the college term paper writing service

the college term paper writing service

The Ethical Dilemma of College Term Paper Writing Services

1. Introduction to College Term Paper Writing Services

College term paper writing services are student-focused companies designed to make the college coursework process smoother and easier. Typically, students who have papers and projects due will hire college term paper writing services to do the paperwork and turn it in. The student then receives the grade and learns from examples and corrections made by professionals in the various disciplines. Due to the confidentiality that college term paper writing services afford, identifiers, numbers, and names are also removed and replaced with generic codes or identifiers to protect both the student and the company. The business has been around as long as the internet and college coursework have been compatible, which is about 20 years.

Since these term paper writing businesses came to prominence, numerous ethical dilemmas have arisen regarding whether or not students should or should not use them and whether or not colleges and universities should prohibit students from doing so. As defined by Merriam Webster, it is a situation involving two (or more) alternative choices, neither of which is absolutely acceptable. An ethical dilemma embroils dilemmas that can land a person or group of individuals into spiritual, legal, or moral related issues. Today, nearly every college and university in the United States has a prohibition against using any form of academic dishonesty, and veiling the policy goes a long way in treating all individuals in a nondiscriminatory fashion. It was once proper and customary to hold students in a disciplinary standpoint, and now it is favorably moral to treat them as if they were innocent until proven guilty. In today’s online world, few investigative means exist to completely track a writer’s progress from a given source—personal access to a given source is blotted out so no one can truly see from which computer the writer is utilizing. Writers have numerous computers for writing through the use of commercially hosted sites such as Essaytyper. Only a court order will force a company to reveal the actual source of a document.

2. Ethical Implications of Using Term Paper Writing Services

Students turn to term paper writing services for a variety of reasons. Some are too busy to write their papers, have poor research skills, or for some other reason are simply unable to adequately perform the work required by course assignments. Whatever reasons they have, the use of term paper writing services raises important and difficult ethical questions to which students may not even give a thought.

In considering the use of such services, the most evident question is what are the ethical implications for the student, or more infrequently, the institution which commissions the service? The first and most immediate answer, of course, is that it is cheating. You are fraudulently misrepresenting the origin of the work you will ultimately hand in, presenting a purchased work as your own. Most colleges and universities have rules, regulations, and policies related to academic honesty and integrity, including severe punishment for students who are suspected of cheating.

Such regulations are meant to ensure that students encompass obviously essential study skills, and especially those related to research, reading and writing independently, critically and analytically. Such skills are crucial to student learning, but also to the kind of personal and professional development that college attendance is meant to promote. If using term paper writing services makes you look exactly like you don’t have these skills, it makes you look dishonest. If we see the use of these services as unethical, this is one of the underlying facts. The more idealistic motivation for going to college is to learn, to broaden and refine knowledge. If learning can happen somewhere in the process of creating a term paper, you’ve missed something very important by simply buying your term paper.

3. Regulatory Measures and Academic Integrity Policies

Regulatory measures and academic integrity policies. In response to this, the student term paper industry, many educators and college administrators have sought to shut down these services and/or prevent students from buying or using term papers. Some colleges have emergency expulsion hearings when they are able to ambush students with bought term papers. There are many local and national organizations, such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), that have produced guidelines for members which prohibit term paper buying. Several universities restrict computer account privileges for students caught using term paper writing services. Some do so for a fixed term while other universities do so for an indefinite term until the offender completes an educational session.

There are many punitive measures against students caught using term paper writing services. Congress passed the “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974” which permits parents access to their children’s educational records until the student reaches the age of 21. A protocol that uses this provision is practiced by Barry Thatcher, Vice-President of Dean of Instruction for University of Alaska SE. In many colleges, use of a term paper writer is academically dishonesty which if caught will result in the student being awarded an F (failing) grade along with a permanent notation for their personal academic record (transcript) that they purchased or otherwise did not comply with the assignment. A different approach to term paper writers is an option not to prosecute and instead the passage is merely marked as plagiarized with a grade of zero. Some instructors announce their anti-term paper buying policies to their classes with the hope that their openness will discourage cheating. Some colleges have an academic code of conduct as a statement of rights and responsibilities that are upheld by faculty, staff, and students. Violation of the code may result in actions ranging from a reduction of points for an assignment to suspension or dismissal for an undergraduate or the appropriate penalties for a graduate student. Some segments of ethical perspectives rely on the nature of the acculturation process to generate or maintain “ethical” behavior. By making a college environment less violent, the spread of term paper writing services can supposedly be slowed or checked. Putting students in settings that entrain ethical behavior is in line with the educational goals of colleges.

4. Alternatives to Term Paper Writing Services

For many students, college comes with work and home obligations which make it nearly impossible to dedicate the necessary time to their studies. These students often turn to custom term papers online to meet their coursework needs. In many cases, students are unable to afford high-quality work and turn to unethically operated businesses that frequently are unable to produce high-quality work. However, providing high-quality work is making others successful off of your own work, which presents an ethical challenge. In this light, working with a writer who composes term papers for very little is unethical. However, many students do it because they believe they have no alternative. Various alternatives for students in the place of term paper services are discussed in this section.

One of the most popular alternatives to term paper services is to begin and complete work early. By utilizing time management techniques, you work on sections of an assignment at various times to ensure completion before a due date. Colleges are great places for finding assistance in skill building and subject studying. You may find assistance in learning from peers or instructors. Many colleges and universities provide tutoring services. Instructors will likely be glad to assist you with subjects that are unfamiliar to you. If a tutor or instructor isn’t available, perhaps a mentor will be willing to offer you advice and oversight. Many instructors are available for consulting and mentoring. Many colleges establish libraries in which they provide many types of resources, including help in writing academic papers. If this is available to you, utilize it. Use all resources possible. Also, consult online resources for academic and writing. A simple search in a search engine will yield many useful results for refining your skills for academic papers.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

In the quest to find a solution to the ethical dilemmas created by term paper writing services, we isolated seven specific problems. The first is that many of the students already do the work themselves. Then, many students accessing these services do not take the time to understand their school’s policies. Finally, a lot of the people buying papers are not really doing so to bring home A’s and B’s. They are more intent on getting a passing grade. These people will still be in the other two groups and any solutions will help them, but they are not currently the primary market. Those customers continue to be cheaters.

Although plagiarism software does exist, there are many ways customers can and do circumvent it. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) violations prevent any real vetting of whether a student is in fact using the writing service. Finally, there is a view that addressing how to deal with the problem is dealing with the symptom, not the root cause. The fact that students feel like they cannot complete an assignment speaks of some kind of root problem that should be identified and addressed, not just how are they cheating. As such, we have a series of recommendations corresponding to the three categories we broke the essay buyers into. These are potential solutions to these issues, but the legitimacy and potential for success of each initiative requires further study.

For educational institutions that have ethnic integrity as a goal, we make three recommendations. If not already in place, the students of these institutions should have it further drilled into their heads that the use of these services is plagiarism and finding out that you use them can result in, at the very least, a zero on an assignment and at most, expulsion as some schools do. Similarly, they should be subject to zero-tolerance punishment should they attempt to otherwise circumvent the system, i.e., through pens or any self-report schemes. Finally, schools can play the drug card. If more students knew how these schools felt about writing services, they wouldn’t be nearly as attracted to them. They could put this information in their course catalogs and everywhere else they advertise opening.