“Paper? or PARTY? The choice is yours…”

That’s the slogan for a Montreal-based website that gives college students the chance to pay cash to have their papers penned by a former university professor.

The proudly brash online service, unemployedprofessors.com, offers to write custom essays, term papers, case studies, lab reports, speeches, dissertations and theses.

“You want that sweet Ivy League vibe to reverberate through your essays but don’t have the chops to write them that way? Let Unemployed Professor write all of those tedious essays, take-home exams, and anything else that one of your dreadful professors throws at you,” the site’s homepage reads.

The service claims that all of its writers hold advanced graduate degrees from respected universities.

“The hiring process is pretty thorough,” organizers of Unemployed Professors wrote in an email to the Sheaf. “It involves independent credential verification and rigorous writing sample examinations.”

The service has been available for roughly a year and now employs 30 ghostwriters.

After registering an account, students post the details of their assignment along with a deadline and a bidding process begins.

“Our online bidding system allows you complete control over the speed at which your essay can be written,” the site’s frequently asked questions section explains. “Because our greedy unemployed professors are bidding on your essays, you can set the timeframe in which you need the work done and the market will dictate a price.”

A professor who offers to write an essay for a certain price in four days, for instance, would likely lose a bid to a professor who offers to write the same essay for the cheaper price in two days. The winning bid is, of course, selected by the student.

We produce custom research; it’s up to the user to do with it as he or she sees fits. — Unemployed Professors

Assignments can be cited in any style and include bibliographies, references, title pages and page numbers.

“It’s a breathtakingly cynical operation,” said Gordon DesBrisay, associate dean of student affairs for the College of Arts and Science. “The whole enterprise is rife with ethical challenges. It’s just entirely wrong.”

DesBrisay is an associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. He’s poured over thousands of submitted papers and although spotting original work that’s been purchased online is difficult, he said he has a good nose for sniffing out assignments that students did not write themselves.

“I have students do quite a bit of writing and you quickly get to know somebody’s writerly voice and their range of abilities,” DesBrisay said. “If somebody suddenly hands something in that looks like it was written by a distinguished British academic, my little antennae go up.”

Purchasing academic work online is not a new scheme. In fact, a simple Google search reveals an industry teeming with websites that offer similar services.

“This [service] has just got a lot of media attention and has a slick looking website,” he said.

DesBrisay said students at the university mostly steer the waters of academia with honesty but warned those who ante up for work that’s not their own.

“Any student at the U of S whose caught availing themselves of these kind of services will be prosecuted to the full extent of the university’s standards,” he said.

University Secretary Lea Pennock said a formal hearing is held at the college-level when a professor comes forward with allegations of inauthentic work. Hearing boards must include at least one current student that is unfamiliar with the situation in question. The board investigates the mitigating circumstances and the student’s history of academic misconduct. If a student is unanimously found guilty, the board hands down a punishment.

“If [a student] had a prior offense, I would think it would be suspension or expulsion. If it was a first offense, it would probably be a zero on the course,” Pennock said. “But it’s really up to the board to decide.”

A suspension is a temporary ban on enrolling at the university while expulsion is permanent.

If a current professor was caught selling papers to students the university would proceed according to the misconduct standards in the faculty’s collective bargaining agreement, Pennock said.

The organizers of the site don’t see the ethical dilemma.

“We produce custom research; it’s up to the user to do with it as he or she sees fits,” they wrote to the Sheaf. “The true devil here is the contemporary academic system. It’s simply producing too many PhDs, and creating analogs to indentured servants who will spend a good part of their life working as lecturers or adjuncts and earning wages below the poverty line.”

[box type=”info”]To view the hilariously casual email correspondance between the people behind unemployedprofessors.com and our senior news editor, check out the Sheaf’s blog. [/box]

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Graphics: UnemployedProfessors.com