I’m surprised you’re willing to shell out for an essay when everyone uses chat GPT or similar for free to be frank.
Look, I’m a lecturer within the humanities. I’ve noticed a huge shift in essay quality since 2022 for obvious reasons. It’s still blindingly obvious when someone gets a LLM to write the whole thing. For starters, lots of the references are entirely made up but there’s also a formulaic structure to the language that just gives it away. I had one student write about Miss Lonelyhearts and refer to the protagonist as a female throughout. I don’t dob the students in for academic misconduct, I just either fail them as in the case of Miss Lonelyhearts or I give them a really terrible grade.
Some students use it to restructure, reword, make it sound better and that’s also a bit obvious but equally I don’t chastise it as much. Reason being, I can tell they’ve put some time and effort in and they’ve at least read the core texts and done the research. They know what they’re talking about and use proper references which I appreciate.
It’s now increasingly rarer to find a student I don’t believe has used it even a little bit. The only way to get around LLM usage is in person handwritten exams but they’re seriously unpopular. To be honest as well, they don’t really work within the humanities beyond a level. You can’t get the full depth without external references.
What I would say is, if you can’t be arsed with the course to the extent you don’t want to put any remote effort in and would rather risk getting caught for cheating then your heart probably isn’t in it. Why are you doing the degree? Do you love the subject or are you just doing it because you feel it’s expected?