The Internet has revolutionized the way students do research – and made plagiarism a breeze. Students can lift whole paragraphs from online encyclopedias or download essays from dozens of free paper mills. Those willing to pay have more options: for as little as $17.95 and up per page. Buying papers may be easy, but the quality turns out to be more of a crapshoot. While free paper mills are known to subsist on poor student submissions, it turnsout that paying top dollar for a paper is no guarantee that it's going to get an A or even a C. Shiva Balaghi, associate director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, found some papers about women issues from sites like Academic Term Papers to be "formalistic and awkwardly organized," with several misspellings. David Wallace, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, called the stock essay from paper mills "stilted and old-fashioned." Meanwhile, the paper mills are making every effort to keep customers happy. Tim, a University of Arizona senior who buys around four papers a semester, recalls ordering an essay from a website last year. Five minutes after he chose a paper, he got a call from the company urging him to reconsider: One of his schoolmates had already ordered the same paper. As teachers also get their hands on new technology, the balance of power may shift. Most promising are detection systems that operate like search engines, scouring the web for passages that match portions of students' essays. Berkeley neurobiologist David Presti used a program developed by a graduate student John Barrie called plagiarism.org on 320 student papers and nailed 45 cheaters who ignored warnings that their work would be screened. But plagiarism. org failed to detect problems in paragraphs with even the slightest amount of rewriting.