Search

In "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Indiana Jones--perhaps the last heroic professor to appear in a major Hollywood film--survives a series of adventures involving spiders, snakes, treacherous colleagues, and countless Nazis who are determined to recover the ark of the covenant for their "Fuhrer." Apparently the ark has mystical powers. Ultimately, Jones recovers the ark. But the great artifact is not displayed in a museum or used in the war effort; instead it is enclosed in a packing crate and wheeled into a vast government warehouse, never to be seen again. That is what happens to the majority of undergraduate projects in the humanities. Heroic research is undertaken, and the student suffers mightily during the writing process. But after being submitted for a grade, the results of all that work are filed away, never to be read again. Fortunately, people are living at a moment when students can undertake a far wider range of learning experiences than was possible when the traditional research paper was the gold standard of scholarly production. This author has written several columns about what the "digital humanities" movement means for scholars. But as a teacher at a liberal-arts college, what also excites him about the digital humanities is what it offers to undergraduates: Students can "build" as well as "write." The digital humanities encourages scholars and students to use the Internet to present their work to a global audience. There is no guarantee that the world will beat a path to one's online project, but at least it is available, and updatable. It is not a moribund, bound manuscript shelved in a university library's off-site storage warehouse. In what seems to be the worst of times for higher education, the digital-humanities community is cultivating an academic culture that enables new directions in research while it reduces the warehousing of neglected scholarship and the isolation of scholars.

Judge Claude M. Hilton, of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, in March found that scanning the student papers for the purpose of detecting plagiarism is a "highly transformative" use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. He ruled that the company "makes no use of any work's particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works," and that the new use "provides a substantial public benefit." The case has been closely watched by the thousands of colleges who use the plagiarism-detection tool, called Turnitin, as well as by opponents of the service, who hope to prevent professors from becoming anti-cheating police. In March 2007, four high-school students--two in Virginia and two in Arizona--sued iParadigms, the company that runs Turnitin, arguing that the company took their papers against their will and profited from using them. The students' high schools required papers to be checked for plagiarism using Turnitin, and the service automatically adds scanned papers to its database. The company boasts about the size of its database as a selling point, and colleges pay thousands of dollars a year to use it. The students sought $900,000 as compensation for six papers they had submitted.

In this humorous essay, the author responds to a critique of one of his articles found on a web site that sells term papers. He points out the irony of finding an analysis of an article covering college honor systems on a site that helps students plagiarize, and offers his own critique of the paper.

A well-established market in prewritten research papers violates the ethical standards of every college, but it persists because selling papers is not illegal and the cost and difficulty of prosecuting a student suspected of submitting a purchased paper is prohibitive. (MSE)

Companies in the term-paper-research business insist that they are legitimate enterprises. Research Assistance of Los Angeles insists that "the best way to learn research techniques is through studying research papers." Author's Research Services adds a disclaimer that all materials are sold for research assistance, not as finished product. (MLW)