Lately we have been seeing more attention given to the potential for cheating on the Internet. Cheating on papers in college is nothing new. We can think of more than one famous person whose work was later discovered to be plagiarized to one degree or another. However, the ease of use the World Wide Web brings to cheating is something relatively new. Time was, a student needed to go to the library, find books, and transcribe the information he wanted. Or, she went to her sorority house and grabbed an old paper from a file cabinet down in the basement. Now, with a simple drag and click words can almost effortlessly be transported to a custom term paper. Nothing could be easier. Recently we visited a few of the sites offering papers to malfeasant students.

Cheater.com is one site which offers term papers gratis to surfers. Their FAQ claims 72,000 members. Ostensibly, the papers are put online for brainstorming purposes only. Other links to research sources are also provided. Indeed, Cheater.com could be considered a legitimate research source.

Cheathouse.com (a.k.a. “An Evil House of Cheat”) offers tips on how to cheat on exams along with their online term papers. Tips included were wearing a baseball cap to hide eye movement, writing notes on the desk, etc.

SchoolSucks.com takes a unique approach. It makes no bones about its intended purpose: providing the means to beat the system. SchoolSucks has branched out since its inception. Now there are links to “Sucks Auctions,” free e-mail and free web pages, among others. Their archive of online papers is easily searchable by keyword or topic. We also noticed ads for something called “Urine Luck,” purportedly a dietary supplement aimed at altering drug tests for marijuana usage. This helped create an aura that indicates SchoolSucks.com is, in our opinion, definitely a subversive site for online cheating.

A link on the SchoolSucks site led to something called 12,000 Papers.com, a site for a company called The Paper Store out of New Jersey. According to the site owners, 12,000 Papers.com has better essays than the free ones available on SchoolSucks, and they charge accordingly. The fee is $8.95 per page, plus 95 cents to e-mail the paper to you. Alternatively you can pay $8.95 to have it faxed or $18.95 to get it by FedEx next day air. They take all major credit cards, checks, money orders, or C.O.D. through FedEx and they can even translate the paper into a language besides English. In addition to offering 12,000 papers to search, this site offers custom research paper writing. Custom papers are more expensive at $18.95 per page, and are also available on a one day turnaround in emergency situations. College students need never write a paper again, providing they can afford the fees.

In the midst of our meandering for term paper sites we also came across School Paper.com (download their entire library of papers for a one-time charge of $20.00), NetEssays.net (includes sample college admissions essays), EssayCrawler.com, which searches other sites for essays, and EssayWorld.com. Needless to say, there are thousands of venues available to the cheating student, and we did not look at them all.

So, what can a teacher or professor do knowing that students’ papers can be easily cut and pasted from online material? Common sense prevails, of course. An experienced eye can usually detect material written by a professional rather than a teenager. Also, SchoolSucks in particular notes that their papers are freely available for anybody to look at