Fraudulent term papers: A breach of authenticity

The long view of security strategies for your network.

Authenticity is one of the six fundamental attributes of information (the Parkerian Hexad – see "Crime, Use of Computers In" from the Encyclopedia of Information Systems) that we strive to protect through information assurance. Submitting a term paper to a teacher as fulfillment of an academic requirement when the paper has been written to order by a ghost writer is a breach of authenticity as described by Donn B. Parker in his writings (see for example Chapter 10 of Fighting Computer Crime: A New Framework for Protecting Information).

Type "custom written term papers" into a search engine and you will get millions of hits (2,670,000 on Google in late June 2010). The criminals who run these paper mills are completely unabashed by their contribution to academic dishonesty: they use advertising phrases like "100% plagiarism free, fully referenced, free unlimited amendments & guaranteed privacy." Their Web sites have pull-down menus for ordering fraudulent essays of different academic levels (high school, university, masters, doctorate), number of pages and words, bibliographic style (APA, MLA, Chicago and so on), and language style (U.S. English, U.K. English and even "not a native speaker"). Costs are around $10 per page.

For professors receiving these fraudulently purchased papers, there's a real problem proving the fraud. The papers really aren't plagiarized: they are written to order and they are unique. They don't appear on the Web and therefore cannot be located using such text-oriented plagiarism-detection engines as DOCCOP.COM; because they are new, they are not in the database of student papers maintained by TURNITIN.COM.

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Authenticity is one of the six fundamental attributes of information (the Parkerian Hexad – see "Crime, Use of Computers In" from the Encyclopedia of Information Systems) that we strive to protect through information assurance. Submitting a term paper to a teacher as fulfillment of an academic requirement when the paper has been written to order by a ghost writer is a breach of authenticity as described by Donn B. Parker in his writings (see for example Chapter 10 of Fighting Computer Crime: A New Framework for Protecting Information).

Type "custom written term papers" into a search engine and you will get millions of hits (2,670,000 on Google in late June 2010). The criminals who run these paper mills are completely unabashed by their contribution to academic dishonesty: they use advertising phrases like "100% plagiarism free, fully referenced, free unlimited amendments & guaranteed privacy." Their Web sites have pull-down menus for ordering fraudulent essays of different academic levels (high school, university, masters, doctorate), number of pages and words, bibliographic style (APA, MLA, Chicago and so on), and language style (U.S. English, U.K. English and even "not a native speaker"). Costs are around $10 per page.

For professors receiving these fraudulently purchased papers, there's a real problem proving the fraud. The papers really aren't plagiarized: they are written to order and they are unique. They don't appear on the Web and therefore cannot be located using such text-oriented plagiarism-detection engines as DOCCOP.COM; because they are new, they are not in the database of student papers maintained by TURNITIN.COM.

Why should anyone care? More particularly, why should readers of this column care?

In the academic community, presenting someone else's work as one's own – whether through plagiarism or by having a paper ghost-written – is viewed with visceral horror. The point of having students write term papers is to help them learn; buying a paper written to order is such a subversion of the process that it is nauseating. Then too, grading a student's paper should be a dialog in which the instructor shares constructive insights with the student to improve the student's reasoning and writing skills; expending energy on the wrong person's work is at least frustrating.

But for non-academic readers, just consider the implications of hiring someone who had cheated his way through a college degree: would you be happy having such a person in your team? The most fundamental problem is the employee's lack of honesty. If she is willing to cheat to get a degree, what is she willing to do to you to get ahead? If he misrepresented his academic qualifications by claiming a degree he did not earn, what else is he lying about? If she considers ethics, rules and laws to be so unimportant, what would stop her from selling your trade secrets to the highest bidder? If he's willing to present someone else's work as his own in school, what will stop him from stealing – plagiarizing – other people's materials and getting your organization into deep legal trouble when the theft is found out?

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services and teaching. He is Chief Technical Officer of Adaptive Cyber Security Instruments, Inc. and Associate Professor of Information Assurance in the School of Business and Management at Norwich University. Visit his Web site for white papers and course materials.