TERM PAPER MILLS AND AI

I remember a student of mine at Franklin and Marshall College who submitted a term paper on García Lorca that my intuition and experience told me he had not written himself.

We then had small classes of ten or twelve students, and the rapport between teacher and student was very close. Dialogue was fluid and relaxed. I knew my students well, both from the classroom and from serving as adviser to some of them. I could assess their abilities quite accurately from our day-to-day contact.

This particular student was simply not up to it, and I knew it. I knew him well. The paper he had submitted was so far over his head that he could not have written anything remotely similar by himself in a million years.

He had hired the services of one of the then-popular “term-paper mills”. These companies proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, selling essays and term papers on practically any subject in the academic world. Was Othello right to kill Desdemona? They had a paper on that. Were García Lorca’s dramas existential? They had an essay on that, too. Anything you could possibly ask your students to write about, they could provide.

And this was years and years before AI, mind you. Nihil sub sole novum, of course.

What did I do? I was unable to prove the fraud or accuse the student of plagiarism. So I gave the essay a C and hoped he would not challenge the grade.

He did not.