So you have a thousand-character essay due for class. You can’t be bothered to copy an obscure sample composition by hand, and as a matter of principle you aren’t going to write something original. What’s a junior-high student to do?
There’s always Composition Star 《作文之星》 (aka CStar), an automatic essay generator. From the product description:
Composition Star is software that allows the computer to automatically write primary and middle-school essays. With her, you will no longer be bothered by writing. With a few gentle clicks of your mouse, the computer will automatically write out an outstanding composition that will leave you feeling satisfied.
Students might be satisfied, but parents are not. In the academically intense period between the college entrance exams earlier this month and the high-school placement tests going on today, parents in Xi’an worried over their children’s future – would they rely too much on software and fail exams that require them to write something independently? A letter to the editor printed in Beijing’s Legal Mirror called for an outright ban on the software.
But CStar is not limited to writing compositions for class. An earlier flap back in January was touched off by a 12-year-old’s incredibly sophisticated love letters. Apparently CStar’s creators felt it valuable to include a list of sappy romantic lines alongside the award-winning academic essays.
CStar boasts an archive of over 50 composition anthologies, including 3500 award-winning papers, which it says allows users to generate upwards of 10,000 unique essays. Journalists have tended to take this claim at face value, without realizing that CStar merely automates the process of plagiarism, stitching together paragraphs from its huge archive rather than generating a completely new essay.
A movie critique we generated here at Danwei was made up of four paragraphs, each of which could be found in online sources through a simple search. If teachers do something similar with suspicious papers, or happen to have a copy of CStar themselves, lazy plagiarists may need to look elsewhere for more tricks.