Memoirs of an academic fraudster: inside the shadowy business of ghostwriting college students' papers.

• Author: Luzer, Daniel
• Position: The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat - Book review

The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat

by Dave Tomar

Bloomsbury, 272 pp.

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Academic paper mills--the companies that write papers for students--don't really advertise. One doesn't see their services in the backs of magazines or populating the margins of Web pages. If such companies market at all, it's frequently done using spam text, with links, in the comments section of Web sites read by college students. On one such site recently, for example, "SolisSharon26" posted the following item:

Young people who are studying in the universities feel necessity for professional writing online because usually they do not have enough time so that deal with there assignments by themselves. Browse the site and you will find the firm which crew is accessible 24/7 to order essay. I'm not sure I'd trust people who write like this with my credit card number, much less to take care of my Intro to American Government term paper. But there are more professional ads like this all over the Internet, where a cheating student can follow the link provided, send a fee, and in a few hours or days receive a paper. It's pretty easy to picture the stressed-out or lazy students who buy this stuff. It's harder to imagine the kind of people who make their living producing it.

This world became a little less shadowy when, on November z2, 20zo, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article, "The Shadow Scholar," in which a writer using the pseudonym Ed Dante wrote that he'd been turning out American college students' essays for the last decade. Dante had written some 5,000 papers. "I work at a company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month creating essays based on ... instructions provided by cheating students. On any day, I am working on upward of 20 assignments. You've never heard of me," he explained, "but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work." At least if you are a professor.

A few readers thought Ed Dante was made up. One blogger wrote that the Chronicle piece, which became the publication's most-read article, seemed to have been written by someone "skilled in the art of literary hoaxes." In fact, he was very much a real person. Meet Dave Tomar, freelance journalist, Rutgers graduate, and Phillies fan.

Tomar used the Chronicle article as the basis for his new book, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat, the story of his life as an academic fraudster. Tomar...