Court Writes End to Term Paper Mill

As a result of free-lance sting operation by a Cal State Los Angeles professor, a Superior Court judge Thursday ordered a woman to stop selling term papers to students, officials announced.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Miriam A. Vogel issued a preliminary injunction sought by the Cal State system against Alicia Ruble. A Cal State spokeswoman said Ruble was a former Cal State Los Angeles student and owner of a service that supplied term papers for a fee.

Ruble’s alleged activities were brought to the attention of authorities by Allen Freedman, an assistant professor of engineering who said he was angered by the flyers for the term paper service distributed on campus. Freedman said he posed as a returning student, met with Ruble and arranged to pay her $90 for a term paper “on an arcane subject on the philosophy of science.”

“I’m very pleased with that,” Freedman said of the court action Thursday.

However, he added that the case “didn’t even scratch the surface” of the number of people selling term papers.

“There are hundreds of companies out there. They still leaflet all over the place,” he said.

Ruble could not be located for comment Thursday. In a story last year in the campus newspaper, the University Times, she was quoted as saying that her service was ethical and necessary.

“We’re providing a service people need because they don’t learn how to read and write there,” she said, according to the University Times.

She reportedly said she got the idea for the service when she helped a professor grade papers and noticed how poorly done most were.

Selling term papers is not a criminal offense but is a violation of the state Education Code, Cal State system spokeswoman Janice Walker said. The civil action against Ruble was brought by the attorney general’s office with the assistance of the university’s office of general counsel.

“This action is a warning to other similar businesses that we will take whatever legal means are available to us to shut them down,” Lee Kerschner, the Cal State system’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, said in a prepared statement. “Supplying term papers or dissertations for a fee subverts the academic process and cheats the students out of the learning experience gained by doing the work themselves.”

Standard policy at all Cal State campuses is to give a failing grade to students who are caught passing off purchased material as their own. Both Walker and Cal State Los Angeles campus spokeswoman Ruth Goldway said they knew of no students who were disciplined for using papers supplied by Ruble.

Walker said that the university obtained a similar court order against a similar service about 10 years ago, but that firm moved out of state, where it could not be affected by California courts.