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Comment by mithaler | Hacker News Reader

Yes, these were in use back when I was in high school (I graduated in 2005); I remember I wrote a paper in a history class about Winston Churchill, and it amusingly flagged the first sentence of it because it was just the basic biographical intro that's undoubtedly common to nearly any paper about him: "Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born XXX..." Thankfully it only marks parts of the paper, and the teacher was smart enough to realize it wasn't a real problem.

Sadly though, these provide no defense against the multitude of shady for-profit services that write papers for hire that anyone can find by Googling "term paper".

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But, the paper would have to be original.. Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts.

...and yeah, the results of the plagiarism service were a bit soft, but I think it would notice and annotate if things were in quotations, or likely to be common enough to not be an issue. In fact, I think her department had a general 'score' that they'd considered serious enough to consider cheating, and a sentence or two lifted from the interwebs would get you a marked down grade.

Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay?

It might be difficult, but that's not even the whole problem. Worse is that parents, who do have the money, will sometimes fund their students efforts to cheat (or even do it behind their backs).

I've spent a long time as a tutor (SAT, GRE, subject tests, and most of the math/science courses at high school and college level) in a relatively affluent town, and I've been approached on a few occasions by parents that wanted me to help their kids cheat in various ways (including asking me to pose as their student and take the SAT for them, write college essays, do take home tests and homework assignments, etc.).

It's by no means common; I've had hundreds of students and only a small handful of requests like this. But it does happen - never underestimate what some rich parents will do to buy their children success in spite of academic laziness!

Can you really get an original paper written at a price that's at least conceivable for a high school student to pay? Nuts.

Oh, absolutely. I see 400-level programming and engineering homework assignments crop up on vworker from time to time; they go for about $15. And copywriting is way cheaper than that.

High school english papers are what, five paragraphs? People pay about $1.50 for comparable web copy on Mechanical Turk.

It's vary easy to accidentally lift a sentence or idea if you do enough research and write something of length. Dropping a full grade for a short essay is reasonable but if you handing in 60+ pages it's rather harsh IMO.

Oh yeah, sorry I should have been more specific.. for one, the papers are much shorter than that (this is high school).. also, when I said their grade was marked down, I just meant that they were penalized.. I don't know by how much.

High school essays are generally not 60 pages.

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No reasonable person would require a citation for an easily verified, widely-known, uncontroversial fact like Churchill's birthday. You would need citations for every sentence if that was the standard.

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