Custom essay network offers to "custom write your college essays to match your language skills and academic level, whether you are a school, pre-college student having English as your second language or you are a Ph.D. student skilled in the language….In our work we use the same plagiarism scanning services as the most of your teachers use. So we grant 100% plagiarism free papers."
I knew such services existed (from this tell-all article), but I expected them to be located in the internet equivalent of a dark, dimly lit alley, right next door to an internet porn shop. Instead, they dominate the google search results for "economics essay" or "economics essay topics".
What I found most intriguing about about Custom essay network's service was the price list:
Flash order Completed within 8 hours $39.55/ page
Rush order Completed within 12 hours $34.55 / page
Emergency order Completed within 24 hours $24.55 / page
Fast order Completed within 48 hours $19.55 / page
Regular order Completed within 96 hours $15.55 / page
Economical order Completed within one week $12.55 / page
Prices increase by 14.47 percent in just four hours going from a Rush to a Flash order. Compounded, that would be equivalent to an inflation rate of 125 percent a day, 29,000 percent a week, and, if my math is correct, an inflation rate of 3.426E+130 on an annual basis.
Prices increase more slowly, however, when going from an economical to a rush order, however: 1.2 percent in four hours, 7.4 percent a day, 65 percent a week and an annual inflation rate of 2.21474E+13 percent.
Prices convey information – and in this case, they reveal a great deal about the psychology of cheating.
Any sensible person, planning to cheat, would use the economical order service – the cost of waiting and using a regular, fast, emergency, rush or flash order is astronomical.
But people don't always plan to cheat. Some plan to get their essays done on time – but procrastinate and procrastinate until they face a choice between failure and a $39.55/page flash order.
One explanation of procrastination is hyperbolic discounting. Completing a paper involves a trade-off between present pain (writing) and future gain (a passing grade). Hyperbolic discounting happens when people heavily discount future benefits, so won't undertake the present pain for the distant future gain.
The Custom Essays price schedule is a perfect example of hyperbolic discounting. A week before the paper is due, the benefits of getting a passing grade are far off, and so the willingness to pay for a paper is low – just $12.55 a page. Eight hours before the paper is due, with the benefits of getting a passing grade looming large on the horizon, the willingness to pay shoots up to $39.55 a page.
Now hyperbolic discounting is not the only possible explanation of Custom Essay's pricing schedule. Like I said, there are many such services available on the internet, http://customessayorder.com/, http://www.bestwritingservice.com/, http://paramountessays.com/prices , and so on. A week before an essay is due, the customer has an opportunity to shop around between different essay services, and find one that offers quality service at a reasonable price. Three hours before the due date, there is no time to shop around. In other words, the nearer the due date, the less elastic the consumer's demand – and essay writing services can exploit this by raising their price.
The costs for the writer increase, too, as the deadline looms near. There's not much time for coffee breaks or sleep if you're writing a 10 page paper in eight hours – and that's another reason why prices increase as time-to-completion decreases.
You might be reading this and thinking "I don't care about real-world examples of hyperbolic discounting. Custom essay services undermine the integrity of the entire academic process."
So what to do? In-class assessment. Break large assignments into multiple small assignments, reducing the temptation to procrastinate. Require some amount of hand-written work, for example, ask students to edit their draft essays by hand, and then scan and submit the edited version. In time, we may have anti-cheating software that will be able to compare a possibly-fraudulent essay to a piece of work known to be authored by the student, and estimate the probability that the two pieces of work were authored by the same person. Until then, it's a matter of constant vigilance.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
I was once phoned in the evening by an anonymous person who was also in my program. He wanted to copy my assignment and cheat. He offered me money. He was just calling down the class directory.
I turned him down.
It’s painful the cheating that happens.
While I understand the reasoning, I think that this:
for example, ask students to edit their draft essays by hand, and then scan and submit the edited version
may be more trouble than it’s worth. I think a significant proportion of students are really going to resent it – especially those who do not ordinarily do their editing on paper. It sounds like something you’d see in a Grade 10 classroom, not in a university.
Josh – “may be more trouble than it’s worth.” I got that idea from a colleague in the English department who does just that, but I tend to agree with you on the hassle factor.
Scanning stuff is actually remarkably useful though – it’s a good solution last minute emails along the lines of “I’m stuck on this question and have no idea what to do.” “O.k., scan what you’ve done and email it to me.”
Like all nerds my first reaction is to throw technology at the problem. Software developers use revision control to keep track of changes. The same tools would work well for latex or other text based formats and thus provide a full history of their original work. And MS Word has a track changes feature. You could tell student who edit on screen in Word to enable it (tips).
Can I ask for a paper with regressions lol? I will improve my productivity
Patrick – if the ghost writer does the original work and all of the revisions, track changes doesn’t help unless I can somehow identify the paper as ghost written from the document properties, e.g. author name, etc. It’s too much to expect students to learn Latex. Handwriting is one of the few things that’s really hard to fake.
As the old saying goes: “In politics and show-biz, the two things you really need to succeed are honesty and integrity. If you can fake them, you’ve got it made.”
Seriously. We reward leaders ( both in politics and business) who lie, steal,defraud.
Lawrence Eagleburger once said of Henry Kissinger: “Henry doesn’t lie because it is in his interest.He lies because it is his nature.” To which someone replied :”I won’t listen until his last words on the gallows.”
We have university depts dedicated to teaching the art of lying (marketing, public relations and journalism).
Whole faculties (Bus.Adm.and M.B.A.)
What should be the penalty for plagiarizing an MBA assignment? Increased bonus because you outsourced and cut costs?
Like after a war where we hunt the small-fry war criminals and hire the ennemy’s whole intelligence apparatus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
We try to inculcate moral values to people who clearly see all around them the honesty is for suckers…
Plagiarism is fairly easily defeated simply by discussing the paper with the student, even in cases where the student is not especially fluent in the language of instruction. While it is possible that the student will have made a heroic effort to thoroughly understand the content of the purchased paper, this pretty much defeats the purpose of purchasing it in the first place. Arguably the pedagogical objective is very nearly achieved if the student does make such an effort.
Courses with essays should also have final exams.
But these measures are costly in terms of the professor’s time. I’m not convinced that this is a problem that anyone has a strong incentive to solve.
I tend to agree with Jacques, but only for big firms with some degree of monopoly. Small firms and the people who work for them have no choice but to be honest – if nothing else it’s their one competitive advantage!
Frances:True enough. But what will you do when students can’t realistically write a paper by hand:
http://www.purdueexponent.org/features/article_e8dc0172-b854-11e0-a426-001a4bcf6878.html
Being an engineer and CS undergrad, I didn’t write many term papers, but I can’t imagine a term paper in block letters – even a rough draft. It would be ridiculous.
Wow, the ghostwriters really write original manuscripts!? Cheating has come a long way in the 12 years since I left university. Are undergrad classes in Econ typically too big to meet with every student to discuss their term papers? I imagine you’d be able to sniff out the cheaters pretty quickly by making them talk about their papers.
It used to offend my sense of fair play that people would divy-up problem sets. Example: 4 questions split between 4 people, each do one and copy three. Result: easy A. Some of us would, foolishly, toil through the whole thing. Result: humiliating C unless you were really, really smart. I usually scored high on exams (having struggled through the homework), but it never made-up for all the lost ground from the term work. And of course, the profs knew that people split-up problem sets, so they just made them bigger to compensate – which only worsened the plight of those flying solo. Not sure there’s really any way to stop it, short of switching to oral exams for everything – good luck faking your way through an oral exam!
Anyway, between cheating and grade inflation, it’s no wonder Masters is the new Bachelors.
“Prices increase by 14.47 percent in just four hours going from a Rush to a Flash order. Compounded, that would be equivalent to an inflation rate of 125 percent a day, 29,000 percent a week, and, if my math is correct, an inflation rate of 3.426E+130 on an annual basis.”
Frances, I think this is an example of setting price points for heterogenous consumers, rather than assuming that there is a single consumer who is indifferent between purchasing one version and another. I don’t think you can infer any sort of time discount from this.
On rsj’s comment:
There’s a demand surface for time against price and quantity demanded, and also a supply surface of time against price and quantity supplied, and what we are observing is the resultant market equilibrium curve of time against price and quantity traded. (Except Frances doesn’t have data on quantity traded, but presumably it’s non-zero at all those quoted prices, because they wouldn’t bother to quote prices for goods that don’t get traded in equilibrium). Frances is explaining the demand side. Presumably there’s also some sort of increasing cost of rush jobs that explains the supply side.
Yes, different points on the market equilibrium curve may be different consumers. But why don’t they all purchase the cheaper 1 week option?
(I find it hard thinking about demand and supply in 3-D.)
The hyperbolic discounting story fits with my observations, dealing with many students caught cheating. But, of course, I suffer sample selection bias.
Jacques René “What should be the penalty for plagiarizing an MBA assignment? Increased bonus because you outsourced and cut costs?”
If you click on that tell-all article link, it sounds like the writer develops long-term relationships with particular clients. And I’m thinking: what does this person do when they graduate with an MBA and land a job? Will they start doing their own work, or will they now start outsourcing their business letters and corporate reports, as in this post http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/11/out-sourcing-your-own-job.html.
Patrick – up until now, I’ve found that most students generally can write in cursive – or can produce some kind of writing that’s legible. Though the students I’m teaching now are primarily a pre-lap top generation, five or ten years from now thing might be quite different. Another serious question is: can anyone actually read this handwriting? I imagine the ability to read handwriting is decreasing in many places as teachers substitute powerpoint for writing on the chalkboard, email replaces letters – all the little opportunities for hand-writing reading evaporate.
Patrick and Ian MacT: “Plagiarism is fairly easily defeated simply by discussing the paper with the student”
Sure, discussing a paper will give you an indication of the probability that the student did the essay him or herself. But there’s a big difference between being 90% sure that a paper is a custom-essay product, and having enough evidence to fail the student/kick him or her out of university.
How confident do I need to be that something is plagiarized before I take actions that will cost a student hundreds or thousands of dollars and potentially four months or a year or more of their life?
A friend of mine who was hard up tried to get into this as a writer. It turns out most of those sites are scams, largely based in Eastern Europe. They routinely sell people pre-sold papers, and when authors who want to work for them submit the required two writing samples, they just take them and sell them. The scams all operate outside North America, and you’d have no chance of taking them to court. Nor would you want to go public with a complaint.
http://www.essayscam.org/Forum/
Interestingly, you can go on Kijiji and find lots of local people willing to do the same thing, though obviously they are more discreet.
The primary goal of education is to separate students into two groups: those who are willing to do something pointless and boring for a long time to get far off rewards and those who aren’t. The latter tend to procrastinate, miss deadlines, fail courses, and drop out. There is a strong correlation between intelligence and being future-oriented, and so it looks like schools are selecting for intelligence. That said, some minimal level of intelligence or interest it normally needed, but that is a secondary concern. Breaking assignments into multiple small assignments would be counter-productive by favouring the wrong types of students.
I know this better than most. I am an awful student. I don’t finish essays or reading assignments because I am too busy writing my own essays and researching my own interests. I want to learn economics, and so I have to sit through English literature classes discussing Dante’s Inferno? (Which, by the way, is the trashiest piece of biblical fan-fiction I have ever suffered through.) The whole point of suffering through those classes was, in my opinion, to be boring and irrelevant; it was a test of my ability to suffer tedium and jump through hoops for a special piece of paper or passing grade on some far off date. I find the whole situation hopelessly depressing and demotivating: that’s why I am not a good student. More importantly, it’s also why I am not a good employee (unless I am genuinely interested in what I am doing).
“How confident do I need to be that something is plagiarized before I take actions that will cost a student hundreds or thousands of dollars and potentially four months or a year or more of their life?”
Perhaps not plagiarism, but being unable to coherently discuss (and we’re not talking about an inquisition here) a paper they claim to have written certainly seems like grounds to give a much lower grade, don’t you think.
Admittedly I’m an arm chair quarterback on this, but inconvenience and cost to students doesn’t seem like a valid concern. Valid assessment of learning and the integrity of the school strike me as being much more important. Anything less than an A is potentially very inconvenient to any given student. Are universities going to stop grading and just hand out 4.0 GPAs to everyone … oh wait … never mind.
Frances (sorta OT so I won’t take it personally if you ignore me): to what extent is there institution pressure to give high grades? If you have a class that just doesn’t do well (and I understand from my teacher friends that classes vary from year to year), do you get flak from the dept. or the university? What about parents? Do you get parents calling you and berating you for not giving their little darlings A’s? How willing are parents and/or the institution to accept your assessment that a class or any given student really did deserve their low/failing grade?
Patrick – This series of posts is a way of me thinking through how I’m going to structure a required research essay course that I’m teaching for the first time this fall. I’m planning to give a significant percentage of the marks to in-class presentations and assessments so, yes, students will have to get up and explain their paper. It’s a good learning experience, as well as something that can’t be outsourced.
But that’s really different from saying to a student “you couldn’t explain this to me coherently, I’m figuring you had a lot of help with this, I’m going to reduce your mark from an A- to a C+”. We actually aren’t allowed to do this – any allegation that a student has violated the academic integrity policy gets sent down to the Dean’s office, so students are guaranteed of fair and consistent treatment (and so the offense goes on the student’s record).
In terms of institutional pressure to give high grades – nothing that as a tenured full professor I can’t resist! Where, though, I think there are legitimate reasons to question grades is when average grades varies wildly between course sections or across courses. So ECO 321 with Prof X has an average grade of 60%, and Eco 345 with Prof Y has an average grade of 75%, for example. Sometimes that can also be addressed with coordinated exams, but not always. I know that at Carleton profs have been asked by their department chair both to lower and to raise grades.
Fortunately I’ve not yet had any “helicopter parents”. Honestly I am constantly astonished by how little students complain about the treatment some of them receive at some Canadian universities – including some large “research oriented” universities.
Lee Kelly – I enjoyed your comment – but I think that even smaller assignments, e.g. a one page research proposal, a 2 page description of data etc provide ample scope for procrastination…
Frances: I had a similar course last year with a poli sci colleague. What we did is have students present a proposal within the first 3 weeks or so that we could offer advice on how to turn the idea into a feasible term paper. This was followed up by a presentation of preliminary results about a month later, where we’d provide feedback.
We also allowed teams of up to 3 people, so that reduced the workload a bit.
One other thing we did is ask our library people to give a presentation on how to access the data that are available to students. That was a very useful exercise.
Oh, and one great thing about teaching at a French-language university is that the market for ‘custom essay services’ is much less well-developed.
Shangwen:
Delightful. They get you coming and going.
Let’s forget about paying for essays — I have a hard time understanding that, mostly because I would always prefer to keep my money and just not turn in the essay if I wasn’t going to do it. But I’m also the type of person who wouldn’t pay money for video game swords.
But think of another example — concert tickets. Often the tickets have a pricing structure that is, say, $15 1 week in advance, and $20 at the door. It seems silly to convert that to a discount rate; There are costs to planning and committing to attend a concert. First, you lose the option of something better coming along, or the risk that you wont want to attend the concert at that date. At the same time, you have to plan your Saturday night activity, which requires effort. It seems plausible that for many income levels the “cost” of buying the ticket in advance is $5.
But that does not mean that, assuming you are willing to pay $300 for the event, you would be willing to pay $400 at the door, because the option value and effort involved is not proportional to the price of the good. It’s not an interest rate or a discount rate. Rather, it is overhead.
If anything, it might be proportional to the wealth of the person making the decision. A much wealthier person might value their effort and commitment as worth more than a poorer person who is long on effort and short on cash and entertainment options.
So I view this as price discrimination rather than a measure of time discounting, even if the underlying time discounting is hyperbolic.
I would have thought that if you asked for students to submit electronic copies of their work, you might be able to find the identity of the author (or the date it was written, how long it was edited, etc.) hidden in the metadata (it’s remarkable what gets stored in the metadata – when I was an articling student I was told a story about an articling student who made a comment in a document using track changes along the lines of “isn’t this illegal?” (it wasn’t). Although the comment was deleted, it was stored in the meta-data when the electronic document was sent over to the government. Needless to say, when the government retrieved that comment from the metadata, it led to all sorts of ackward questions). Certainly, if the student’s name is Joe Smith and the author’s name in the metadata is XYZ Essays Inc, that student will have some ‘splainin to do. It wouldn’t be fool proof (“I wrote it on a friend’s computer”, “I used my dad’s office computer”, “the clock on my computer is 3 years out of date” etc.), but it’ll be a red flag.
I guess eventually students and essay mills would get wise (and there’s no shortage of software to wipe metadata), but at the very least you’d catch the dumber/lazier of the cheaters (and, let’s face it, that’s probably not a small minority). Moreover, what’s not in the metadata might be just as interesting as what is. If a student submits a paper that was created 2 hours before it was due (or maybe two years before it was due, if it has been recycled), and 25 minutes was spend editing it, that sort of suggests that he might have copied and pasted it from somewhere else. Moreover, you could also insist that students submit papers with the metadata intact.
Mind you, back in the day, I usually had no trouble picking out the plagiarized papers, as they were either really terrible (and off topic) or absolutely amazing (I once nailed one student who had the audacity to submit a Professor’s (and a friend of the Professor I was working for) working paper as his own. It was far too good (and on far too obscure a topic) to be a students, but the reference to the author’s archival research in Geneva “last august” in the footnotes was kind of a dead give away that it wasn’t written by a third year undergrad. Then again, I suppose I don’t know how many plagiarists I didn’t catch (and other than the fellow who submitted the working paper, I’m not sure that anyone of them ever received appropriate punishments). When I was a TA in an economic history course, I used to fantasize about selling (or, for the sake of propriety, shall we call it “self-publishing”) my own undergrad economic history papers to the local paper mill in the hopes that I could bust my own students. I figured it would be a way both to make an extra buck and to make it easier to catch plagiarists (though I probably would have been in trouble had I actually done it).
Why bother coming up with a solution to this? Universities increasingly depend on the revenue of foreign students, so by cracking down–“in-class assessments”–you will turn foreign students away from your university, which in turn hurts your university and, by extension, you and the other academics employed by the institution. Sorry, but that’s the “macro” picture here.
For math methods in my undergrad physics program assignments we were told to work together on assignments. They were longer and harder than what one person could do. We all had to handwrite our own copy of the answers and understand them. There were lots of phone calls. The interesting thing is we didn’t always go to the smartest people in the class. We were much more likely to call someone with whom we could reciprocate and say something like “I got #3; can you help me on #4?” Of course we were a small, tightly-knit group which made us co-operate within some unwritten rules. I don’t know if this would scale to class sizes >30.
Chris J: assignments are a bit different from exams. (And maybe essays are different again?). In an exam, you are simply trying to measure what the student already understands. In an assignment, you are also trying to get them to learn it so they understand it. I do something similar to your physics prof. Except I say they may work together, if they wish. My assignments aren’t longer or harder than one person could do, so if they are able to figure it out by themselves, without help, that’s fine. But if they can’t figure it out for themselves, I want them to get help, from anywhere. Me, the TA, or other students. Because I want them to learn how to do it. But I also tell them that what they ultimately hand in must reflect their own understanding. Don’t just copy someone else’s answer. Discuss someone else’s answer, until you can figure out why it is the answer, then go off by yourself and write up your own answer out of your own head.
It’s a slightly fine distinction, but it seems to work, most of the time.
Your article may have an unintended result. I would guess that you, as an author and educator, would not choose to endorse the essay writing services that you mention. Because you link to them directly you are, to the point of view of Google and other search engines, endorsing those sites and passing some of your “link equity” to them. You are contributing to those sites getting better rankings in the search engines and more traffic.
Of course, you’re not going to generate an increase in demand, nor would your abstaining from linking to these three particular services reduce the likelihood that students will be able to find those sites or others like it in the future. Still, since Google is unable to understand the context of your link it is interpreting your links in a positive light.
By the way, if you are ever looking for a research topic, the bizarre underground world of link buying, with its rules and valuations based on the whims and secret rules of sites like Google is an interesting emerging market rife with information disparity.
Ben, yes, I wondered about that. If the sites were obscure I would have been reluctant to publicize them. Since they’re already at the top of the rankings, I don’t think this post will do much harm.
The internet is a strange place – there are sites that reprint fragments of WCI posts to make the site appear legitimate, when really it’s just a home for advertising and links.