The ominous Ctrl-C

IMAGINE the following scenario: you have an assignment to submit on the most boring topic ever. The last thing you want to do is to go to the library to check reference material. You don’t even feel like doing any research over the internet. So you decide to take the easy way out by logging onto some essay websites and hitting Control C.

You repeat this process with several such websites, design a nice cover page and print out the whole thing to submit the next day. You know your teacher is not that tech-savvy so s/he will probably never guess that your assignment is nothing but a rip-off and you’ll breeze your way through it with an A. All’s well that ends well. End of story, right?

Unfortunately not. You have just fallen prey to one of the worst categories of websites which were conceived on the World Wide Web. These websites come under many different, jazzed-up names, with equally appealing headlines and alluring promises, but underneath their façade, they’re all the same.

They feature essays and term papers written by people like you and me. No matter which topic your teacher/professor gives you to write an essay on, you are sure to find something written on it on one of these websites, even if it comprises just a paragraph. At best, you can find a whole five to six-paragraph essay on it. They are all absolutely for free so all you do need is to hit Ctrl and C.

But before you hit those keys, stop and reflect for a while. Have you wondered why they are for free in the first place? If you have spent quality time researching on a topic, analysing it from all angles and then writing down something concrete, will you put it up online and let anyone copy/paste it for free without even giving you due credit for all that hard work? It’s highly unlikely.

On the other hand, if you know what you have written is a shoddy piece of rip-off from different websites from the internet, you won’t really mind if anyone copies it. After all, it wasn’t even yours in the first place, was it?

And therein lies the basic problem with these websites. The essays and papers grossly lack quality. Saying that the essays featured here are horrible would be the understatement of the year. They aren’t just horrible. They’re terrible to the nth degree, replete with spelling and grammatical errors. Even paragraphing leaves a lot to be desired and sometimes, the formatting of the webpage itself is so bad that you feel like closing the window immediately.

Moreover, most of the times, there is no coherence between paragraphs. One paragraph will talk about something which is completely different from the track the writer has taken in the next paragraph. This is something which can easily send your head spinning if you’re trying to read and make some sense out of it.

If you think this is an exaggeration, then check out the following sentences copied verbatim from one of the websites which was extremely popular among a group of A-level English General students a couple of years ago:

— “Computer crime first is a very new problem in our society today and it is crimes that are committed from a computer.”
— “I’m about to take up a position which is going to be deamed by some, if not all, as a terrible stand to take.”
— “That being suicide does have its merits.”
— “Why should it be looked upon as disgracefull, when some religions claim death the be the reward for people after their time on earth is done.”
— “Hacking is a process of learning not following any manual.”

As you can well imagine, almost every sentence of such essays is filled with such mistakes. There is no proper sentence structure and typos dominate the entire body of the written material.

Another problem with these websites is that the term papers and essays which they put up for free copy/pasting look as if they have been copied from different sources. If you go through the essays carefully, you’ll discover that in nine out of 10 cases, the content hardly ever relates to its title. It is as if the essay title says something and the body talks about something totally different.

Of course, this discussion shouldn’t serve to alert you to find an alternative means of copy/pasting. It is simply a wake-up call for you to realise that that what you are copy/pasting now is completely wrong in the first place. The fact is that copy/pasting is simply another name for cheating, no matter how much you try to justify it. The internet may have simplified matters but if you hit that Ctrl C key too often for your assignment, you are technically committing a crime.

The internet is there for you can find new information and assess its utility before you decide to include it as part of your assignment/thesis. One of the problems with this medium of information is that anyone can put up anything on any website. There is no accountability factor. On the one hand, it has allowed a great degree of freedom to ordinary people to get their ideas and opinions across. But on the other, there is no dearth of twisted facts and figures, which spread more misinformation than awareness.

Then, there is naivety on the part of students today who don’t even think about questioning the information they come across and include in their assignments. This unauthentic information is apparently lost on the educators and teachers who correct the essays which students pass off as their own work. This is indicated by the somewhat alarming frequency of comments by visitors to essay websites who thank the authors for their “commendable” work — between the lines it means that they got excellent grades on those papers.

Of course, it would be unfair to generalise. There are students who genuinely work hard and teachers who are tech-savvy enough to detect plagiarism. There are also websites which feature the hardwork and research of professionals. You will need to probe in deeper to find their websites but once you do, there’s no reason why you cannot rewrite in your own words any authentic information that you come across, as long as you give credit to the website and the author in your bibliography. So basically what you do need to wake up to is the fact that all those web sources which encourage copy/pasting are highly dubious. Copy/pasting may seem like the easy way out, but inadvertently, it’s spoiling your language and general knowledge. If this is the price you want to pay for your laziness, go ahead by all means. But remember that it would do you a world of good if you do your own work for a change.