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Freelance worker keeps clear conscience while writing students’ essays and homework for pay

Photo Illustration by Isaac Arjonilla

By Sean Greene

April 20, 2011 1:50 a.m.

Today he had 20 homework assignments due, including three research papers and a pile of one-pagers for some online classes.

But the closest thing to a grade he’ll receive for any of this will arrive as a money transfer to his PayPal account.

That’s because he’s not a student ““ he calls himself a creative writer ““ but one who can produce plagiarism-free, original writings on behalf of students willing to pay per page for a good grade.

For the past year and a half, the writer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, has been writing research projects, essays, dissertations and other homework assignments, cranking out between 70 and 110 pages a week.

He’s worked with 400 customers ““ most of whom are repeats. Among those contacts in his phone, he estimates 60 to 70 are from UCLA.

He flicks through an email on his smartphone outside an Orange County coffee shop.

“This one’s about Lincoln,” he says to himself. “Four to five pages, double-spaced.”

The assignment will take about an hour and a half to complete.

Normally, he can get $24 per page, but he’ll only charge $21 this time.
The business model of such custom essay writers is simple: no inventory, no overhead.

“It’s all intellectual property,” the writer said. “It’s just straight profit.”

He showed his PayPal account’s month-to-date statement. Not quite to $10,000, but by the end of this week he’ll be close. Today, he will have closed $500 in assignments and taken $300 more in deposits.

Before this, he worked at a corporate bank but said he hated the hours and the stress.

“Working really, really sucks. It’s a soul-crusher,” he said. “I hated talking to people about how much money they make.”

After three years, he left the corporate world to pursue a Master of Business Administration degree.

He graduated with a 4.0 the next year. That’s when a couple of CSU Fullerton students asked him to write a few assignments for them.

Since then, he’s built his own business for himself. He even has a few other writers to tackle his least favorite subjects ““ biology, chemistry and upper division statistics.

He works for himself and he chooses his own hours, dedicating about five hours a day to his assignments.

“I just wake up and write,” he said. “This one girl’s 30-page paper for her Ph.D. dissertation in psychology on bipolar disorder … I’ll pick away at that maybe a page and a half a day.”

Other assignments are easier.

“Once you get so many customers … you start getting a sense of what you’re writing about. Everything starts looking the same,” he said. “Honestly, there’s no difference between some of the topics I see at USC or UCLA and the topics I see at an online school.”

Many educators, like Kathleen Komar, a professor of comparative literature, said buying essays from so-called paper mills is a waste of an education.

Komar said she has detected students who hired someone else to do their work in the past.

“Absolutely, someone in my classes will end up with a better grade if they did their own writing,” she said. “Besides which, they’ll actually learn something.”

There are several ways to recognize if a student’s work is not his own. In Komar’s case, she realized that the paper did not answer the current prompt, but one from years before.

In other cases, if a student’s writing makes an extraordinary leap in quality, that may be used to presume plagiarism, said Bruce Beiderwell, director of the UCLA Writing Program.

The Dean of Students Office has not had problems with students purchasing papers, said Debra Geller, executive director of community standards from the Office of the Dean of Students.

Instead, the issue lies with students getting papers from test banks.

Beiderwell said there is no way of knowing just how prevalent the use of paper mill services are at UCLA.

Whether students buy originals, copy someone else’s or take a paper off the Internet, Gellar said it is still plagiarism.

Back at the coffee shop, the barrista comes out and offers the writer a brownie before closing. The employees know him well, he said. He often comes here twice a night to meet with his clients.

Eventually, he said he’d like to get paid for writing about topics he enjoys more. He’s already published a few short stories in an anthology featuring about 20 other authors, for which he gets $20 in royalty checks every quarter. He even has a literary agent.

“I want to be a writer, but not for $30,000 or $40,000 a year. I want to make $100,000 a year,” he said. “I don’t want to sound money-hungry, but I am.”

He plans to keep his business up until he’s bringing in $20,000 a month consistently.

But until then, he said it’s isolating work.

He’ll see his wife leave the apartment to go out, but he’ll be stuck inside working. Sometimes, he finds himself staring into their giant fish tank.

“I’ll find dumb reasons to get out,” he said. “I’ll just go out to get a Perrier … but it’s a rush to watch that money build up.”

His line of work is not cheating, he said. It’s the students who are cheating.

“If the student chooses to (hire me), they can be short-siding themselves,” he said. “But that’s their decision.”

At the same time, he believes in karma, he goes to church and he volunteers.

He said he doesn’t mind helping people ““ his work doesn’t keep him up at night.

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