Pasting together work from other sources and then pretending it's your own, whether or not you acknowledge the sources in a bibliography, is plagiarism. Buying a paper is fraud. Both violate copyright; both are prohibited by the  Student Conduct Rules . Most important, both are dishonest; in both cases you claim credit for work you haven't done.Either action is technically possible, and certainly made easier with computers. With only a few keystrokes, legitimate scholarly papers can be copied and pasted. And for the absolutely completely lazy, dozens of internet companies stand by to peddle research papers for outrageous prices. In many cases, the best that can be said of them is that they have passed spellcheck. 

Of course, cheating has always been considered a fine art by the dishonest. And some students have managed to slip bogus writing past their overworked professors. To those people, their education is not an accomplishment, but a commodity. They have nothing to be proud of.

And now they have something to fear: recently, software tools that analyze style and continuity have been developed for use in identifying written passages that have been cut and pasted from different sources, and internet organizations have formed that analyze student papers for plagiarism. Some are so precise that they can identify both copied passages by source and purchased paper by vendor. Independent instructors, departments, and entire institutions can take advantage of these services to spot dishonest writing. You can expect them to do so soon, if they aren't already.