online essay help or plagiarism

Plagiarism is a hot topic in academia today. I talk to students about it quite a bit and until recently, I supposed that most of them understood that buying a paper online counts as plagiarism. Fundamentally, I still assume that most of them know that paying for someone else to do their work for them is somehow wrong, but after looking at a couple of online essay writing sites and talking to some students, it has become clear to me that they may not understand that paying for a paper is plagiarism. Many of these sites advertise themselves as producing plagiarism free papers. They tell their potential customers that the papers they are buying are not plagiarized. They assure students that the papers they will receive are "authentic" and completely "original," even that they have been run through plagiarism software to verify their originality. And, of course, they assure students that most people buy their essay papers because they are simply too busy to write them. Next time I discuss plagiarism with a class, I know I will modify my lecture a little to include a discussion about why papers purchased from these sites are in fact plagiarized.