Teaching Assistants (TAs) frequently trade tips for discovering plagiarism in the papers they grade. While google has made it easy to catch the lazy copy-paste form, many of us recognize that cheaters with financial resources can buy term papers. The following chat occurred on TopMarkEssays.com, an essay mill which charges +$10/page for custom writing and bills itself as “among the premier essay writing companies in the world”.

---

Operator Henry has joined the chat.

Henry: Hello may I help you

Jay: So… uh… where did your writers go to school? Where’d they get their degrees?

Henry: Why?

Jay: I’m wondering if they used this service to get through their programs and graduate.

Henry: May I know why you come with such accusations [That’s a nice thing to say about your customers. -ed]

Jay: I can’t help but notice that your homepage is filled with errors.

Jay: You know, the kind I discover when grading papers.

Jay: “The greatest advantage when you order a customer paper with us is that we follow all instructions.”

Henry: sorry

Jay: A “customer paper”?

Jay: “I will defiantly place another order with you soon. Thanks”

Jay: “Defiantly” place?

Henry: Did you place a paper with us

Jay: How much to check if any of the papers I’m grading came from your service?

Jay: You know, you guys could make good money going in both directions.

Henry: what do you mean?

Jay: You can charge to write the papers, and then charge institutions to check whether the student wrote the paper themselves.

Henry: Good business idea but not applicable

Jay: If you’re really sharp, you could even go into the outsourced TA business I read about in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jay: Trifecta, man.

Jay: Charge for writing the papers, charge for grading them and charge for catching the cheats.

Henry: what do you mean

Henry: How many papers are you marking from our websites [No surprise that there’s more than one website, but I wonder how many of these apparently different companies are just re-brands of the same service . -ed]

Jay: How much do I have to pay to get the names of everyone at my institution who’s bought a paper from you?

Jay: What’s the price? $100 per person?

Jay: How about $300 for repeat customers?

Jay: What’s the matter, Henry? Has nobody ever asked to buy your customer list?

Henry: Nope

Jay: Well, I’m asking. How many customers do you have? 3000? At $300 each, that’s $90,000 cash. Not bad.

Jay: Sorry $900,000 cash.

Henry: We have business ethics with our customers

Jay: Are your business ethics not of the same caliber as your academic ethics?

Henry: and why do you ask?

Jay: It’s not like you’re selling a good product, Henry. Let’s be honest, there is a grammatical error in the first sentence of your homepage: “We understand you are working or you have other commitment that makes it difficult for you to achieve the best in your academic work, and we offer you the solution.”

Jay: That should be “commitments”, plural.

Henry: Why do you criticize that website. Do you want to order

Henry: I mean you want to order a research paper?

Jay: You sell a service to help people cheat and help them commit the highest crime in academia, but you won’t sell me your customer list because you have “business ethics”? Really, Henry?

Henry: Please let me transffer you to management

Jay: Sure.

Henry: Yap

[REDACTED]

It’s probably best that we end here. 😉