Paying someone to write your essay for you

[var123]

I found this online by accident when looking for something else. I am a bit shocked, tbh. Isn't this blatant cheating?

essayoneday.com/

Checking the metadata will only work if the student is daft enough to copy and paste. If they produce a new document and re-type, they will get away with it.

Checking the metadata will only work if the student is daft enough to copy and paste

They can cut and paste, too, with trivial precautions. But let's not give 'em away, eh?

var123, there were students who cheated in 1984

there were students who didn't give a damn about a good education as long as they got a piece of paper

why else did we have invigilators and supervised loo breaks and all bags to be put away on entering the exam room?

they were a tiny minority and so are the students who cheat today

but given the enormous quantity of students at universities these days, and the relative global uniformity of university courses, that tiny minority might just be enough to make it worth somebody's while to set up an internet site for cheating: particularly as that doesn't take much in terms of investment

ime a student who has been lifting extracts out of other works can usually be spotted through the change of style or thinking without the need to resort to turnitin: after all, the students who do this sort of thing are not the greatest writers, and if you suddenly find a coherent sentence in their essays it is often worthwhile checking where that came from...

if you suspect it, then you call them in for a gentle discussion and then either do or do not take it further according to university guidelines

ime they typically fall into two groups:

a) the ones who have simply been sloppy about their note-keeping and ended up mixing their own thoughts with reading notes/lecture notes in the same file

b) the ones who are at breaking point because of stress/ill health/inability to cope with the course and have used this as a desperate last resort. Very rarely do you see the completely immoral chancers: I may have met one or two of those over the last 7 or 8 years.

Some of the people I wrote essays for in the 1970s were actually incredibly conscientious- they just got snowed under.

I suspect larger numbers are cheating today. Of the children of friends I know at university, half have had substantial 'help' (ie. someone writing it for them) with an or all non-exam condition coursework.

With regard to GCSE coursework, I know of one case where a secondary English teacher wrote a relative's essay for her and she carried it into the controlled room along with her notes. This would only be possible, frankly, if the school turns a blind eye.

There was a thread on mumsnet a while back that discussed the pressure on schools, and individual teachers, to turn a blind eye to this.

It's not OK but I think it's the inevitable result of a perfect storm of factors (league table pressure; the business model being imposed on education).

I suspect it also has a lot to do with the rise of coursework. My degree was exam based, with a couple of supervised dissertations.

I wouldn't like to see a return to exams, I didn't feel they tested what I was good at, or key academic skills (not in the humanities, anyway).

On the other hand, the ability, and temptation, to cheat must be so high now. Add to that the fact that parents writing an essay, hiring a tutor to write the essay with the child, getting academic friends to give substanti help (talking through ideas, demonstrating skills, editing drafts,) is something many children have become so used to, from GCSE onwards, I think a lot don't even know that it IS cheating.
I think it's probably fair to say it isn't usually poor, badly-connected working-class students who are the main group doing this.
And that means it is just another layer of discrimination.

I have a very good story about this. Around 6 months ago I was contacted by a student through a website I get a lot of freelance work from. The message was along the lines of "hello, need someone to write a uni dissertation on deforestation and as I see from your profile you live in my town wondered if you could help?"

I replied that no, he should do his own work. He responded saying it would be a "model answer" that he would use to work from. Yeah right. He was quite rude in his reply to me and I was premenstrual at the time...

Then I remembered that one of the mums of a child my daughter goes to Brownies with works a lecturer in Geography at the nearest Uni. So I pinged her a quick text saying "you don't know a student called X doing a dissertation on deforestation in Russia, do you?"

Ten seconds later she rang me - yes she did, yes the Uni were worried about this student's work as it all appeared to have been done by different people, they had pulled him in before to quiz him on it, he was millimetres away from being chucked off his course and would I be prepared to forward all emails to her?

End of the story is that they gave him a final warning and very unusually for an undergrad he will be asked to attend a Viva exam and be quizzed on his dissertation to make sure he did actually write it and understands the subject matter.

As my mum always used to say, be sure your sins will find you out. (some details changed to protect the innocent)

It is all a bit depressing to read these responses and think of all the students who could excel but not when up against professional writers.

True, but my background is finance, marketing and Spanish. I could probably do you a reasonable essay on One Hundred Years of Solitude or the paintings of Frida Kahlo, but ask me to write about the Wars of the Roses or the ecology of Zambia and I'd be lost.

ask me to write about the Wars of the Roses or the ecology of Zambia and I'd be lost.

I suspect you could, with a few days' reading of Wikipedia relevant secondary and tertiary sources, knock out 3000 words to 2.2 standard.

Probably. But many of the websites for academic writing are paying very little (around £50 per 3000 words) and it wouldn't be worth my time. I'm sure there are thousands of others out there who are prepared to do it though.

My phone clearly does irony.

This thread is showing above the one about university course fees going up.

'Help' to get your degree class up from a 2:2 to a 2:1 or 1st must look like a small, sensible investment when placed next to the cost of a degree these days.

In my day most essays didn't count towards your degree, only final exams did. But often you couldn't graduate unless you had handed in all required work. So paying me to turn out a reasonable essay was a dishonest but sensible pragmatic choice.

These days, in my faculty, all exams and all coursework over years 2 and 3 count towards the degree. So that would be something like 2 essays (or 2 assignments + an exam) in 4 modules per semester= 32 essays, maybe a little less if doing double modules. An expensive way to get a degree. And the requirements for the individual essays are quite course specific, so whoever undertook to do the work would have to spend some time studying our website.

32 essays, maybe a little less if doing double modules. An expensive way to get a degree.

If it's right that they're £50 a pop, that's £1600. In the context of the ~£50k cost of getting a UK degree, or more if doing it at international fees, is £1600 really "expensive" if it got you a better classification?

If we're all getting our dirty laundry out, another problem is that the scent of money means that universities are only too happy to accept students with marginal English, and I don't think it is overly controversial to say that English language certificates often don't prove very much. Accepting students onto courses who are immediately struggling with the demands of language, which are brought to a head by asking for essays, doesn't do anyone any good.