I happened to stumble (literally) across a website offering students essays for sale. Having taught at or been a teaching assistant at several universities, I know how seriously they take plagiarism: many schools will expel students caught turning in a paper not their own.

That’s why the this particular site, which claims to be among the “legitimate” essays companies, has guarantees that ring a little hollow: “Your Money Back And A Free Rewrite.” Right. You can mail in that rewrite to the degree mill you’ll be attending next. There’s dark humor about how this site touts its legitimacy and excellence, and indeed it is a slick site, with a video introduction and offers of live telephone support. There’s even a long section warning potential customers against their unscrupulous competition.

You should also be aware that some services also indulge in fraudulent activity. The main source of this problem is that some companies seem to take the attitude that their customers are cheats and that they deserve to be ripped off.

Message: we don’t rip off our cheats.

I imagine that turning in this kind of essay works only in classes where there are too few papers during the term to recognize a student’s style, or there are too many students for the professor and teaching assistants to keep up with. That’s because you would recognize a marked improvement in writing and investigate it more (plagiarism is to academia what terrorism is to airports).

Or maybe it works better than I think, as the time I caught plagiarism wasn’t even like that. The author of a paper I was grading had forgotten to remove another student’s name from the table of contents page. In another example a colleague showed me a plagiarized paper in which the student had left in the top margin the URL of his source. It makes me wonder how many smart plagiarizers actually get away with it.

Now if only I could keep that same excitement into early November, when papers will really start weighing down on me. I guess nothing gold can stay.