Straight A's at $3.50 a Page

New York cracks down on ghostwritten college papers

First undercover agents, posing as clients, were sent to case the joint, an office on the fifth floor of a building next to Grand Central Station in New York City. Then prosecutors raided the premises --impounding two truckloads of evidence. Though it had the split-second timing of a narcotics bust, last week's daylight raid by New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams was trying to smash a ring of ghostwriters who sell term papers to college students. Instead of cocaine or marijuana, the evidence included papers with titles like "The Importance of Fate in Romeo and Juliet" and "Mycenaean and Minoan Architecture." The culprit: a term-paper mill named Collegiate Research Systems Inc. that sells roughly 500 ghostwritten essays in a good month from a 305-page catalogue, grossing about $20,000.

Small ghostwriting operations have long flourished in many college communities, usually ignored by the law. But the pressure for good grades is rising, and the level of student writing skills has dropped. The result: business is booming. Currently students who want to go in for literary cheating have to pay about $3.50 a page for a copy of an existing essay, $10 a page for a custom-tailored work. Some essays were originally honest term papers that students later sold to the ghostwriters. Others are fabricated by graduate students who are well paid for the chore. One Manhattan author, who calls himself "Casper the Friendly Ghostwriter," demands a premium for C papers--because, he claims, they are harder to write than A essays.

In Los Angeles, little official attention is paid to Research Assistance, a firm openly offering 3,000 papers for sale. Illinois has an antiplagiarism statute on the books, but so far it has not caused much ghostwriters' cramp. Term-paper mills claim they are opposed to plagiarism. They are, they say, merely providing "research material." Just last week an organization calling itself Authors Research Services Inc. placed an ad in the IIlini at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus. It proclaimed: "Research papers--thousands on file available for inspection in our office. Read first, then buy."

In most colleges, students are failed forthwith when caught submitting ghost work as their own. But few are caught. Only a handful of states (including Maryland and Pennsylvania) have specifically outlawed campus ghostwriting for profit. New York has one of the toughest laws, threatening fines and jail terms of up to 90 days for ghostwriters who help college students with assignments. So far officials have found the law difficult to enforce. New York prosecutors first won a court injunction against Collegiate Research Systems Inc., the target of last week's raid, in 1978. Company President John Magee, 29, responded with a series of time-consuming legal appeals; he drew a contempt of court citation and did not pay his fine.

Meanwhile, C.R.S. has continued to crank out perennials like "Pornography and the Law," "The Economics of Pollution" and "An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets." The catalogue also offers specialty items like the 14-page "Sexism: Does It Exist in Eleven Alcoholism Treatment Programs in the Philadelphia Area?" All are sold for cash only: "No personal checks accepted," warns the catalogue.

Last week's raid came after three local colleges, upset by the ghostwriters' brazen sales tactics, complained to officials. Says James A. Malone, dean of students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice: "I have personally chased off peddlers hawking handbills just outside the school. We even have a person assigned just to remove these advertisements from campus bulletin boards."

Assistant Attorneys General Adrienne Collier and Rhonda Singer say they expect to investigate eight to ten other ghostly firms in the next 30 days. Meanwhile, hundreds of C.R.S. clients will have to write their own term papers--or buy them elsewhere. In fact, several anxious students called C.R.S. to ask about their papers while the raid was in progress last week. Their requests met no sympathy from the investigator who was answering the C.R.S. phone. Later some even telephoned the attorney general's office to ask for their papers. They had already paid for the work, they said. Besides, they added, the papers were due "at the very latest by the end of this week." qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.