The obvious point of comparison between the two novels is that where Orwell’s world is an authoritarian, police-state nightmare, Huxley’s dystopia is ostensibly a paradise, with drugs and sex available on demand. A clever student might even pick up some extra credit by pointing out that while Orwell meant his book as a kind of predictive warning, it is Huxley’s world, much more far-fetched at the time of writing, that now more nearly resembles our own.

The essay never exactly makes these points, though it gets close a couple of times, declaring at one point that “the two works vary greatly.” It also manages to remind us that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair and that both he and his book “are misunderstood to this day.”

The paper does make a number of embarrassing spelling errors (“dissention,” “anti-semetic”) but William H. Pritchard, an English professor at Amherst, who read the paper at The Times’s request, shrewdly suggested that, in this day of spell check, they may have been included deliberately, to throw suspicious teachers off the track. If confronted with such a paper from one of his own students, he wrote in an e-mail message, he probably wouldn’t grade it at all but would instead say “come see me” (shuddering at the prospect).

The Hamlet essay was a trick assignment, or perhaps a poorly worded one. Ophelia’s genuine madness, as opposed to Hamlet’s feigned craziness, has become a touchstone in Shakespeare studies, especially among feminist and gender studies scholars who read in Ophelia’s songs and fragmentary utterances a coded response to the irrationality and sexual repression of the Elizabethan patriarchy.

The author of the four-page paper, supplied by Go-Essays for $127.96, approaches the question more literally and concludes, not incorrectly, that Ophelia is literally driven crazy by her father, brother and lover — or as the essay puts it: “Thus, in critical review of the play, Ophelia mentally suffers from the scars of unwanted love and exploitation rather than any singular or isolated cause.”

The paper goes on to repeat this point with so much plot summary and quotation from the text that it soars right to the assigned length. It’s also written in language so stilted and often ungrammatical (“Hamlet is obviously hurt by Ophelia’s lack of affection to his vows of love”) that it suggests the author may not be a native speaker of English, and even makes you suspect that some of these made-to-order term papers are written by the very same people who pick up the phone when you call to complain about your credit card bill.