College Life Today

Outside of plagiarism just being dead wrong, there are psychological issues involved with taking someone elses work. I’m always preaching anti-plagiarism and being careful about citing information. The resent accusations of plagiarism against Coldplay illustrate how delicate an issue plagiarism is for artists. Basically, Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, is accusing Coldplay of stealing a guitar riff of his in the song Viva La Vida. Yusuf is a little sensative of this issue, as he has, in the past, accused several artists of plagiarism and sued one, The Flaming Lips. So Coldplay has a fight on their hands. Both sides are hurt and both sides think they are right. The only protection either side has is careful documentation of their own work, even as musicians.

Plagiarism is a serious offense and knowing how to avoid it is very important for college students. It follows you throughout your life, even if your rock stars. Lesson learned…document, document, document. Even if we are talking only 8 notes in a scale and only 7 different ones.

TurnItIn.com is as common to college students blue books, pizza and cheap beer.  Write your term paper, submit it to TurnItIn.com and submit the paper and report to your professor. However, not all students want this process to be a part of the academic world. A group of high schools students have taken iParadigms, the owners of TurnItIn.com, to court for copyright infringement. The decision of the suite against TurnItIn.com was released this week, with the court voting that since no transformation of the work takes place, there is no violation of copyright.

This is an excellent victory for both students and colleges and universities. Services like TurnItIn.com assist in the fight against plagiarism and encouraging students to maintain academic integrity of their work. A recent study and subsequent authoring of a book about the study reveals that students care about plagiarism far more than colleges and university administrations give them credit for. Susan D. Blum reveals the results of a three year investigation into college culture and plagiarism in “My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture“. We will be reveiwing her book on this blog next week and I think most of you will be very surprised at what she finds. According to Blum’s findings, one can speculate that most students will applaud the court’s decision in favor of TurnItIn.com. If you have an opinion on the TurnItIn.com decision, we would love to hear it!

According to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, a recent trend in private universities is to offer a guarantee that if a student doesn’t graduate in 4 years, the 5th year is free! Pennsylvania’s Juniata College is one of several private schools to launch this program in hopes of attracting financially strapped parents. Since approximately only 1 in 3 college students actually graduate in 4 years, colleges like Juniata are hoping that parents will realize that two thirds of them will need to pay for an extra year they may not have budgeted for and be lured in by the 20% savings. Sound good parents? Well…wait just a minute…You have to have a bit of help from your college student… Read more…

In a lame bit of reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education, author Thomas Bartlett “reports” the “shocking” news of “essay mills” being a global phenomena. Even more astounding, Bartlett acts as if it is news that these companies plagiarize what they call “custom” term papers. Furthermore, he asserts that these companies are growing rapidly and “becoming” international. Bartlett’s reporting is lame due to the fact that these companies have always been owned by foreign corporations, never sold anything but plagiarism and, in fact, they are actually dying out rather rapidly. Learn more….

Paper Masters, as one of the only legitimate custom term paper companies on the Internet has tracked these foreign companies for many years. As a family owned business operating in the United States, Paper Masters has battled with these fraudulent foreign companies for many years, trying to differentiate our services from their out and out robbery of college students and plagiarism practices. Where has the Chronicle been when we were reporting on fraudulent term paper companies years ago!

I am curious why a publication of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s caliber would spend its energy on writing an article about a fraudulent company. If they were presenting a piece on the fraud that is prolific in these Essay Mills, than I could see why he would focus on the company Essay Writers. But to present a piece on cheating going global and essay mills multiplying when, in fact, they are diminishing rapidly and  have always been run outside of the United States, is just poor investigation.

Having monitored the industry for 12 years, and owning one of the only legitimate United States operated “essay mills” on the internet, the “essay mill” industry is actually becoming very small. There are only a few companies, yet to the uninformed eye, it appears like many. A few companies operate under many, many names. Note the case Axact v. Student Network Resources (http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=9146), which illustrates the true nature of these essay mills. These term paper mills are becoming extinct due to ubiquitous use of TurnItIn.com by professors. Students need customized term papers, not plagiarized essay mill products and they are no longer willing to be taken advantage of by foreign companies that never produce a product.

Many graduate level students look towards Paper Masters in order to avoid these issues of plagiarism. In a recent discussion with one graduate student that was looking to order a research paper, the student stated that the sole purpose for searching out help and a model research paper was to have a sample of exactly how to cite properly.

Citation is confusing but as Thomas Holmes, director of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Exams Institute,  stated in regards to Bodner’s study: “I usually tell students if it’s more than four words you better be quoting them”. Great advice to live and trust your academic career on when writing a research paper at any level.

Two weeks ago, Amazon released its second version of its eBook reader, the Kindle 2. Our staff purchased two of them and we have been using them for about a week. At first, all of us were skeptical as to the value of the Kindle 2 for writing research papers and doing research. However, after I read the cool things you could do with the Kindle 2 in the extended user’s manual in the Kindle, I have been completely sold! The Amazon Kindle 2 is a fabulous resource for writing research papers. Here’s why we love it…

The Kindle 2 works well for reading eBooks, is convenient and compact. It’s overall coolness aside, the Kindle 2 has perfect features built in for researching. Students will find the ability to make notes, highlight and upload the notes to their computer an excellent way to organize research for writing a research paper. Read more…

In a new study released by the research company Ambient Insight, it is revealed that currently 1.25 million college students take all their classes online (Nagel, 2009).The future looks to have this number tripled by 2014, making online classes the most common way of attending college. The cost of an online degree is significantly below that of many traditional universities. For example, the price of an M.B.A. at the University of Phoenix Online is approximately $23,230, one-third less than the same degree at Harvard University. However, the tuition at the University of Phoenix Online is higher than some for profit universities. A comparison between Phoenix Online and Georgia Tech indicates that the cost of an online degree is almost two times that charged by Georgia Tech. However, online students have a cost advantage over traditional college students in that they do not have to pay room and board expenses. Read more…

After every big election, professors love to assign voter turnout term papers. The demographics of election results tell quite a bit about our nation and a well-written voter turnout term paper can reveal interesting findings for political science term papers. Analysis of voter turnout is often based on ethnic, demographic, and economic statistics that are a viable measure of predicting who will show up at the polls and who will not; however, the reality still remains that when it comes to Americans and voting, there is an underlying sense of apathy that runs through the fabric of American culture that is at the root of low voter turnout. For example, one of our great American icons, Paris Hilton, campaigned for young, testosterone fueled men to get out and vote, as evidenced by the picture seen here. Sadly, Paris failed to vote for in the last Presidential election.

We are a nation of apathetic bitchers and hypocrites. Will this year be different, as our pocket-books are empty, our President is an idiot, our nation is scoffed at and we fight wars for made-up causes? As noted by Doyle (2001) in one voter turnout term paper, “At the most fundamental level, one can argue that U.S. voters don’t go to the polls often because the political parties and their allied economic interests have little incentive to promote citizen involvement, while at the same time there is no social or economic crisis strong enough to generate a sense of urgency in the electorate.”

The idea that there is no incentive to promote citizen involvement is quite apparent in our society. Many citizens are disengaging, not only from voting, but also from all kinds of civic involvement. While many voter turnout term papers argue that this is due to the politicians inability to motivate voters, many term paper say that the American citizen’s lack of participation in civic events may be due to broader cultural trends not directly related to politics. Americans in the 90’s have limited leisure time, have access to all kinds of services from the privacy of their home and rely primarily on television for information about the world. These trends tend to isolate people from one another and diminish our capacity to collectively address public problems through government action. The process of public policy-making on the local, state and national levels is left to an increasingly small group of active voters and leaders. While Americans continue to be involved in volunteer work and community building efforts, they are not active in civic networks, groups that try to connect them with elected leaders and government agencies. In the past three decades, active involvement in civic organizations has dropped. Americans still care about their communities, but they do not believe that politics and government matter. What will your voter turnout term paper say?

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