Episode 31 of the Webtoon ‘Cheese in the Trap Season 3’ became a hit last September. In the said episode, a college student presented a paper that she had bought from a site that sells reports to students. This matter was reported to the professor, and the student was given a lower grade. The netizens expressed diverse opinions on the matter in the episode, particularly about whether the punishment that was given to the student for having passed off the work that she had bought from a sales site as hers was fair or not.
The reason that the episode became a big issue was that it evoked sympathy from many netizens in different colleges. As with the situation in the Webtoon, the college students have to strive to search for information and data for their reports and presentations. Most of the students who have gone through Internet data hunting might have come across sites like Report W**ld or Report B**. These are the sites that sell ready-made reports to students. The site is basically a giant market where students sell their works or buy others’.
ST conducted a survey to find out what the Soongsilians think about using the report-selling sites. From September 23 to 30, ST put up posters in the Student Union Hall and Jo Man-sik Memorial Hall. The title of the survey was ‘Using Report-selling Sites for Assignments: Do You Think It’s Okay?’ A total of 245 students participated in the survey, and the results were tallied, yielding the following figures:
Yes - 110 / No - 135
Student Union Hall : 67 / 73
Jo Man-sik Memorial Hall : 43 / 62
Total : 110 / 135
YES
Jung He-sun (Electronic Engineering, 12)
Using the report-selling sites is just like using Google and Wikipedia for searching. If you paid for the price and specify who did the original work, it’s obviously legal, and no one can criticize it. Let’s face it. We scrap off, copy, and paste other people’s works all the time from the Internet. When using the report-selling sites, at least you pay for their work and give them royalty. So using the sites is no problem.
Yook Ji-eun (Computer Science, 13)
If you only use the parts that you need, it doesn’t seem like a bad act. In most cases, the professors don’t give us enough time to look through the data thoroughly so we have no other choice than to use the shortcut. The works on the report-selling sites are very well written, their table of contents is well organized. By using such sites, students doing an assignment will see how other outstanding students did theirs, and they will be able to better understand the things they’re studying while writing their work.
NO
Lee Sang-gu (Economics, 13)
Our professors don’t give us assignments just to see if we’ll turn these in or not; they do so to make us study while searching for information. The report-selling sites mislead the student consumers with a sales gimmick. The students these days are so mesmerized with outcome-based principles and convenient formalism, and they fall for this marketing trick. They pay good money so they won’t have to study, and to slack off. I think that’s what students are not supposed to do.
Lee Yong-in (Global Commerce, 09)
Most of the assignments given to students don’t only require well-collected and organized data but the students’ opinions as well. They need to reflect the students’ thoughts. If you use the report-selling sites and other people’s works for your assignments, you’re passing off other people’s opinions as yours. I don’t think that buying other people’s personal ideas is a good way of studying.
The ratio between those in favor of using report-selling sites for assignments and those against it is 44:56, which is pretty close. Those in favor of using the sites think that it can be a nice way of conducting Web search as you can find high-quality data in such sites. On the contrary, those against the use of such sites think that it isn’t right to buy somebody else’s work and to pass it off as your own.
In the survey and interviews, however, both sides agreed that when you use a report that you bought, you have to specify the work’s original creator. They also agreed that writing your report with the help of the bought work and making it seem like it’s a hundred percent your work is not acceptable. Another school of thought is that as the sale is being done in a free market and no definite illegal act is being committed, we don’t have the right to say if it’s okay or not okay.
An opinion pretty contrary to the one stated above was also expressed: that legal limitations must be applied to the report-selling sites. Another is that the company that runs the site, which works as an intermediary between the students who want to sell their works and those who want to buy others’ works, gets a commission fee that’s too much. The fee percentages vary among the sites, but some go as high as 30% of the whole sales profit. Thus, it was expressed that aside from the issue of whether the sites are useful for studying or not, there’s also the issue of the sites being too obsessed with personal gain. We gathered the various opinions mentioned above but we couldn’t make an exact conclusion based on them regarding whether using report-selling sites for assignments is okay. Whether using these sites is acceptable, however, is still highly debatable. We let our readers decide on this matter. What’s your opinion regarding this?
