Plagiarism and Essay Mills
Sometimes as I decide what kind of papers to assign to my students, I can’t help but think about their potential to use essay mills.
Essay mills are companies whose sole purpose is to generate essays for high school and college students (in exchange for a fee, of course). Sure, essay mills claim that the papers are meant just to help the students write their own original papers, but with names such as echeat.com, it’s pretty clear what their real purpose is.
Professors in general are very worried about essay mills and their impact on learning, but not knowing exactly what essay mills are or the quality of their output, it is hard to know how worried we should be. So together with Aline Grüneisen, I decided to check it out. We ordered a typical college term paper from four different essay mills, and as the topic of the paper we chose… (surprise!) Cheating.
Here is the description of the task that we gave the four essay mills:
“When and why do people cheat? Consider the social circumstances involved in dishonesty, and provide a thoughtful response to the topic of cheating. Address various forms of cheating (personal, at work, etc.) and how each of these can be rationalized by a social culture of cheating.”
We requested a term paper for a university level social psychology class, 12 pages long, using 15 sources (cited and referenced in a bibliography), APA style, to be completed in the next 2 weeks, which we felt was a pretty basic and conventional request. The essay mills charged us in advance, between $150 to $216 per paper.
Two weeks later, what we received what would best be described as gibberish. A few of the papers attempt to mimic APA style, but none achieve it without glaring errors. Citations were sloppy, and the reference lists abominable – including outdated and unknown sources, many of which were online news stories, editorial posts or blogs, and some that were simply broken links. In terms of the quality of the writing itself, the authors of all four papers seemed to have a very tenuous grasp of the English language, or even how to format an essay. Paragraphs jumped bluntly from one topic to another, and often fell into the form of a list, counting off various forms of cheating or providing a long stream of examples that were never explained or connected to the “thesis” of the paper. Here are some excerpts from the four papers:
“Cheating by healers. Healing is different. There is harmless healing, when healers-cheaters and wizards offer omens, lapels, damage to withdraw, the husband-wife back and stuff. We read in the newspaper and just smile. But these days fewer people believe in wizards.”
“If the large allowance of study undertook on scholar betraying is any suggestion of academia and professors’ powerful yearn to decrease scholar betraying, it appeared expected these mind-set would component into the creation of their school room guidelines.”
“By trusting blindfold only in stable love, loyalty, responsibility and honesty the partners assimilate with the credulous and naïve persons of the past.“
“Women have a much greater necessity to feel special.”
“The future generation must learn for historical mistakes and develop the sense of pride and responsibility for its actions.”
At this point we were rather relieved, figuring that the day is not here where students can submit papers from essay mills and get good grades for them. Moreover, we concluded that if students did try to buy a paper from an essay mill, just like us, they would feel that they have wasted their money and won’t try it again.
But the story does not end here. We submitted the four essays to WriteCheck.com, a website that inspects papers for plagiarism and found that two of the papers were 35-39% copied from existing works. We decided to take action with the two largely plagiarized papers, and contacted the essay mills requesting our money back. Despite the solid proof that we provided, the companies insisted that they did not plagiarize. One company even tried to threaten us by saying that they will get in touch with the dean at Duke to alert them to the fact that we submitted work that is not ours (just imagine being a student who had used the paper for a class!).
The bottom line? I think that the technological revolution has not yet solved students’ problems. They still have no other option but to actually work on their papers (or maybe cheat the old fashioned way and copy from friends). But I do worry about the existence of essay mills and the signal that they send to our students. As for our refund, we are still waiting…
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves
the text sounds a little like they took a good essay, google translated it to another language and then back to English
agadthya
I’ve found that outsourcing to a fellow classmate produces the best results. Or trading off on assignments based on strengths and weaknesses.
If it is acceptable in the business world why not at the university? I think being able to be clever enough to cheat and cheat well is a sign of progress in itself. Although I can generally do the assignments myself without problem once I understand the material of a subject I feel no need to spend more time on an essay that will not teach me anything new or benefit me outside of maintaining a relatively high grade.
Some of those sites do work although this is what I have heard from word of mouth.
Would it be unethical to sell all of my classwork upon graduation to someone working towards the same degree? I wonder how much a B.S. is worth to some people..
Please do some more research on the placebo effect. I think there is a lot of potential in helping treat chronic pain patients somewhere in the midst of all of it, but I am unable to remain objective as I am too close to the matter.
Robert: That’s like saying, “Using your hands is allowed in football, so why not use my hands in soccer, too?” The answer is that they’re different games, with different rules and different ways of measuring excellence.
Thanks Chris, I suppose this is a logical fallacy of ambiguity my English professor warned me about. Isn’t it safe to say that with an alarming rise of college students across the nation and in other countries that I am in direct competition with these other people? And as many others have pointed out if the instructor doesn’t go beyond assigning the questions that come with the teachers edition textbook should I really be blamed for downloading the semesters work the first week?
Mr. Ariely states that an honor system might curb cheating in regards to people who view it as socially acceptable such as in my case. I think in a situation such as this if a student chooses to take the easy way out it will only limit their progression. It may be possible to lie and cheat ones way through the basic courses but if nothing is learned it will become increasingly difficult to understand concepts that are built upon earlier work.
I truly don’t consider my methodology cheating. If the teacher does not have time to test the extent of my knowledge then I will not waste my time on material I’ve already learned.
Of course sometimes I wonder if my uni is ripping me off and giving me a substandard education. Figuring this out after I’ve accumulated so much debt has left me rather bitter.
Writecheck.com is expensive for students. I use Plagtracker.com, because it’s totally free
I think the real lesson here is the classic one: There is no honor among thieves. Students who are attempting to cheat through these essay mills find themselves cheated. The threat of blackmail from one of the companies is a typical method of enforcement in criminal communities. In a community without trust, one should not expect much honor.
As Roy mentioned, those excerpts do sound like they are writing the essay in a different language and then machine translating them…
Maybe they are outsourcing the writing to cheaper countries and then translating? Sounds weird they’d expect anyone to accept the quality of machine translation, but given what you showed, it seems they may be doing that… It’d certainly make economic sense!
For over 20 years, I’ve been assigning unlikely-comparison essays. For example, compare the acquisition of Rhode Island by its earliest European settlers with that of Arizona, considering legal, moral, and economic dimensions. Or compare the sense of self suggested in the erotic verse of Catullus with that of Allen Ginsberg. Such pairings are unlikely ever to have been requested before. Further, I demand that the question be explored thematically, that is, you can’t just write several paragraphs about Rhode Island and then move on to Arizona. It must be integrated. But then most college professors do not involve themselves much in the composition process; like their department heads, they’re focused on finished products. Another consideration: why do you want an essay? Is that the most apt vehicle for causing the sort of reflection on the part of the student that you’re after? Or is it a habit of long standing, assigned for lack of a better, or even another idea?
Omigod! You mean students are ALMOST as unethical as the tens of thousands of professors who hire semi-qualified and often linguistically challenged teaching assistants to do most of their actual teaching for them?
My manga-obsessed physics TA for Modern Physics at Cal-Berkeley used to holler “POW!” every time he diagrammed a collision, and “POW!” was about the only word of of his tutorials that any of us could understand!
I would have thought it takes a whole lifetime of selling out to achieve the typical professorial level of academic irresponsibility, and now you tell me that mere students of tender years are just as crooked!
Who woulda thunk it?
1. These essays read very much like cheap articles written for SEO “benefit” and are probably produced in either the “beginner” or the “advanced” departments of the same companies (can’t tell which side makes more money).
2. +1 to Robert C–The exact same behavior that education criticizes as plagiarism is lauded as leverage in corporations. One wonders how business schools would evaluate a plagiarized paper on leverage?
No, doing an end-run around accepted performance measures is considered a bad thing in either domain.
Beg to disagree. It’s all a question of ownership. Stealing someone else’s idea, in an academic world where individuals own ideas, is plagiarism and wrong. In the corporate world, there is no individual ownership and the corporation owns you, your work, and every idea you have during your employ. Therefore, there is no such thing as plagiarism in business, unless you get caught stealing from another corporation, and then it’s a question of IP protection.
In my experience of designing performance measures, if they can be run-around that easily, they weren’t too well designed in the first place. You get what you measure (and reward), so be careful what you’re measuring.
ubitheclown: I think if you read my comment, you’ll see that you actually DON’T disagree with me. Or if you do, you didn’t say anything in your follow up that demonstrates that disagreement.
Dan,
You still need to be wary about people like me. I did work for some students. This is how I operated. Take a thesis / dissertation and rephrase it completely. YES, I did rephrase some 20000 words. Take an existing dissertation put it in writecheck, that gives a report telling me which parts of dissertation are identified as plagiarism. Rephrase it and submit it again do it until the plagiarism is zero. The advantage of rephrasing is the context is not lost (mostly not but there are instances when it was lost). Out of 10 dissertations I submitted 7 are pass. The rest failed because they were caught in the viva/ discussion, some students are too lazy to read what is submitted by them. I have seen instances where the professor failed candidates when he felt the dissertation was too good to be true for the student.
I may add, most of the students come to college to get a Degree and get a job. They are not really interested in learning. Those who really want to learn will do it anyway. Why do not we do away with submitting papers all together? Why do not the professors give them case studies and ask them to complete it in 30 mins infront of professors and give marks based on that. No need to check plagiarism, since no one can copy.
I once included references to werewolves and vampires in a Falklands Islands paper. I still wonder if the teacher ever caught it. THe student certainly didn’t.
Would have been cool for you to note that you first published this elsewhere – I saw it on Technology Review a while back. Yup: September 15, 2010, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/420806/plagiarism-and-essay-mills/
At least it is from you.
As an author Dan, where do you draw the line on plagiarism of your own material? I recently read your latest book (excellent, by the way) and now I’m finding the content of the book appearing in your recent postings. I could see using a series of columns to construct a book but to take material from an already published source and recycle it seems a bit ‘dishonest’.
My first year teaching I caught a number of students cheating in the ethics class I was teaching. I had them write essays on academic dishonesty and the responses were illuminating. One student complained (IMHO legitimately) that it was unfair that she had to get a college degree to be a pre-school teacher. Another said that it was only fair that he could buy papers because he worked for the money to by them. What was the difference: he and the students who wrote their own papers both put in work—and he did at least the same amount of work that they did for a paper to earn the money to buy it, by flipping burgers. What was the difference?
What do you say to students caught up in an unfair system, who have no intellectual interests but have to get a credential to get for work that doesn’t require any of the skills they’re supposed to be learning in college? As an academic I’m caught up in an unfair system too: I’m supposed to be teaching but I’m also obliged to act as a representative of an employment-prescreening agency. There’s tremendous pressure at my place to keep the grades down—because we have to produce a ranking as part of our credentialing function. So, I face a real conflict of interests: I have to do my best to teach but hope that a reasonable number of students do poorly so that I can produce the correct quota of low grades for my courses.
The problem is to find some way to detach the teaching function of colleges from the employment-credentialing function. But until that happens—if it ever happens—both students and faculty are stuck in an inherently unfair system. Students recognize that—and it promotes academic dishonesty.
At least in the San Francisco area, where I live, employers demand degrees. It cuts down on the resumes to plow through, and mistakenly leads them to believe that they have critical thinkers working for them.
Hence, everyone simply must have a degree, although one certainly wonders how some of these people got degrees.
Careful Dan, as an out of work English speaking and published paper writer you’ve just provided me with a nice way to earn a little welcome cash at home. However, I’m with you – anyone using this type of service is fooling themselves if they think they’ll get away with it. And they must also have too much money and too few friends to even think about, so can’t be real students!
As a professor, I have to say: It is trivially simple to eliminate cheating and to grade fairly. Just like in graduate school, make the exams into a private 3-hour interview before a panel of professors.
The only problem is that it is expensive and time-consuming, and nobody wants to pay for a professional workforce of highly trained professor (hence the complaints about TA’s above).
I’m happy to see we’re not yet to the point where students can order up essays on-demand, but I don’t believe for a moment that we won’t get there — probably very soon.
Even though these essay mills aren’t viable solutions yet, I don’t think it’s too soon to start thinking about how to address the problem when they become more sophisticated. This isn’t just a technical problem, either — I’ve seen numerous references to educators working on automated grading of essays, and I think we probably need to consider the message we’re sending to students when we mass-produce their grades. We should also not forget that if we’ve got the technical ability to grade essays, that same ability could be used to improve the quality of the output from essay mills.
I do believe, however, that if I were a professor, I’d include at least a trivial anti-robot hook in my essay assignments. For example, I might declare that my lectures would be considered (for the purposes of my assignments only) a citable resource, and that I expected to see at least one, but not more than two of these references in an assignment (for instance). Poof — the bar just went up a notch.
@abrahamdavidsmith, this is what vexes me the most: as a professor, I have to put in work to minimize cheating, even when it means imposing restrictions on assignments that I don’t think are good pedagogically. I make multiple copies of tests. OK, that doesn’t impede effective teaching, but it imposes a burden on me and wastes time I could use more productively. But I also have to set specific questions for term papers which I don’t want to do: I think students should be able to write on whatever they want within the purview of the course and approach their topic however they want, with my guidance. But I have to impose restrictions to mimimize cheating.
The tragedy is that we are in an arms race, where we spend time and effort that could go to real learning and real research to policing. And all this not only makes my job more tedious but it makes student’s experience much less interesting. I wish I could give take-home exams–but I can’t. I wish I could have students take in class exams sitting under the trees in the quad, as I did when I was an undergraduate. But I can’t.
I hate cheating because it undermines the system, because it creates an adversarial system and takes the joy out of the whole thing. I have a zero-tolerance policy and I implement it. But I f*ing hate the whole thing. This isn’t what I got into this business for: like the Clerke at Oxenford, I would gladly learn and gladly teach. But I do not gladly function as a cop.
As someone who writes these students’ papers for a living, I hear you. It’s annoying as fuck that these students are even in college in the first place. They think that they are just there to get the degree but really they are supposed to be learning skills like critical thinking, communication, clear writing and these are not the kinds of skills that you can fake in the real world. So they are just wasting their time and their money by going to college.
Still, I pay my rent and you get a paper that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself from all the bad grammar so it’s a win win in some respects.
I once wrote a paper for one of these services, when I was living in NYC, between MA and going back to grad school for PhD. I responded to an advertisement asking for people with advanced degrees–didn’t matter what. I took the job because I was so outraged that apart from it, as a woman, no one gave a damn that I had an MA or, for that matter, that I had a BA: all they cared about was my performance on the typing test. And when I tried saying that I couldn’t type the employment agency just said they couldn’t work with me: “I’m sorry, Hon–we don’t have jobs for little girls who don’t type.”
So I wrote this paper, on the geology of New York City and environs, which I totally enjoyed researching and writing. And I think I probably got an A on it, even though my degree is in philosophy. The service I was working for was in New Jersey, so I rode my bike across, delivered the paper, and then ended up getting lost the the Meadowlands, a miserable polluted swamp, for my sins. I never did it again, and still feel bad about it.
But as I say what motivated me was the anger, that with my degree, with my intelligence and willingness to work hard, and my ability to contribute, because I was a woman apart from this job I couldn’t get anything that used my intelligence or energy or skills. I would have done anything, extended myself to the limit, worked every waking hour, given everything I had–and I had a lot–to do a job that wasn’t just pink-collar secretarial drudge work. But the only interesting work I could get was writing papers for this service–and I did do a very good job.
As a professor who is concerned about teaching and cheating, mostly because of how unfair it is to the students who put in the work, I appreciate you covering these issues.
Just as the cheating is outsourced, I would like much of the checking outsourced. Why can’t colleges provide proctored exam rooms, and staff which check papers for plagiarism? Ethical standards would be more uniform and teachers would be out of the policing business, which they are not very good at anyway.
Love it, but who pays? The general public already thinks we’re lazy bums, and want to make sure that we do some drudge work. Years ago when I taught at Large State University a member of the Board of Regents nixed a request for more faculty office space on the grounds that “if faculty were doing their jobs they wouldn’t need offices.” Get it?
I’d go for a British style system where students’ credentials and ranking depended on an externally administered test–or tests. And we commented on papers, and tutored, but didn’t grade–or at least where our grades and assessments were irrelevant to the credentialing and ranking business.
Amusing and insightful.
Thanks, Dan.
When they say “Recycle,” they mean bottles. This article is from 2010 and has already been published on dozens of websites.
To all of you professors who are concerned about cheating: have you ever asked yourselves WHY your students are cheating? Perhaps there is an inherent problem in the so-called educational system? Perhaps you are no longer educating but rather selling job certificates, and your students are smart enough to recognize that? Perhaps YOU are cheating your students, and they are merely playing the game?
Think about that before you come up with the next anti-plagiarism method, which your students will find trivially easy to bypass.
Goddam, as a professor I can’t fix that. I can’t change that “so-called educational system.” I’d love to teach, really teach because I love my field and think that what I have to teach is wonderful. But I’m as bound by the system as students are–if not more so. And believe me, I fight it.
Wow. i can’t believe internet has come to this extent of essay mills! This should be banned! But surely only rich people would pay for 100s of dollars- I guess.
Sadly, I’ve received papers from my students that had similar bad grammar and incoherence. Some have then resorted to stealing entire papers (for free!) from easily-accessed internet sites–university libraries, and the like–once I’ve recorded the zeroes they earned.
The rapid transition from mindless gibber-jabber to eye-watering prose is a sure sign of plagiarism.
The examples you offered in this piece are actually representative of some of the student writing I must endure, Dan.
I guess the good news is that there is a market for this kind of writing, so the students who fail may still find employment.
Guy
I’m afraid that the message the essay mills are sending is frankly that you should be paid for your work or you should be paying for someone to do work for you. Funny thing is that I doubt they guarantee a good grade or stand by the ‘originality’ of that work.
In this age, words, ideas and efforts are stolen at an alarming pace and as long as there is an incentive to do it without being caught, some will do it.
If a professor or teacher really wants to measure a student’s performance on a subject through essay writing, then he or she will have to invest a lot more time in the process with the students. In the past I have worked with students learning English as a second language. In their course, they were required to write a persuasive speech in English. I worked one on one with them and invested quite a lot of time on grammar correction, but the largest amount if time was spent actually on getting them to find an argument they were willing to make and then try to support that, because, they really seemed to not have any strong opinions about anything. The fact of the matter is, without any interest in the topic, there can not be an opinion aside from a superficial one. So I did find students ‘borrowing’ opinions and support for them from ‘other’ sources. This can be recognized if you work closely with the students in the process, but if you are just going to wait for the finished product…and it comes out to seem suspiciously familiar to something you read before…don’t be surprised. Students will invest as much time into their education as they or others around them value it.
Three additional comments that I have:
0) Plagiarism and “copying ideas” and “cheating” are different, and people are conflating them. Plagiarism is about not citing your sources.
“Copying ideas” is a vague idea that isn’t part of any sort of copyright law or academic principle. Copyright law covers text, not concepts, and academics rely on building from each-others’ ideas. “Cheating” is something different, and is about claiming credit for work outside the bounds of some specified rule set for a scoring system.
1) If your assignments are easy to copy, then you aren’t asking interesting (read “good”) questions of your students.
Corollary to 1) If you can’t tell an A student from a C student after a semester of contact, then your assessment system is broken anyway. “A” means “could teach the class next semester”. “C” means “can handle the main concepts, but can’t develop or derive them without direct instruction.” I’m in math/science so perhaps this is more clear-cut than other disciplines.
2) They way to avoid basic plagiarism is treat them as adult researchers: Tell them that they *should* use every resource they can find, and the only thing they have to do is drop in a footnote explaining where they found it. Here’s the header I put on many of my mid-term exams:
“”"
Note! This is a take-home exam. It is due in class on [date]. You may use any resource at your disposable, including classmates, textbooks, the Internet, or anything else. However, for each question, you
must disclose what resources you used and how you used them. For example “My great-uncle Hermann suggested (between his political tirades) that I use the equation $100^x=10^{2x}$ to simplify in step 2.” It is your
responsibility to make sure that you completely understand and can defend everything that you write down!
“”"
(sorry for the embedded LaTeX…. I suppose this isn’t the sort of blog that supports MathJAX.)
Wow, as a computer science major that focuses in linguistics, I find those excepts to be lovely! It reminds me of a random poetry generator I made for a project (which was about as effective but really fun). This may have done something similar, where it found several related essays, then used an algorithm to predict word sequence probabilities. If it did not have enough data input, it would get 100% probabilities on some sequences and read right out of the paper causing sections of plagiarism.
I assigned a paper in college a Number of years ago. The papers included one that had been plagiarized and was still completely unintelligible. I failed the student and wrote a lengthy description explaining my reasons. Seven years later I got a letter from the dean of students alsing me to review my grade for this student as his failing that paper and subsequently failing my class was keeping him from receiving a diploma. I refused to change his grade and was asked several times again.
The administration was colluding with the student to approve his plagiarizing. I was disgusted. I no longer teach at that college.
Good for you, Arlette, and way to stick to your guns.
It is a foul for the administration to even hint at changing grades, especially for such an inane reason.
Why in the world would the school or its graduates want to have a plagiarist hang the diploma? Talk about a brand killer!
Guy
The BBC has an article focusing on plagerism in Europe and how it has ruined a few careers and the reputations of some previously well respected individuals in government, education and other fields.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/18962349
“Viewpoint: The Spectre of Plagerism Haunting Europe”
The quotes from the essays purchased were awesome! Definitely good enough to pass around the office for fun.
Wow. I edit papers for students who write dissertations for doctoral degrees and sometimes they request that I write or completely rewrite portions of their papers for them. Unfortunately, I do not do that as it’s unethical. I cannot believe students actually pay someone to write their papers for them….craziness.
If you are looking for a genuine, classy site to purchase your essay or any custom-written material: Relax, you are in the right place! We specialize in custom essays, coursework, term papers, resumes, cover letters, theses, dissertations, speeches, book reports amongst others.
> I cannot believe students actually pay someone to write their papers for them….craziness.
Took ‘em five weeks to find this site. Wonder what the real comprehension of the poster above is. The post itself is coherent and correct, but it could be a cut-and-paste.
Hello Mr Ariely
I can only say that you havent looked into this issue deep enough. I know an office colleague who has an engineering degree, and he also writes part time for one of these essay mills. I have looked at some of his papers, in subjects such as engineering, chemistry and mathematics. I can tell you that those are top drawer papers, as obviously they would be – this guy has an engineer’s grasp of the subjects. And he says that he receives a steady stream of orders, many of them repeat ones, since most of his clients get high grades in their courses and come back to him.
So may be most of the papers produced by essay mills for students are crap, but some of them are also genuine stuff that let these students cheat very conveniently, and get them high grades too. Please do some more careful research, maybe order papers on more technical subjects, before you relax. There are lots of essay mills on the net, perhaps you just did not go to the ‘good’ ones!
I absolutely agree with perfect. The internet is full of assignment writing services and a simple Google search throws several thousand websites. Your research could just be the tip of the iceberg because in all likelihood; you ordered assignments from companies that are just more “popular” as they were the ones that were shown to you for the keyword you keyed in.
This does not mean all the companies are junk out there. To our dismay, many websites are owned by the same owner running a company that has several essay websites under its belt and some companies have a few hundred essay mill sites. So, we do not even know if you ordered with different companies in the first place.
After winning a tennis match with me, one of my friend’s college going son who is studying to get a Management degree boasted to me that he had been ordering many of his essays from some website called gr8researchpaper.com I think and he had been mostly getting A- to B+ grades on most of his research papers.
I once wrote a paper for one of these essay mills, on the geology of NYC and environs. It was a really good paper too: I enjoyed researching and writing it, and learnt a lot.
But when I biked out from Manhattan to NJ to deliver it I got lost in the New Jersey “meadowlands”—a miserable, polluted quagmire, and became convinced that God was punishing me. I never did it again or as far as I can remember cheated on anything else again. Believe me, getting stuck in the New Jersey meadowlands will do that to you!
Why did I do it? Because I got this job in response to an ad in The Village Voice for people with post-BA degrees. I had a philosophy MA from Johns Hopkins, on my way to my PhD. But applying for jobs no one gave a damn. They didn’t even look at my resume. They just asked me take the typing test—and when, on one occasion, I lied and said I couldn’t type they said that they “didn’t have any jobs for little girls who can’t type.”
So I was bitter and angry because the only job I could get that took any consideration of my credentials or my skills (other than typing) was this job, writing phoney term papers.
Wow, incredible blog layout! How long have you been blogging
for? you made blogging look easy. The overall look of your website is fantastic, let alone the content!
Academic dishonesty is old news. I believe outsourcing essays by college students is not new and its first few instances date all the way back to 1970′s. However, what makes the whole thing interesting is the fact that most of these essays mills are run by poor, ESL owners based in third world countries. The good thing is; their writing is appalling at the very least, so its very easy for professors to catch hold of mischief mongers.
I am a professor myself and it was as recent as yesterday I caught a student when I noticed that his language was very different. When I confronted him, he told me he had ordered his essay from some company called assignmentwritinghelp.com and he was assured that his paper will pass without plagiarism. Sure enough, there was no plagiarism, but I carefully evaluate all the essays and check if there is change in writing style. This particular student is ESL, but the essay was written by a native, so he had to come out clean.
I agree with Mary, and this is a point that I myself wonder about. I mentioned in an earlier post that I have a friend who writes for some online essay mills. I have seen him write complicated engineering dissertations, and sometimes I myself have discussed one or two theoretical points with him that he asked me about.
I have asked him often – the papers that you are writing are in your own writing style, and contain highly specialized and advanced content. Whereas the students who are ordering the papers would obviously be writing a lot of other assignments in their own style and certainly with a lesser level of expertise (they are not practicing engineers like my friend is). So how come they dont get caught? My friend shrugs and says that as long as his clients are satisfied and he gets paid, he is happy.
So I have wondered – who is lazier here, the student or the teacher? The student, who is dishonest enough to order an essay and submit it as his own? Or the teacher, who isnt suspicious (or doesnt notice) when one of his average students suddenly turns in a top grade assignment in a completely different writing style?
Hmmmm, it appears to me, your “experiment” consisted of sending prompts to four of the shittiest, least fluent in the English language essay mills you could find. Whether you did that on purpose (to try and prove your point), or if you were deceived I’m not sure. But your post is not an accurate depiction of reality I’m afraid. I’m a ghostwriter myself, and of my student clients, only 3 out of the hundreds I’ve provided with example essays have gotten below a C. To find the “real” essay mills that actually provide quality, there’s a barrier. People over the age of 30 will find them nearly impossible to track down for the simple fact that you have to have the internet skill set to filter out the trashy ones. We ARE at a level that students can pay, go play, and a few days later check their email for their B+ paper. The fact that you are referring to the modern world as “the technological revolution” just goes to show how far behind teachers are compared to their students (in regards to cheating).
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