Dave Tomar, a former writer for an academic paper mill, has crafted an entertaining, albeit also horrifying, memoir of his days (and nights) cranking out essays for college students. Though Tomar’s story is interesting, the implications of his experience are more noteworthy. According to Tomar, people can make a living helping students cheat through college, which is an indictment of the current state of higher education.
Unlike conventional plagiarism where a student swipes some text from the Internet or whatnot and presents it as her or his own, paid for plagiarism is much more difficult to detect. Indeed, aside from using in-class writing assignments to prevent it entirely, paid for plagiarism may be nearly impossible to detect. But, beyond the question of detection, why are so many students so desperate to pass a college course that they will cheat?
According to Tomar, “For many people of the Millennial generation, there is a rational pragmatism to cheating that did not exist for previous generations” (19). In other words, in a world where the value of an education has essentially been degraded to a certification which provides financial benefit (for example, qualifying for a job), cheating makes a certain sense in a cost-benefit analysis. The likelihood of getting caught is low, and the rewards can be substantial. Since college is viewed anyway as an expensive scam by some students, those students see no ethical problems in spending a bit more to employ someone such as Tomar to ease their passages through college. In their eyes, if one needs to get a clogged sink fixed, one hires a plumber; similarly, if one needs to get an A on a paper, then one hires a professional writer.
In addition to telling his personal story, Tomar comments extensively on the issues within higher education that have led to the flourishing of his former profession. These include the increasingly impersonalization and bureaucracy of many large educational institutions (25), the increasingly higher cost of college (56), Internet entrepreneurs willing to provide a commercial service regardless of the nature of the service (75), the accessibility of knowledge on the Internet (81), the growth of the entitlement mentality among students and their parents (106), the growth in for-profit institutions (123), and so on. We could probably add a few of our own as well that Tomar doesn’t note, but, regardless, his essential point stands: Something’s wrong with the higher education system when this can happen. To illustrate this fact most vividly, Tomar describes writing a doctoral dissertation in five days (177).
Of course, it wasn’t his own.
So what can be done to guard against students cheating in such a manner? Well, first of all, those of us in higher education need to work on the conditions that have allowed this cheating to flourish. In the meantime though, at the level of the individual instructor, it might be wise to develop assignments and assessments which can’t be gamed by bringing in a ringer such as Tomar. For example, in-class writing assignments effectively force students to develop their own intellectual capabilities. Beyond guarding against people such as Tomar, we can also lower the demand for such services in the first place. For instance, breaking large writing assignments down into steps may help students be more confident in their own abilities and less likely to hire a “shadow scholar.” Thankfully, most students probably do do their own work (if only because college is expensive enough as is), but it’s probably good to know that this situation does exist. Tomar is supposedly retired now, but it’s likely another talented writer has taken his place in the paper mill industry. Perhaps you have read her or his work already . . .
The book is available through OhioLINK.
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