Writing a university dissertation is, as every student knows, a labour of love. It requires long hours in the library, along with careful shaping and structuring of one’s material, plus countless litres of late-night black coffee. Or, alternatively, £300.
That’s if you’re only aiming for a 2:1, of course. If you’re really serious about academic success, you can pay £660 and get a First.
How? By hiring one of the growing number of companies that will supply anything from 1,000-word essays on the causes of the English Civil War to 10,000-word treatises on international marketing strategies. Not surprisingly, voices in academia are being raised in anger.
“Students who go down this path are cheating themselves,” says Jo Wynn, of the Quality Assurance Agency, which monitors standards in higher education.
“If we were to find someone using such a thing, our response would be ferocious,” says Professor Tom Ward, pro-vice-chancellor for academic affairs, at the University of East Anglia. “Not only would they not get their degree, they’d be kicked out. It is just so undermining of the whole system.”
Maybe so, but it’s pretty simple to do. Just go on the internet, type “essay writing”, and a host of firms will be clamouring to help with your coursework. “Where A Student’s Life Becomes Easier,” purrs the website UKBestEssays.com; less reassuring is its claim: “We provide piece of mind.”
Indeed, while these companies promise round-the-clock customer support and teams of 200 to 4,000 highly qualified essay-crafters, producing pieces of work that will pass all plagiarism tests, some appear to be more, well, questionable.
Question number one: are they in the UK? Not UKBestEssays. Despite a website showing Union Flags, the girl at the end of the phone says she’s in Delaware in the US. And when the rather distant-sounding man at Essaydom.co.uk is asked if I can visit his office, he says he can’t give me the address because I “might bring the police”.
“We all get tarred with the same brush,” complains Jilly Walden, quality manager at UKEssays.com, based at the same address (in Arnold, near Nottingham) as Degree Essays (www.degree-essays.com) and Law Teacher (www.lawteacher.net)
“Yet, unlike other companies, we are happy to publish our address, and we are happy for students to visit us; we have got academics in-house. Nor do we condone plagiarism. It’s made very clear to clients that we don’t supply essays; we give model answers around which they frame their ideas. We see it as no different to a lecturer pointing students towards a document in a library. As far as we know, 99.9 per cent of customers use our products correctly.”
But it’s hard to believe someone would pay £660 purely for a stimulating read. However, the founder of London-based Oxbridge Essays, Stratos Malamatinas, who says his firm (www.oxbridgeessays.com) gets 10,000-plus orders per year, stands by the ''it’s-just-a-framework’’ stance. “It’s made explicit to our customers that they should use our material merely as inspiration, and they should express themselves in their own words,” he declares.
“That said, 75 per cent of our customers are foreign students who, although talented, can’t express themselves as well in English as in their own language. British universities are happy to take their money, without checking their English. There’s a real greediness among British universities; students are left to struggle, and are forced to turn to a private company, rather than getting help that should be supplied by the university. It’s not just foreign students. Most UK students who come to us are profoundly unhappy with the tuition they get, [with] no formal instruction in the writing and structuring of essays.”
Especially when that essay is 90,000 words.
“I’m fine on research, and I can talk about the subject till the cows come home, but I need guidance in putting material together and expressing it in academic terms,” says Geoff (not his real name), who is doing a PhD in marketing at University College London, and is paying Oxbridge Essays to help him with his 400-page-plus thesis.
“They are writing the guideline, so to speak, and I am mimicking it in my own words. It’s going to take a couple of years and I’ll have paid them a five-figure sum, but it’s worth it. I am aware that some people do just take this kind of work and pass it off as their own – so I don’t want my real name in The Daily Telegraph, in case people think that’s what I’ve done.”
The same applies to “Dan”, a second-year student at Bristol University, who, in his first year, sought outside help with an essay on tragedy in Shakespeare. “I felt like I wasn’t getting much academic direction,” he says. “The number of students at lectures was enormous. I was getting no real feedback.” Instead of buying an essay off the internet, he turned to the tutorial agency Bright Young Things, which spent three and a half hours with him (at £60 an hour) planning his essay. Result? A 2:1 grade, but it was all his own work.
“We don’t write people’s essays, we merely teach them essay-production skills,” maintains Oliver Eccles, one of Bright Young Things’ senior tutors.
That’s not to say that tutors don’t get asked to do a bit of proxy essay-penning, though.
“I’ve had some difficult conversations with parents and students who want me to write the essay,” says Michelle Okin, who runs the tutorial agency Rose Okin (£40-£75 per hour). “But how are they going to stand on their own feet if they’ve always had the stabilisers on?”
It’s a powerful argument. Indeed, many would argue that the spread of tutoring in higher education was inevitable, considering how prevalent it has become in secondary and primary education. But the more immediate question for any student contemplating an essay purchase, is more likely to be – can I get away with it?
The answer is yes, if the work has been written by the kind of brilliant academic mind the websites claim to have on their books (Stratos Malamantinas says he has essay-writers who earn between £20,000 and £70,000 per year).
“If it truly is an original work, then it will get through the plagiarism-detection software,” says Will Murray, whose firm supplies Turnitin, the plagiarism checking system used by most UK universities. “But sometimes the writing has been outsourced to India, or America, and the grammar and expressions will reflect that. I’ve even seen cases where the student has left in the name of the person who actually wrote the essay.”
Ideally, prevention is better than detection. By inviting students to discuss essays, university tutors can monitor the sudden arrival of unfamiliar thoughts and ideas.
“My instinct is very much against the combative 'We don’t trust you’ approach,” says Professor Ward. “Rather than going for the Orwellian system, whereby we monitor our students’ internet traffic, I favour making them understand the only people being ripped off by these short cuts is them.”
Finally, there is always the worry that the immaculately written document you have bought is not as fresh as claimed, and may contain great chunks of pre-plagiarised text that will set off the digital detection sirens.
“So the question,” says Will Murray, “is how confident are you that the essay you are handing in, that has been written by someone you have never met, is 100 per cent original?”
LINK
Link to "In Praise of Plagiarism", an article defending plagiarism.
Not to be denied, this kind of service is spreading strongly among the education radar. Many students have the difficulty to make an essay that in the end will disturb and postponed their educational time. To have services like this is definitely a great temptation for all students, that is not great enough to make some writings. When there is a great temptation like this, students tend to give anything, including their pocket money to have an easier life. This service is very benefitting for the students since not only they complete the student’s tasks, but also guarantee that their writing is free from plagiarism, and also, they guarantee that this writing is good and will get a good score. In the end, the score is the thing we need for our education. Well, in my own opinion, despite the temptation for this essay service, this is not a good way for students to get their degree. Yes, you got the score, but the most important thing in education is the thing you learned. Therefore, you will not get anything learned from this kind of service, and that is not the purpose of our study.
ReplyDeleteCollege students usually get tempted whenever they see private tutors that offer them services on writing their university essays for them. This kind of service usually sells hard amongst college students because it saves their time on doing their assignments. The guarantee of a “100% free from any kind of plagiarism” on the service often raise the sell price of those private tutors. The question is that, do you think these services are giving you any benefits other than saving your ass against deadline? It certainly does not, because the reason that a lecturer gave you assignment is for you to learn. By using those private tutors to get your job done won’t help you on becoming a better person and will only detain you from learning new things. I personally think that this kind of service is not worth it because sometimes the problem is not the assignments that are too much but the lack of good time management is what’s wrong.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of thing is already happened since our mom and dad going to college. There’s always these kind of people who want to make easy A’s. However right know there are lots of ways to check whether you do plagiarism into your essay or not. The first one is you can search for free plagiarism checker on the internet. Thinking of recycling old paper you’re your friends there are some ways where you can input your essay and the framework or the computer system will try to recognize the similarity between your essay and the old paper. There’s a really high demand from the college student and the suppliers sees it as an opportunity. We need to remind the students about integrity and the importance of honesty. Using the reality of the society, student should improve their caring to others and the concept of being something useful. Be good, no matter who you are and where you came from or even what you believe. After the student believe to be good, they will not even think to do such dirty cheap things.
ReplyDeleteI personally would not want anyone writing an essay for me because the feeling of accomplishment after finishing a long and difficult essay wouldn’t be there when the finished essay is given to me by that person and I also think it’s an act of crime because later, the work I submitted to the professor wouldn’t be my original work. Even so, I don’t really find anything wrong with paying a company to hire someone to teach me how to write essays because I would want to get help in writing essays from a professional who’s experienced in writing essays. I find it obnoxious that many British universities don’t even give as simple as an essay structure to their students because different students coming from different schools would have different perspectives on how to write essays and it wouldn’t be fair if one would get a bad grade from a different style of essay writing compared to another who has a preferable style of essay writing by their lecturers. So, I support the company that teaches students how to write essays but I don’t support the company that writes essays for them.
ReplyDeleteThis is actually a controversial topics to be discussed. These ‘Essay writings helper’ Website are a controversial business, which sometimes being run by anonymous people on the web. Sure they can claim that they have a team of 200-plus professional essay writers. But, this is just based on their own testimony. Thus, we can’t know for sure wether this ‘essay helpers’ is really run by a credible person. Even some of these companies refused to be visited by the customer because they are afraid of being found out by the police, which makes it hard for these potential customer to put their more or less four years of college worth of trust. It is also questionable wether these company is helping college students by giving them guidelines in their essay? Or is these company simply offering a service to write student’s essays. If it is just simply a guidelines, why would someone would pay as much as £660?, It just doesn’t make sense. Well, maybe if u just not willing to do your work or if u just happen to had a lot of cash in your pocket, that might be the case. Still, it doesn’t really explain the 10,000-plus orders per year. Then, if it is just a service to write an academic essay’s, if you are considering to rent these kind of service you should definitely question yourself on the purpose of your four year study in college.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, i am kind of sad and triggered when i realize this kind of things are still really happening surround us. If all of people keep talking about their nonsense reasons of doing so, i think it will take more than a whole year to cover all of it. Therefore i want to talk about the real reason and what is the solution of it. It is based on my own opinion which i took from my experience in junior and senior high school. I am not going to talk about essay, but it is quite similiar with it (plagiarism).
ReplyDeleteFrom all of my high school experience, the main reason i met surround me was the person itself. For example the level of confidence they have on their works and their diligence. But i want to talk about different perspective, i want to talk about the task itself. Many of the teachers were giving the kind of task that did not train our critical thinking but did train our copy paste thinking instead. The curriculum itself need to be improved by the government. We need the kind of curriculum that train our critical thinking, and that was what exactly my senior high school did. Therefore the level of plagiarism was very low, even zero for some subjects which modified by some of my teachers in senior high school. All students would show their own unique way of thinking and analyzing. On addition, the teachers had this kind of unique method which instead of punishment, they gave more reward which was very effective way to make us grew even more to be critical thinker.
To use the services would definitely be a wrong act no matter how you look at it, most especially if you submit the "framework" as your own work. The plagiarism aspect, though it may be the most striking piece, isn't really the biggest problem. It is the ability, or lack thereof, of the student to understand and then articulate said understanding onto a written piece. The inability to do proper English could be a factor among foreign students.But even then, why would there be such a motivation to purchase services that is so vile and deplorable on an academic level? remember that one of the essay provider firms report to having over 10000 orders per year. This doesn't clearly indicate much but a factor in this high number of request is the quality of university services. I personally think that if there was a competent enough service, students would not have to turn to other sources for help.
ReplyDeleteFor the ‘private tutor’ of essay itself. I want to talk about my opinion which is how to solve this kind of bad habit in our surrounding. The best solution would be preventive action, not repressive one. I am agreed and even surprised in a good way when i know there is a plagiarism detector. Therefore the repressive way would do just perfect. But for the preventive way, i think it should be the characteristics of people themself.
ReplyDeleteThe best way of prevention is to implement the no need to copy value. Therefore i believe, the soft skills training need to be intensified. Because if many people were prepared with the soft skills they needed to write their own essays, the possibility of paying the ‘private tutor’ would be decreased. Many people would feel that they do not need to waste their money for any of those ‘private tutors’ anymore since the reasons would be minimalized to only that ‘lazy’ reason.
I couldn’t disagree more on how college and school life could be a burden for us sometimes. Especially when there are so many tasks piled up which isn’t something I enjoy and feel excited about. For instance, writing an essay that is 1000 words and above is very tiring for me considering I don’t really like writing. Whether it is my school or college life, I am willing to give anything including money in order to get a good score, and therefore graduating with good grades despite it being unethical. We can’t deny the fact that many university students just want to get their degree as quick as possible. So, when an opportunity like this Oxbridge Essays offers services like this, it could be quiet tempting for university students. However, I remind myself from time to time that the reason why I’m attending university is to get the education that I need and that a degree is just a proof of finishing my education. And of course, this kind of services will not help me get the education I wanted in the first place, but instead, acts like a shortcut in earning a degree.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of service is very good temptation to students. And I strongly disagree with services like this. When there is an essay writing task, I know it’s not everybody’s favorite. There are some students who doesn’t like to write. Hence, many students are willing to use their pocket money to pay for these kinds of services. They pay so they wouldn’t have to use extra energy for thinking materials, choosing grammar, and writing the paper. And the result is, they just know that their task is done without even knowing what’s written on the paper. Although this is very practical, this is not how education should be. You are in college (or school) to study. Not to pay for services that does your homework and expect good scores. What’s important is what you learn and your effort for learning. Honesty is important. My mother told me: “it’s better to get a bad score by doing it yourself, rather than getting a perfect score by cheating”.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of problems that I have with this system. Firstly, it does not give students a sense of accomplishment, students do not get their satisfaction of completing a task all by themselves. Of course it is much easier this way and less stressful, but being able to relieve all that stress when you have completed the task is such an amazing feeling. Secondly, it is unfair to the students who might not be able to purchase these services, for example if a student creates their thesis by purchasing these kinds of services and graduates immediately, where as another students does everything all by himself and struggles. His thesis is not accepted by the lecturers and such so he has to remake it all over again. How is that fair? Lastly, by doing this kind of transaction or by purchasing these types of services we might struggle in the future where we cannot rely on these services to help us do our work.
ReplyDeleteThis act is very common when we reach college/university. This is inevitable. In my opinion, this does attract students to cheat. Why? because we know that students usually take an easier way to do things, especially when we are assigned to do long essays. For example, when we need to do a 1000 word essay. Truthfully, I really hate doing essays. If there is a business entity, that has a credible name like "Oxbridge essay" here in Jogjakarta, most students including myself would consider taking it. I consider taking it due to the fact that sometimes I cant manage my time wisely. In fact, around a year ago I personally thought that this may be a good business opportunity. However, since I am admitted to Universitas Gadjah Mada, where integrity is very emphasized, I will always say that this is not the right thing to do. This is somehow an act of crime.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I would like to say that this is a really good article. Not just because of the content but because the content is still debatable by most people, some of them agree and some don’t. me myself personally don’t like writing essays therefore this kind of services would be helpful for me. But before we get any further we must know why this kind of services exist. It exist because in reality people respect scores more than honesty, although I have heard so many sayings that said “your honesty is more important than your score”. So I think this is why this kind of services exist. I do think that this kind of services are good because although we know that it isn’t good for education but it can show us how bad are the education in those area or in that country are. Summing it up, I totally agree if students try to use this kind of services but, I do not suggest them to do so. - Dimas Aditya Permana
ReplyDeleteA major problem faced by University students with regards to writing an essay is time management. University students often find difficulties in balancing social life, university life and assignments. As a university student, I also find it difficult to do equally well on all 3 aspects mentioned before. Many students, including myself choose to prioritize one obligation over the other. This condition becomes one of the driving factor for essay service provider to conduct their business. Institutions must realize the service described in the passage is available due to a high demand and thus a good business opportunity. Institution however, are able to decrease the demand of that service by providing alternatives or viable solution to its students. This can be done by providing an interactive training platform such as time management workshop, writing workshop or any other self development activities that can train university students. I believe that when students are well prepared in terms of skills and time management, the demand for essay writing services will decrease.
ReplyDeleteI do not exactly support this kind of service. I think it makes students even lazier, and they would be more incompetent in writing essays. Essays are very important and will be required a lot from students in their university life. So, I really think they need to be able to make essays themselves. Moreover, I think this kind of service will increase the tendency for upper class students to misuse their money. This is one of the services that will support the negative mindset of how the society thinks about rich people. They usually say rich people can get away with anything or money can buy anything. I personally think this typical mindset is wrong, because this is a stereotype we set upon rich people. And, not everyone with lots of money abuses what they have. Therefore, I do not agree nor support this kind of service, since I think it brings more bad than good. I think people should learn how to write essays properly, because it will be very useful in our everyday life.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I am not one bit of surprise reading this article, it has been a common practice where I came from. Even though only certain people that do it. I suppose this sort of thing not only happen in university level, I suppose this sort of contract cheating have been present for a while in a level as low as elementary school, at least in their later years. In my high school buying assignment from another has been a common practice, and there are people such as myself who take advantage of this sad circumstances and turning it into a business. Back in my high school, there is only one class of social science major, which is mine, and somehow our class has become a major trading place for ‘jockeying’ assignments. We used to mass produce certain assignment, usually ridiculous one such as hand painting wall magazine or making prepackaged kit for your practicum, the sort of manual labour people thinks are not worth their time. Though in my final years I realized my sins, and reduce the order capacity. And by the way I have never bought any of my assignments.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, schools do not provide guidance in how to make academic essays. Fortunately, my high school prepared me with some knowledge as to how to write one, although it was in Bahasa. This is one of the problems that many schools have. I was lucky that my school offers help but that is not the case for others. A friend of mine, who was a transfer student from Taiwan, had a really bad experience in making a Bahasa academic essay. He has never made a short essay in Bahasa let alone an academic essay in Bahasa. He constantly had to use Google Translate, which is a bad choice, and asks his friends if his grammar was right or if he was using the right words to convey what he wanted to write. It was hell for him and seeing him work like that, I feel really bad. Schools should really set students up to know how to write academic essays early so that during their university days, they do not plagiarize or even buy an essay.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting actually, and very smart indeed. If this was in Indonesia it would be called "Joki" which is basically the term or slang when someone is doing the job for you. However, I prefer writing my own essays because I want to share my opinions or ideas and express my feelings. If I do pay someone to write my essays then it would just be a waste of money, If I can do it why should I pay? I cannot deny the fact that this "business" is spreading very quickly nowadays because it is true, more and more people are starting this business because I guess it does not take that much effort, I mean you just have to be good at writing and then you get paid lots of money. When I write my own essays I feel like I have accomplished something when I finish. I would see why people might pay other people to write for their essays, if they have the money then they can do whatever they want, maybe they lack the skills of writing essays so they need the help of other people.
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