We’re entering the third week of the fall semester at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and I am very much enjoying my two Advanced Professional Communications classes.

This semester KPU’s Richmond campus has seen the reappearance of posters advertising “ghostwriting” services to Chinese students. The service charges $60 per double-spaced page and guarantees that the results will fool plagiarism-detection programs.

It is depressing to consider the possibility that any of my students would hire a ghostwriter to complete their assignments. I tell my whippersnappers that I can always detect a change in their use of language, and whether that change has resulted from his or her own improvement or from a substitution of author. Alas, this is more difficult for me to pull off in an online course, in which students can hire another person to complete *all* of the assignments (but not the final exam, unless they forge an I.D. to get seated).