. It will also note that I’ve plagiarized the students in my class. One time, I wrote a review of the film “As Good As It Gets” on how accurately it portrayed mental health issues. I got thousands of hits that I’d plagiarized real estate sites every time I mentioned the name of the film in the paper. Sometimes it works, many times it doesn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hilarity_n.suze/32/6223_2.png) [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hilarity_N.Suze)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2019, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/34 "2019-10-18T21:12:33Z")
It is not illegal to write for money. There are tons of sites, including some I’ve worked for, where there are requests for so many pages on such and such a subject, and freelancers bid on them. Now the problem with this site for me was that I don’t work for free or even for cheap, and other people mostly undercut my bids. Another site was headed by a guy who was so skeevy that I couldn’t stand to work for him. Were some of the requests for term papers? It looked like it to me, but I didn’t know. (Except for skeevy guy.) I know some of them weren’t, for example sometimes the request would say that the writing in question was for a certain website and must conform to that website’s style. But if you don’t KNOW it’s for somebody’s term paper, for a grade, then it seems to me you’re okay, ethically and legally. I have a friend who gets assignments via her website. They’re pretty diverse, and sometimes people ask for “academic diction.” She writes them, they go wherever they go, sometimes (in fact quite often) with someone else’s name on them. Illegal? No. Unethical? For either the writer or the end user? I don’t think so. I have in the past written a couple of editorials that went into daily papers under the name of some public official or another, as if they’d written them themselves. Illegal? No. Unethical? I don’t think anyone would say so, certainly not the politicians in question. After all, it’s well known that politicians hire speechwriters. Does anybody think Spiro Agnew came up with “nattering nabobs of negativism” on his own? When I worked in a certain department for a university, one of my jobs was to take a paper someone had written, smooth it out, and make its style fit so that it could be sent off to a scholarly journal. In some cases these were student papers that were going out to the journals under the name of the instructor, not the student, and the same university that would expel a student for submitting work not his own were paying me to buff up a student’s paper so that the instructor could submit work that was undeniably not his own. (Now maybe the student had agreed. I don’t know.) So set up a website saying you do writing and editing, and you’re good. People do that. People hire other people to write stuff for all sorts of reasons. I don’t think you need to do any special research to find out if what you’re writing is for a website or somebody’s class. (I don’t know whether it’s a crime to write term papers for people to turn in for classes. I think a lot depends on the institution. At the time I did it, when I was a student myself, if a student was found to have submitted work not his own, it was cause for expulsion, or being put on probation, or getting an F on the paper, or failing the entire class, depending on various factors. But there was no down side for the person who wrote the paper. At some point the university changed its policy so that if the person who did the actual writing was connected to the institution of higher learning, that person was subject to the same punishment as the person submitting the paper. So I quit doing that. I did still type papers for people and being a good little typist I corrected misspellings and grammatical errors, and if I ran into an actual error of fact I mentioned it to whoever’s paper it was. When I severed my connection with this institution I still kept on the right side, because they could always revoke my degree (although not, I think, for work I’d done before they instituted that policy.) So, to answer the OP, I would say you could set up a site, and if you don’t specifically say you’re writing term papers, you should be okay. I’m going to guess that you might make more money if you contacted the athletic department(s) of nearby colleges/unis and offered your services as a tutor. A person who helps them learn how to do the research. Or a person who, say, takes someone’s notes and types them up in a certain format. Or who gives the paper a critical edit before it’s submitted. ---
**Author:** ![Sunny\_Daze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunny_daze/32/438_2.png) [@Sunny\_Daze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunny_Daze)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/35 "2019-10-19T00:20:49Z")
We’ve covered: It’s bad and wrong and the students will fail if they get caught. I want to point out that you won’t make much either. I can order an entire novel to “self publish” on Amazon for a few hundred bucks. I’d look for a different line of income adjustment. ---
**Author:** ![jaycat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jaycat/32/3015_2.png) [@jaycat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jaycat)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/36 "2019-10-19T00:34:14Z")
> [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](#): > > Does anybody think Spiro Agnew came up with “nattering nabobs of negativism” on his own? Maybe not the best example here. ---
**Author:** ![ralfy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ralfy/32/600_2.png) [@ralfy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralfy)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/37 "2019-10-19T00:39:02Z")
You can probably focus on services like proofreading, etc. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/38 "2019-10-19T01:40:37Z")
> [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](#): > > I’m going to guess that you might make more money if you contacted the athletic department(s) of nearby colleges/unis and offered your services as a tutor. A person who helps them learn how to do the research. Or a person who, say, takes someone’s notes and types them up in a certain format. Or who gives the paper a critical edit before it’s submitted. I’ll just note that, if the OP’s information on his profile here is still accurate, he’s located in Saudi Arabia, so that may not be as viable an idea as it would be in the U.S. ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/39 "2019-10-19T01:53:20Z")
> [@tricoteuse](#): > > I wish the OP would answer the questions people are asking him instead of trying to be cute. I was not trying to be cute. I was trying to be asleep. I am in Saudi Arabia and only now woke up. I have reviewed the comments and see little that needs my input. I am asking about legality, not morality. As for the very modest audition project they asked me to do, I have found it harder than I expected. Given a real paper library I could have knocked it out in two or three hours. I am simply unfamiliar with quickly mining Kindle and online documents for cites. I have ordered a few books and will give the task a few more hours before my deadline runs out. I admit it has been a bit humbling. I suppose one would get very good at such a thing with practice. Thank you all for your comments. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947/40 "2019-10-19T02:02:41Z")
You ordered books to complete the audition paper? Isn’t that going to cost you more than you could possibly make? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/term-paper-writing-services-how-illegal/841947.md?page=3)