Editing Papers - Can I get in Trouble?

hamburger helper

woo! another one for you fine folk!

Okay, so I need some extra cash and I fancy myself a good term paper editor. I'm a 3rd year English major and have about 4 years of technical writing background from my varied work history in office settings.

My question is this: is it against university policies to offer term paper editing services?

Caveats: I will *not* invent or provide the students with new material, only restructuring the thoughts they have given me in grammatically and structurally correct form. They will not benefit from plagiarism, just something that is easier to read.

Here's what I'm kind of worried about: my plan is to target ESL students, so does something like seem okay?

cj iwakura

I did it at USF for a year or so, and no one minded. Just explicitly phrase that in whatever advertising you come up with.

You're not contributing to their papers; you're editing them.
(What I did was a bit different; I did freelance typing, and changed written word to typewritten, but I basically did the same thing as punctuation and spelling goes. And some more here and there if the person didn't mind.)

hamburger helper

cj iwakura wrote: »

I did it at USF for a year or so, and no one minded. Just explicitly phrase that in whatever advertising you come up with.

You're not contributing to their papers; you're editing them.
(What I did was a bit different; I did freelance typing, and changed written word to typewritten, but I basically did the same thing as punctuation and spelling goes. And some more here and there if the person didn't mind.)

People still write in analog? You made money doing data-entry? That's pretty cool, and cheers for the response!

Lewisham

What's ESL? English as a Second Language?

Because that sounds like a whole heap of trouble. Like me asking a French teacher to edit my French papers for "thought structuring." Universities generally don't want to graduate students who aren't able to communicate effectively, whether English is their subject or not.

hamburger helper

Lewisham wrote: »

What's ESL? English as a Second Language?

Yep

Lewisham wrote: »

Because that sounds like a whole heap of trouble. Like me asking a French teacher to edit my French papers for "thought structuring"

And that's my quandary. I'm just wondering if anyone has done this or knows anyone who has. I'm curious to know if there are any academic violations doing so.

Feral

How about reconceptualizing your idea as a tutoring or coaching service rather than an editing service?

In other words, instead of an ESL student dropping off a paper on Tuesday and getting it back all cleaned up and flowy on Wednesday, you sit down with the student and explain your proposed changes to them so they learn something from the experience.

exis

Have you tried asking one of your lecturers? Or the Head of the English Dept? I'd imagine they deal with plagiarized works quite often and would have a fairly specific definition of what constitutes plagiarizing and what doesn't.

And if they say no, I'd second what Feral suggested. Rather than rewriting papers, you could simply look over papers and suggest and explain alterations.

DrFrylock

My girlfriend was in a graduate program where the final degree requirement was to write a couple of term papers on selected subjects. For this, most, if not all the students hired well-paid "editors" to review and help them revise their papers. It was common practice apparently in this particular program and there were several editors who basically did it as a full-time job just for this university and this program. The University was well aware of this. The editors here did basic proofreading, checked for formatting and things like bibliographic style (in this program they were Fascist about the bibliography format), discussed organization, informed students if the assignment didn't fully answer the question and offered suggestions as to how to fix this, and so on.

The fact that these editors were familliar with the specific program and formatting rules and such made their services "more valuable" to students since they could catch specific problems that would likely come up during the official grading process.

So, it does happen but I think it depends on the actual target audience. For example, in my area, hiring a professional editor would be anathema; I'd never heard of such a thing before.

From a purely legalistic perspective (e.g., "will I personally get in trouble for offering such services") the answer depends on your relationship with your customers' university. Based on your OP, you seem to be affiliated with a university, so they may have a blanket academic honesty policy or honor code that prevents you from helping other students without permission. If your customers are at some OTHER university, I doubt that toher random university can punish you for editing one of their student's papers. Even helping a university student cheat directly is not a crime, so you can't be prosecuted (e.g., by police) for it. Although again, if you attend the same university as your customers, the university may have some leeway to do bad things to you (e.g., kick you out).

From a customer's legalistic perspective (e.g., "will your customers get in trouble for hiring you") the answer is maybe so, maybe no. Every professor I know sets a codified academic honesty policy for their class. It's usually on the course webpage. It may or may not be consistent across a university. For example, here is an Academic Honesty policy that would seem to explicitly prohibit hiring an editor, or any other sort of outside collaboration without authorization. The student in that class would have to get permission to hire you from the professor in advance or risk having bad things happen to them. Not all academic honesty policies are so draconian, and as I noted above some programs encourage or at least permit it.

Since it's not a crime and it's really on the student to ensure compliance with the academic honesty policy, you can simply play "see no evil" and have each customer sign a big disclaimer that it's the student's responsibility to get all appropriate permissions from their instructors and check their academic honesty policies on their own. Sketchy, but it keeps your customers from suing you.

From an ethical perspective, you're in a very large gray area. You really have to balance your "services" against what the professor is trying to get out of the student. For example, when I would grade term papers I never once marked off for grammar, as long as I could understand the idea being expressed by the student. I had plenty of ESL students and, as it was not a writing class, I didn't feel the need to punish them for not having English as their first language. This was a fairly reasonable policy used by many faculty. Also, I probably wouldn't have minded if a student gave their term paper to a friend or colleague for review, as long as that colleague didn't rewrite the paper. In fact, I had an open policy that anybody who wanted to submit a paper to me for pre-review could do so, and I'd provide feedback directly. A lot of faculty honored that policy too. At that point, the need for a professional editor diminishes.

In a class where writing is the point, or where the professor is just a pain in the ass about it, things are different. Maybe in that class, the professor really wants to know if the student can write or not, and if not, they may want the student to improve. Here, by providing editing services outside the class context, you're subverting the professor. The first line of editing should be the instructor or the TAs. These individuals can offer appropriate editing advice that does not violate their academic honesty policies (and will do so for free). This doesn't always work out, though. Sometimes the instructor/TA will simply not help in this way. For some projects (e.g., writing a thesis) they may not care enough to do detailed editing. Either way, I think it's still sketchy to hire a professional editor without notifying the instructor first, as they may or may not approve.

Dulcius_ex_asperis

My school has what they call a "writing center" where students (it's mostly for ESL students, I think) can get help with writing papers. Sometimes they just edit, sometimes they make suggestions. I go to a pretty strict private school, though, so I don't think they'd let anything blatantly immoral slide by. Why don't you talk to some of the higher-ups on campus and see what they say?

Aoi Tsuki

Dulcius_ex_asperis wrote: »

My school has what they call a "writing center" where students (it's mostly for ESL students, I think) can get help with writing papers. Sometimes they just edit, sometimes they make suggestions. I go to a pretty strict private school, though, so I don't think they'd let anything blatantly immoral slide by. Why don't you talk to some of the higher-ups on campus and see what they say?

Exactly. My boyfriend is a tutor at our Writing Center, which is not only free, but required visitation for 1300-level comp courses (guaranteed waves of freshmen every finals season, oh boy!). Doing it at our school would therefor probably not be illegal, just stupid, unless you explicitly state that you're offering something beyond those free services. It depends largely on where you're attending. Visiting any campus equivalents of a writing center - or English offices - might be a good idea.

Original Rufus

From my understanding, you're simply trying to be a paid tutor.

So long as you are only attacking poor grammar and logic, I can't imagine what the problem would be.

whuppins

Yeah, I'm with the above poster in that I'm not sure what kind of trouble you think you could get into. I was in almost your exact position when I was in school: I was a 3rd year tech writing student and I met with ESL students who needed help making sense of their Master's theses in whatever complicated-ass hard science subject they were doing research for. These meetings were actually set up by my tech writing professor, and he was the one who paid me. He had a system where he'd get all the grad students who couldn't form a coherent English sentence (AKA the Chinese ESL students; he taught graduate courses that were really just there to make sure that students could graduate and go on to make the university money), and tell them that he could find someone to work with them so that their revised papers would get better grades. Then he'd pick the best students from his undergrad-level tech writing courses and farm the work out to them.

So, I guess it's anecdotal evidence or whatever, but in my case, not only did the professor not mind what I was doing, he actually sponsored it. I'd agree that you need to think of it as more of a tutoring service, and I would invest time in meeting with the students and actually explaining why you made the edits you did. If you just hand them back an edited paper, you haven't really taught them anything; you've just done some of their work for them.

EggyToast

As long as you don't write their papers, you can't get in trouble. What you should do, though, is keep a copy of what they submit to you and what you give back, in case a professor tries to investigate. If the university does look into you, you can say, before anything even gets too legal, that you have copies of everything people gave to you and what you gave back, showing that you were simply an editor.

As for ESL, you don't have a choice -- ESL students are the most likely crowd to use english editing services. You're also not alone in this -- any college with a sizeable portion of ESL students will look for and use editing services. The vast majority of it is grammar correction and tense consistency. If a section reads very awkwardly or you just think it'd be best if they re-wrote it, then you mark that on the paper and ask them to give it back to you.

Clarify up front that you're not a finishing service, but more of a tutor/editor. Say that while you will take a paper the day before it's due and correct grammar, sentence structure, etc., the student will get a better grade if you receive the paper earlier and you have time to get the paper back to them, to add or change parts.

hamburger helper

This is all great advice everyone, thank you so much for taking time to respond. I was worried about academic repercussions , but it seems to be kosher based on your experiences.