Money For Nothing

In the good old days before GenAI, anxieties about student plagiarism sometimes focused on essay mills, where one could buy bespoke essays on whatever topic was needed, complete with references and bibliography, TOTALLY UNDETECTABLE by plagiarism software (though obviously that’s not an issue as they were For Research Purposes Only) because they would be unique and unplagiarised. Yes, about that… The obvious flaw in the plan was that the people who were paid (badly) to hack out such assignments very sensibly approached the task in the most minimal way possible, by reworking and stitching together publicly-available material, which of course did then show up as not original (the case of the student who protested a plagiarism finding on the grounds that he’d paid top rates for a non-plagiarised essay is not, believe me, apocryphal). But even when this wasn’t the case, the simple fact was that these essays just weren’t very good, if the assignment was remotely complex or interesting or,…