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POLITICS & COMMUNITY by Julie Taylor May 24, 1996	It's the night before a huge paper is due and you're freaking. Your notes are a mess, your research is shoddy and your outline is nonexistent. How are you going to come up with twenty pages of material, plus have time to type all your thoughts onto white 8 1/2 x 11's-complete with footnotes and bibliography-by morning?
	At this point, you can do one of three things: rummage under the kitchen sink for some Drano to end it all now; crank out some B.S. and hope for the best; or dial up a research assistance biz and order up a paper to alleviate your migraine. While door number three might sound most appealing in your time of need, it's not necessarily your best bet. Here's why. There's no denying that research assistance is big business. You've seen the ads in the back of the music mags -- the loser with his head in his hands (bearing an uncanny resemblance to, uh, you), the bold 1-800 number, the quality guarantee. Dial those toll-free eleven digits, give up some more numbers (your credit card number, fax number and term paper number) and in an hour you've got the paper of your choice in your hot little hands. How can these firms get away with selling term papers? All research businesses stress the fact that their reports are sold to students for research purposes only and must be incorporated into students' own work. Whatever, right? But this disclaimer means they're not responsible for what you do with the paper once they sell it to you. And they don't sell for peanuts. Most papers run around $7.50 per page, plus approximately $10 to $15 more for fax or FedEx. If you can't find the topic you need among the twenty thousand plus selections most catalogs offer, custom research can be done at the rate of around $25 per page. If you need graduate or Ph.D. research done, the price jumps to (gulp) $45 per page.
	Do you get your money's worth? I had a nine-page paper on Reservoir Dogs faxed to me for seventy-seven bucks. Then I showed it to a story editor at a major movie production company, a university film professor and Quentin Tarantino himself. The story editor and film prof both agreed that the paper sucked. "The person who wrote this obviously didn't get the movie," said the story editor, who had seen Reservoir Dogs seven times. The film prof concurred. "This is amateurish work at best." And Tarantino? His assistant Victoria Lucai said it all: "Mr. Tarantino appreciates all the letters he receives. However, we receive a huge amount of mail on a weekly basis and it is impossible to fulfill all the requests." If the guy who wrote and directed the film isn't interested in reading the research assistance company's stock paper on the subject, do you really think your professor will be? Make some coffee. You've got work to do. Julie Taylor has written for "Time Out" and "Sassy". Her first novel was just bought by Simon & Schuster. Illustration by Martin Schneebalg