Term Paper “Mills,” Academic Plagiarism, and State Regulation

By the mid-197o's, an estimated 63 million Americans will be enrolled in the nation's schools and colleges. Total attendance in higher education alone will exceed i61,2 million. With almost one million earned baccalaureates, over a quarter of a million master's degrees, and nearly 50,000 doctorates awarded each year, servicing the academic world will be lucrative for many educational vendors, including equipment manufacturers, textbook publishers, as well as a new breed of supplier-commercial firms which provide ghost-written term papers for students.' For years, educators have known about fraternity files and the exchange of papers among students. The assistance rendered by relatives and friends in the preparing of assignments has sometimes been met with academic oversight and even acquiescence. Only the most flagrant cases of plagiarism from known and traceable published sources have resulted in disciplinary action (warning, reprimand, grade reduction, failure, revocation of privileges, probation or, in rare cases, suspension or