Being in academics all my life, I’ve of course heard of people who would, for a fee, do research for your undergraduate papers, or even write them for you. In fact, there are even sleazy online companies that sell pre-written papers on a diversity of topics. Pay your money, do no work, and you might even get an A.
But, thanks to alert reader Diana MacPherson, this is the first time I’ve heard of companies that will research and even write your Ph.D. dissertation—or a journal article—for you. The Cloud Consulting Company of Toronto, Canada, has placed this ad on a job-search website:
Yes, it pays a lot, but it seems illegal to me, for it’s fostering a duplicitous practice: passing off the work of others as your own. Can this possibly be legal? Even if it is, it’s unethical, but I bet a lot of unemployed academics would be attracted.
Seems like there would be a lot of business form the political science crowd.
It’s rather depressing to think that there are such good-paying jobs to do somebody else’s work for them. Why can’t people qualified to do this make the same kind of money doing honest work? And why would anybody be stupid enough to pay this kind of money for a degree that, obviously, by the very fact that they’re having to pay so much for it, isn’t going to get them a job that pays enough to make the degree financially worthwhile?
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It’s shocking enough to see students and prospective students advertising on freelancer sites for people to write their theses and entrance essays (some to medical school) but to have a real international business doing this is nuts — they aren’t at all ashamed! And that they can afford to pay their writers and researchers so handsomely means they are making a killing at it!
Lots of people aren’t ashamed to work making porn, or practicing law. Is this necessarily worse? (Besides, I’m not qualified for those others…)
There is no inherent dishonesty in either porn or law… Hum. Well. There is no inherent dishonesty in porn , at least.
There *is* inherent dishonesty in selling or buying a diploma, which is supposed to reflect a level of skill.
I’m sure the people who make porn are proud of their work and many lawyers are proud of their work and practice law because they like it. I know a couple of lawyers – one who helped immigrants and another that is in family law — both do their work because they love it.
Why pay for that ? If you just want the credentials to push some other agenda, say, creationism, then it’s a bargain.
From the other side, I understand the temptation to go work for such an unethical company — it’s a bit *nettling* to work to get top grade in all your studies, plus a solid PhD, + 2 years at least in a post doc (10 years total, and that’s a bare minimum), before even being able to realistically *aspire* to a permanent position, beginning at a whooping € 1752,38 / month (net, beginning MCF, or assistant professor, in France; don’t know elsewhere). You’re 33 years old in average before you even *get* there.
Even if you don’t do it for the money, even if you have money set aside by your family so you aren’t living in a hovel during you studies, it’s a bit of an extended middle finger. Looking for salaries for human resources jobs in France, I literally could not find a significantly lower salary than that, and posts with similar salaries are accessible after 2 years of studies + 2/3 years of experience, so you get there at 23 years old in average.
Amusingly, the sites I saw say that human resources jobs are among the worst paid…
I suppose the alternative career field if this one doesn’t work out would be politics?
I must throw in one reminder since today is the 50th anniversary of the march across the bridge in Zelma, Alabama. With all the politicians going to this event, guess who is not going – republican leaders of the House and Senate. Surprise, Surprise.
They’re busy standing in the courthouse doorway.
How much assistance is allowed for writing a dissertation? Can you have an assistant help gather info. Could someone edit your writing?
I’m guessing you are approaching the line at “writing the draft of the document itself”
What is the protocol for writing at PHD level?
You can have a professional editor if you can pay for it, and someone to help collect data, or even collect all of it is fine too. You should however have written the work being edited.
Thanks
It is also field and department specific what standards are expected, too.
We had another thread on the site about p-values in psychology. IMO, psychologists and others should be willing to move more to a model like in physics, where you farm out some of your mathematical modelling to experts. But there’s a resistence to do this for dissertations (I saw this in my sister’s case, for example). Of course there’s a grey area, too.
“passing off the work of others as your own. Can this possibly be legal?”
Yes it’s legal. Happens all the time in corporate America. Happened to me dozens of times.
You had no protection from this? When I was a corporate person, it was considered a breach in ethics and a firing offence.
ROFL as they say. My memoes were routinely incorporated in my supervisor’s emails. She got promoted.
I had my ideas stolen as well. I even had people promote themselves as having done a thing (a rather big thing) that I did (interestingly I did this big thing before this person was working in my area). I do know someone that was pretty much told to leave because someone else made a big kerfuffle about him stealing her work. I simply won’t stay anywhere where that happens now.
I read an article about a German company in this line of service some time ago. Apparently, it is legal because just because someone commisions a longish, academic text with a very specific topic does not neccesarily mean they will use it as their own dissertation, and how could the company know what their client would do with that text anyway?
That probably would work more in humanities, but I really don’t see if anybody could pull this off in natural sciences, at least at a semi-decent department. It also would require for the advisor to be in for it…
I think you’d be surprised. I’ve seen medical students advertising for help and this also includes research.
Mmmmmmm they can’t even proof read their own advertisement”needed needed”,what chance a well written dissertation?
It’s a trick to determine if you’re qualified!
I saw that too, and I was going to apply on that basis! 🙂
Seriously, this sounds downright unethical.
This is so depressing.
Yes, but is it more depressing than the story about the journal ceasing the use of p-values?
We could test that! Obtain a random sample of academics, and ask which is the more depressing (for good experimental design, you’d have to randomize the order in which the two scenarios were presented). Then run a two-sample t-test. Our null hypothesis would be that the two are equally depressing.
How ironic; we’d have to report the p-value of our result. Maybe we could pay someone to do the experiment for us!
No, we should really not be satisfied with knowing which group was more depressing. We should really want to know how much more depressing one group was than the other, on some meaningful scale, with confidence intervals on our estimate.
Yes, that would be a much better designed experiment.
But the glass is half full! Now, all those unemployed PhDs can earn $100K/year writing dissertations! (Unless… they don’t know how to write and research because they, themselves, cheated on their dissertations… Oh dear.)
From the writer’s POV it would be lucrative and interesting work. The lack of credit would bother me and helping a cheater succeed. This is why I will never be rich – my ego and my damn brain win its empathy morals.
The odd thing is they don’t even require that the applicant has a PhD!
Yes I thought that would be a requirement too. Maybe PhDs are too honest to be able to find enough of them? Or more likely the job prospects for PhDs are not as bad as we feared and they have all got something better to do.
If having a PhD was a prerequisite for writing an acceptable PhD thesis, they’d be quite rare and valuable.
Obviously the vast majority of people who have PhDs did it without already having one, but those who have more than one say that the second one was much quicker and easier to do. One person I read said the first took him 5 years, and the second one 3 years. If you’re going to do something professionally speed helps.
The ghost writer does nothing illegal. It’s the client who passes the work off as his own.
Although applicants are required to have “extremely high attention to detail”, the ad itself has a repeated word in the second paragraph: “assisting our clients in conducting the research needed needed to…”. That is truly ironic.
I don’t know if offering the service itself is illegal — it isn’t actual fraud until the student tries to pass it off as his/her own work, so I would think they would be the only one liable.
What saddens me is that there are graduate programs with supervisors so clueless and so little involved with their students’ work that they wouldn’t notice their students aren’t actually doing any research. There is no way either my spouse or I could have gotten away with that in either of our fields (science and humanities). While this is a terrible service, it is more a symptoms of a larger problem.
Even as an undergrad, by the time you got to your 4th year, your professor knew what you were researching and if you were off the rails or not. It is shocking that students are that disconnected.
I have seen adverts like this posted in my former campus, I don’t know who takes these offers.
In architecture school, it wouldn’t be possible. Your tutor knows what you are doing so much such that it would be a waste of time to try such business
Ah ha! This might explain some of the PhDs I know who are utterly clueless about everything, including the subject they got their PhD in! While I can’t prove anything, this just makes me even more suspicious of them and their credentials.
My university states very clearly that if you try to pass off research you did not do, you will be dismissed from your program. I’m sure others have a similar policy. Even if not illegal, this seems like a fairly big risk. Then again, I had a classmate steal my work last semester, in a circumstance where I could SEE that he did it, so I know people will do stupid things.
I can definitely see ghost-writing of the literature review being done especially for non-English speaking candidates who can’t plow through tons of English-language articles and dissertations. I would expect that to be more common in the sciences, where getting on with the research in the lab would be the focus and non-fluency less of an issue. Perhaps that’s my humanities bias, though! (in some humanities fields, being able to read German is as important as fluency in English)
I know graduate programs in Classics require working knowledge of two European languages in addition to English. They typically test you in these areas. I wouldn’t trust someone to research my stuff right. I can see someone paying for help in the language. But that’s more honest and it isn’t getting them to write the whole thing. Even as an undergrad, I read a lot of German books as they were stereotypically good at cataloging archaeological stuff and they seemed to have spent a lot of time on Augustan things which were my favourite. Then again, I was a big geek and no one required that of me. 🙁
I had to pass three language exams for the Ph.D. program that I didn’t finish. If only they’d given me an exam on postmodernism I could have flunked out on the spot and saved myself some grief
Is it possible to fail an exam on po-mo? Surely the concept of failure implicitly privileges one narrative above others and perpetuates the hegemony of the authoritarian establishment?
Ha ha, good point!
Or, shorter, if you deny truth, how can you award a grade on a factual examination?
I guess they just grade it completely subjectively …
Ha ha! Who’d want to be tested on post modernism when it can be mastered in all of 10 minutes?!
I what the student does is illegal, then assisting him in doing this would be illegal too.
That’s not true for a vast number of other crimes, and I’m not sure it’s true here.
I don’t know about the law in every American state (to be honest, I don’t know the definition in any state).
This is the definition in the Israeli penal law: “If a person does anything – before an offense is committed or during its commission – to make its commission possible, to support or protect it,
or to prevent the perpetrator from being taken or the offense or its loot from being discovered, or if he contributes in any other way to the
creation of conditions for the commission of the offense, then he is an accessory.”
Here in the states we have similar laws. Assisting a crime is being an ‘accessory’, and it can carry a similar or identical penalty to committing a crime. Paying someone to write a paper or dissertation is unethical and would be punished by a university if they were found out, but it is not illegal at the state or federal level that I have heard of.
If a student turning in a paper written by others is a criminal offence (note the if), then the other person who writes the paper makes the commission of the offence possible or at least supports it, and is an accessory.
Now, I am not sure that a student who does this commits any criminal offence. Even if he does, in Israel the accessory of a contravention (I don’t know if the same terminology is used in the US. It’s the lowest level of criminal offences, of which the maximum punishment is 3 months imprisonment).
The offence of the student may be “Obtaining anything by deceit”, which is punishable by 3 years imprisonment (and 5 if committed under aggravating circumstances). It’s a serious offence and the accessory is punishable.
Well, it is legal here, and maybe elsewhere. But if the writer is not a student at that university then they are out of reach of the university. Nothing happens to them.
To my knowledge, this has never been tested in court here. Universities can impose very serious punishments on offending students (temporary or permanent expulsion from university, loss of academic credit etc.). The problem is that I am not sure that these measures are as threatening as criminal prosecution, and more relevant to the topic, this leaves those who offer such services untouched.
There’s a great article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by one of these people:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
He tells how he wrote someone’s 160 page graduate thesis on business ethics (!!!). The client’s text is priceless:
“thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now”
Looks like a lot of fake job ads I’ve seen.
The job was also posted yesterday on Craigslist Chicago.
I think having someone research and/or write one’s dissertantion is unethical (as many posters have stated too). When I was working on mine — in the late Paleolithic — I even felt uncomfortable with the idea of having someone code my data.
This sounds like high end “work from home” scam. The pay seems too high for the requirements – they provide training? Really? The offer could be part of a scheme to extract money from applicants.
I figured it would be kind of cut throat in that you’d have to show yourself worthy and then they’d keep you but only 1-2% are worthy.
Perhaps they have an unpaid ‘intern’ system, which would be ethically consistent with the rest of the business model.
They should run ads in the BAST journal. No messy science to do – easy pickins!
I wonder what it says about the writer of this ad that they listed ‘meticulous nature and an extremely high attention to detail’ in the requirements, but missed the “needed needed” bit in the first sentence of the Job responsibilities section.
Ooh, maybe I have a chance!
It’s absolutely legal, so long as the original author agrees to sell their work under those conditions. Of course, the writer is completely safe, they can write whatever they want to write. The purchaser may be violating the rules of their university, but that’s not against the law. There may be other consequences for doing so however.
I bet the Cloud Consulting Co. charges for training. Could be a scam?
Can’t find a website for them. Ghost writers wanted for ghost company?
Wow, there’s even one company on Craig’s List and a host of others on the net offering dissertation writing.
Elance has people, including those applying to medical school, offering to pay others to write their entrance essay, thesis, whatever.
“Editor” is now a criminal offence?
I agree this sounds dodgy but consider. Most people, including most grad students, can’t write for shit. Many speak English as a second language. How much is it worth to shave a year off your degree by getting someone who can write to organize your work and craft clear prose? So there is a legitimate place for something along these lines. This might be legit.
Hmm, yes.
Reading the ad carefully, it doesn’t say “writing their dissertation for them” though obviously that could be inferred if one wanted to.
Also, research. There is so much stuff published in the literature that I imagine one could spend ones whole time just searching for references and still miss many of them. It would be embarrassing to come to a conclusion that had been disproved by some paper one had missed – or maybe worse, to come to the exact same conclusion based on the same sources as an existing paper one hadn’t seen. It would seem quite legitimate to employ an experienced researcher to go through the literature and find all the relevant papers. Practising lawyers do exactly that, composers of soundtrack music do, even writers do (most of the much-publicised research for Dan Brown’s ‘da Vinci Code’ was done by his wife).
I think the essential thing is that the student selects which references are relevant, puts the whole work together, draws his own conclusions and writes – himself – the draft (no matter how clumsy his English). Quite aside from questions of cheating, he should do that for his own protection, so that he can answer any questions that come up. Also, it is quite unlikely that Cloud’s ‘editor’ will be an expert in the student’s field of study, so if the student doesn’t direct it he will may end up with a nicely written piece of nonsense.
I’m not sure if Cloud’s advert goes over the line, I think the ‘writing drafts’ is the most suspect part of it.
It is one thing for someone to help edit your work, another for that person to do the work. Remember, this includes research.
Yeah, that’s the dodgy sounding bit. Still, if the intent is, “look, this is more than being an editor. You will be doing the prose and helping with the structure, so be prepared” then maybe OK. If this code for “write a dissertation” then …
I know a friend who does writing for business proposals. Works at home. Nice … 😢
There are also jobs writing for universities for applying for grants. This I can see as helpful because people don’t have time to do all that – it has to be boring though and I’d be worried that if they university didn’t get the award, it was all my fault!
Kinda depends whether the ‘research’ includes original work (which obviously the student must do themselves) or just searching the Net for references which can probably legitimately be delegated to an assistant. I’m presuming it still requires an understanding of the field to interpret and evaluate the references that the assistant supplies.
I teach a senior capstone class that culminates in a term paper on a very technical issue that cannot be plagiarized, but it still is vulnerable to being written by a ghost writer. I quickly learned about the online paper mills, as I soon had a paper turned in that was simply ‘too good to be true’. I looked online and was aghast at the number, size, flexibility, and cheapness of these resources. You can get a nice, long 20+ page paper that will exactly say what I want them to say for about $100. The student in question actually got a poor grade because of other reasons (they never came to class and lost a lot of points for that).
So I design the paper to be turned in in installments for proofreading. That is really the only tool I have for fighting this, aside from giving dire threats.
I’d charge a whole lot more than $100 if I were the ghost writer! 20+ pages is a lot of work and my legit writer friends who write for banks and such charge around $1/word.
$1 a word? Just my luck: I’m pithy.
Sometimes they charge a flat rate. It depends on the type of work and for non-profit, they sometimes charge less because the non-profit doesn’t have the money and the work may be easier. Of course, if you were to be wordy, companies wouldn’t want you because your writing wouldn’t be very good.
I know. That is why it is so scary. And the paper was good. Actually, it was beautiful. I also had samples of writing from the same student for an earlier, shorter assignment. He was certainly no Steven Pinker.
Perhaps the cheapness come from an ability to sell essentially the same paper many times. Or at least to cut & paste similar papers to mix it up a bit.
Yeah, I wondered about that as well. Volume makes the money.
I had exactly this same thing happen when I first began teaching our Senior Seminar capstone course. Two students turned in papers that were too good to be true. I was sure the papers were plagiarized (one could have been the first chapter in a book on bat ecology), but searched the web and couldn’t find the sources. I did, however, find the same on-line paper mills to which you refer. A hundred bucks for a 15-page paper, complete with references and the notes used to write the paper. When I called them on it, they turned in their “notes” with passages used in the paper highlighted. Of course the notes were printed out at our campus library, and were dated *after* the papers had been turned in. One student somehow cited a Canadian newspaper which didn’t have an on-line presence, and both papers used Canadian spellings of “colour” and “honour.” I failed both students, but the grades were overturned by university administrators after our attorneys decided that I couldn’t prove that the papers were plagiarized. Well, of course they weren’t–they were bought and paid for. So instead of getting an F, each of the students got an A (because the papers were awesomely well-written, Canadian spellings notwithstanding), and eventually earned a degree from our university. To this day, it remains the low point of my professional career.
I find all this so so so sooooo demoralizing:-( Do these people have no sense of pride in their own work? I was going to say honor, but that word’s gotten sullied by honor killings, etc.
Also, it’s “honour.” Hee hee.
For these people, they probably have pride in their work, it’s just that $$ trumps that pride.
I am sorry for that! I too faced a similar problem in that I could not prove it, so I chose not to pursue it. The low grade did make me feel a little better.
By sheer luck (no deliberate planning on my part) the paper I have the students write is based on a research project on Drosophila development that we do during the semester. It is completely unique, and cannot be lifted from any book or source on the internet. But I am obliged to go over the background and results and key areas for discussion with the class so a student could simply prepare notes for a ghost writer. That writer would have to have an undergrad biology background but I am sure that is not a problem.
Well, if this isn’t illegal then it should be. I second the opinion expressed further up that this is much harder in my area: you need actual data, not just writing. The real danger in natural sciences is not so much ghostwriting or plagiarism as inventing interesting data.
Having a ghost writer for a term paper or even a dissertation is a form cheating, not plagiarism. So it is not strictly illegal. Cheating is handled internally at a university, and the penalties are pretty serious. Actually, I think that because it is a matter handled outside of the law that the university can punish a student with less proof than would be required if it were a legal matter. At least I have seen this to be the case when a prof sees a student cheating on an exam, but has no physical evidence to prove it. The student was still punished based only on the professors word.
Mark Sturtevant,
When I wrote “ghostwriting or plagiarism” I did not intend to imply that the above is anything but the former, but they are still both ways of cheating that seem more of a problem in the humanities than in the sciences.
As for whether it should be illegal, it seems to me that this goes beyond students individually cheating on a test. Yes, that alone is not at the level of a crime, agreed. But here we have a company advertising its service of helping you cheat, systematically undermining the entire system of education a civilised society depends on. To me that falls under “agreement contra bonos mores“, and there should be a strong public interest in making the practice illegal.
Then again, if the USA could get its act together to deal with companies like this one they would also have outlawed diploma mills, so that seems unlikely. Also I would agree immediately that there are better ways of dealing with it, primarily by financing education as a public good 100% through taxes. Once each student is not a paying customer any more the incentive to tolerate such behaviour is much smaller.
“The real danger in natural sciences is not so much ghostwriting or plagiarism as inventing interesting data.”
Agreed.
Where do I sign? I’m tired of being a poor grad student.
Does the candidate have to pass the thesis defense for the ghostwriter to get paid?
Ken Ham’s “dissertation” would have been much better if he had used such a service.
LOL.
Yes, doubtful that it would have started off with, “Hi, I’m Ken Ham,” or whatever the exact words were.
Was’t that Kent Hovid, who got his “degree” from a paper mill? Just checked wikipedia.
Argh, I mean diploma mill.
Oh, shoot, you’re right. Thanks for the correction.
And the inadvertent chuckle as Muphry’s Law strikes again. 😀
This notice appeared on the job posting last night:
“This job posting is no longer available on Indeed.” http://is.gd/kbt7xM
At my university we have a utility called SafeAssign that operates as a plugin to our Learning Management System (Blackboard). This scans the internet for common text patterns with those electronically submitted by students. It reports back with a percentage of copied text, with highlights and hotlinks to the found text. Last semester I used this for the first time and caught several students – not many – in flagrant violation of the plagiarism policy. The penalties were not overturned – they were not even appealed. The students admitted what they had done, copying up to 67% of the text. More students had low values – not enough to trigger a major penalty perhaps, but with the data right there, one can hardly argue.
Sub
Two stories about academic-work-for-hire from a few years back (esp. 2):
(1) At McGill there was a great kurfuffle about a student refusing to allow his paper for a course to be sent to one of the plagerism detection services preemptively. He eventually won his right not to be judged by an unknown program without due process.
(2) Also at McGill, the philosophy department used to have a few professors return final papers by leaving them in a hall sorted by student ID or something. (I would never have done this, but …) Anyway, they stopped when someone found that *all the A papers from a section of Existentialism or something had been stolen*.
As for the “dissertations for sale” specifically, [sigh]. I do blame departments somewhat here, though – when I did my masterses, I was required to meet regularly with committee members, discuss drafts, and eventually (in one case) schedule an oral defense when the committee thought I was ready to do so. How could one possibly do these actvities if one had faked the research nevermind had the results ghostwritten? Are people giving out the result rather than having (employers?) contact the universities to very that someone was a student? I don’t get how this is even supposed to work.
I fail to understand why someone would pay for this. If they plan to go into a career, they will soon be fired for lack of knowledge. Then what? Hire someone to work for you???