Why do so many people use planetpapers.com simply to plagiarize other people's writing? Is it even possible that someone cannot write their own essay, or that someone cannot read a book of any length? If you plagiarize, aren’t you sentencing yourself to failure? And if you cannot gather information, aren’t you opening yourself to attacks from the System?

I know many students who use sites such as planetpapers.com to “gather research” - steal other people’s ideas and papers. Yet it still amazes me that people could be so naïve and lazy. Think about it: in high school, you are already expected to know whatever material you’ve been taught (hopefully). If you cannot get through high school without cheating, how well will you do in college? Professors check whether you have cheated, and you are required to write lengthy papers based on detailed research, which is not present on many Internet paper mills and notes sites. If you cannot read, write, and think on your own, you are doomed. Maybe not now, maybe not during your high school career, but eventually, you will flunk a class or get expelled for cheating. If your job requires you to write essays or gather information, and you “cheat” (gather information without citing it and getting permission) you will be sued and fired.

During high school and college, you are more likely to hurt your grade than to get into serious trouble. (However, if your paper sounds too well written, or if a teacher finds that you stole information, you can still be expelled.) Let’s face it: Cliffs Notes aren’t the Holy Grail of research. If you read Cliffs Notes or Monarch Notes or planetpapers.com' essays, you are bound to miss important details. Any decent teacher will check whether you read a book, and to do so, he will ask you details and concepts from the work that you did not read. Cliffs Notes, shortchange you; there are few concepts and almost no details in those. Monarch Notes only have concepts. And most planetpapers.com essays are written by high-schoolers, filled with typos and inaccuracies, and non-scholarly. (That is not to say, however, that there aren’t some expertly-written papers on planetpapers.com.)

For the lazy, Cliffs Notes, Monarch Notes, and planetpapers.com are an easy way to avoid work, practice, and thought. However, for the scholar or anyone who wants to be more successful in school, these resources should be just that - resources. They are intended to supplement reading, not to replace it. When students read from these works to better understand what they have already read, they are preparing themselves for the real world. And when they enter it, they will be more successful than cheaters.