by Rushworth M. Kidder

Sometimes, to invite reader feedback, I end columns with a “whaddya think?” This time I’m starting with it. We really need your help figuring out what to do about a Google Web Alert we received September 13.

Google’s little-search-engine-that-could, chugging through the dark that weekend, dutifully reported to my colleague Amber Kruk that it had found a website mentioning my 1995 book, How Good People Make Tough Choices. That’s nice, thought Amber. Then she read the alert in full.

Turns out Google was flagging up a site called AcaDemon, an e-supermarket of term papers for students determined to plagiarize. Among the papers for sale are several about my book. There’s your basic three-page model for $26.95, a deluxe seven-pager for $53.95, and the Cadillac edition (eight pages, citing four sources) for $63.95. “Buy and instantly download this paper now!” the site screams, promising “complete privacy.”

Along with the stupendous irony of helping students cheat their way through ethics classes, the site reveals that its writers still have some homework to do. “By understanding these ethical devices in Rushworth’s book,” one summary gushes, “we can see how she successfully creates a strong foundation within her book for ethical decision-making in this spectrum.” Perhaps that’s a laudable gender neutrality. After all, a fourth paper (nine pages, $69.95) titled “The Differing Moralities of Men and Women,” claims to identify “the three main differences between men and women, as described in How Good People Make Tough Choices” — useful information, no doubt, for students who can’t otherwise make that distinction.

Who writes these things? Experts? Hardly. AcaDemon solicits new products from its own customers. Got a paper that received a good grade? Post it here, agree to a 50 percent commission on sales, and then “sit back and watch the $$ roll in.” But it gets worse. Astonishingly, the site advertises its wares as “plagiarism free,” promising would-be customers that “we scan every term paper with our plagiarism-detection software to ensure that all text is original.” After all, we at AcaDemon can’t take a chance that papers written by the industrial-strength cheaters who visit our site might actually be cribbed from someone else’s site! No, our honor is intact: We promise never to sell a plagiarism to a would-be plagiarist.

It all sounds like an over-the-top skit on Saturday Night Live. But this is no April Fools’ column. This thing is real. With biting cynicism, the site’s name suggests just how real: Plagiarism is, in fact, the academic demon that haunts our nation’s educational systems. In a survey released in June by Common Sense Media, more than half of the U.S. teens surveyed admitted to “some form of cheating involving the Internet.” Thirty-eight percent have “copied text from websites and turned it in as their own work.” Nor do they seem to care: 36 percent said that downloading a paper to turn in as their own was “not a serious cheating offense,” while 19 percent said that “it isn’t cheating at all.” The problem isn’t exclusively American: A column last May by Marcel Berlins in London’s Guardian newspaper, citing a 2007 survey from Oxford University, reported that when applicants for medical school were asked to explain how they became interested in medicine, 234 of them told exactly the same anecdote.

What’s gone wrong? The standard complaint points to sloppy, inattentive teaching. Even with access to websites like turnitin.com, which helps faculty members detect plagiarism, students cheat with a brazen assurance that teachers don’t care. Commentators also note a lack of moral sophistication among students, who see no inconsistency between their vehement moral outrage at social injustice and their bland acceptance of their own duplicity. Observers also single out the self-delusion of graduates who, imagining they’ve been taught to analyze, reason, and create, find they’ve only learned to pillage, mimic, and regurgitate.

But back to AcaDemon — and to an analogy. If a site were selling illegal drugs, we’d find ways to nail it shut in a moment. If it sold identity theft — teaching customers how to invade privacy, steal account numbers, and rip people off — we wouldn’t tolerate it for an instant.

So why tolerate plagiarism sites? Plagiarism is its own kind of drug, lulling academic anxiety with a quick fix, reducing the pain of schoolwork without addressing the root cause, and quickly becoming habit forming when it brings success. Plagiarism is also a form of identity theft, turning out manikins cleverly disguised as graduates who know how to think, write, and take responsibility for their work.

As for AcaDemon, what should we do? Do we sue? Probably not: If they’re smart, they’ll make their writers use only paraphrase, not exact quotations, so they won’t need any permissions from our publisher. We can’t exactly treat all this with pride — “Jolly sad you’ve only got one paper listed on AcaDemon, old chap, while I’ve got four!” — even though that might help book sales. Nor can we climb on board by demanding our share of the royalties as hush money. So can we do no more than name them and shame them in columns like this — even though we can hear them chuckling all the way to the bank?

Whatever we do, we can’t do it alone. How should we — our institute, our schools, our world — respond to this demon? Your thoughts?

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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