I have written in this space about the responsibility professors bear when it comes to cheating and plagiarism. If you cannot be bothered to invigilate your own examinations, or at least arrange to have them supervised in a responsible fashion, the result will not be a surprise. Similarly, if you trot out the same term paper questions each year, or if these are boilerplate queries that generate a lot of google hits, you will be checking for plagiarism for the rest of the term.
But the proliferation of "essay mills" and their scientific equivalents on the internet trouble me more. I may spend days and days scouring the library for a quotation from a letter on which to hang a unique question and then, for my trouble, have my student solicit electronically someone to fashion a unique response. Thanks to e-bidding wars, a student can sometimes secure a purpose-made essay on the cheap. It used to be that there was always a trenchcoated graduate school dropout skulking in the library who could, on a limited basis, provide such a service. Now there are, potentially, a thousand, ten thousand such people networked throughout the world.
Can we entrap students who use these services? Can we win these auctions and submit to them answers with a poisoned pill? I do not think so. And from what I have seen, the web sites that host what they claim to be "legitimate" operations will not help us, either. But what I do tell students is that they are relying on third and sometimes fourth parties to help them meet strict deadlines, and while we cannot know who is seeking this service, the students cannot really know who is providing it. If the person providing the answers stitches you up, intentionally or otherwise, there will be no one to help you. And, really, who is comfortable having that little control?
