Students planning to pay for editing services advertised around campus might want to check their syllabi twice.
Scott Sanders, chairman of UNM's English Department, said it is up to individual instructors to determine how much outside help a student can receive. Some syllabi specify that employing a person to alter or revise work that a student submits as their own counts as plagiarism.
"If they're going to rewrite your paper, that would be plagiarism," he said. "But it isn't the person who is getting paid who is committing plagiarism; it's the student. The judgment is the student's."
Still, Kevin - a man who provides editing services for a fee and who wishes to remain anonymous - said he wouldn't have felt comfortable paying for someone to look over his papers when he was earning his degrees. Kevin was a university English instructor for 13 years and now charges students $40 an hour for his services. Kevin said there is an ambiguity regarding plagiarism in real-world situations and that looking for help is a legitimate part of the writing process.
"I think in most real-world situations, something can be substantially the writer's work, but that doesn't mean the writer has to have not gotten any feedback on it," he said. "It's never 100 percent solely the work of one person."
Kevin said that in the five years he's been in the editing business, some students have called him and asked him to write a paper for them, but he has refused.
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"I may not draw the line where other people would or where the university policy would, but I still have to live with myself," he said.
Sanders said in the last six years, when students turn in an English 101 or 102 portfolio, they have been required to include a cover letter that acknowledges who helped them revise their paper and to what extent the paper was edited.
Mary Ellen Kurucz, program manager for the Center for Academic Program Support, said CAPS is very specific about what tutors can and cannot do when a student comes in for tutorial services. Kurucz said the program posts fliers outlining exactly what CAPS will do when a student comes in for help.
"We tell them we do not edit," she said. "We work with students on different stages of the writing process, but we are not a proofreading or editing service. We work with students to improve their writing skills and enable them to do their own editing work."
Kurucz said the bottom line concerns who's doing the work.
"We're very careful to make sure students are doing their own work," she said.
Kevin said he is helping his clients become better writers. He added that sometimes clients bring him papers on which the corrections professors have made are wrong.
"There are professors who feel high and mighty and might say that what I'm doing is unethical," he said. "But my knowledge of the English language is higher than some of the professors at UNM."
