The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had an article by someone who has made a good living (about $66,000 this year) by writing custom research papers on almost any topic for undergraduate and graduate students who hire him to do their assignments.

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

His strategy was to collect the minimal information necessary from Wikipedia and other online sources and simply write everything down, cutting and pasting quotes, and using filler language to get to the necessary word count, without rewriting or editing or polishing.

After I’ve gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

I’ve also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: “A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come.” Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment’s instructions.

The reason he gets away with this is because this is what some students do on their own. For them too, their first version is the one they hand in as their ‘finished’ work, so the roughness of the submitted manuscript must seem familiar to the teacher. As the author says:

I don’t ever edit my assignments. That way I get fewer customer requests to “dumb it down.” So some of my work is great. Some of it is not so great. Most of my clients do not have the wherewithal to tell the difference, which probably means that in most cases the work is better than what the student would have produced on his or her own. I’ve actually had customers thank me for being clever enough to insert typos. “Nice touch,” they’ll say.

As a writing generalist myself, I was vaguely curious about whether I could be as successful a ghostwriter, assuming that I could overcome any scruples. I don’t think I could simply because over the years I have developed habits that would give me away immediately. I would not be able to avoid being opinionated and this would undoubtedly set off suspicions. I am also somewhat obsessive about avoiding typos and grammatical errors, repeatedly rewriting and editing even for my blog posts. My books may not be great works of literature but they are ‘clean’ in the sense that they have very few or no basic errors of this sort. All this attention to detail would slow me down too much, while also likely to set off alarm bells for the reader. As an academic hired gun, I would be a bust.

I was of course bothered by students passing off other people’s work as their own and wondered how widespread it was. But I was also impressed with the writer’s ability to churn out papers on topics for which he had no training and yet be able to fool the student’s teachers and even their graduate thesis advisors into thinking their students had written them.

This article makes for fascinating but disturbing reading and is as much an indictment of the way our educational system is structured, that enables such practices to pass undetected, as it is of the students who use ghostwriters.