Essays from essay banks are “crap”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2020840 , according to the THES :
bq. Students who think they can beat plagiarism detection software by paying an internet ghostwriting service to produce bespoke essays may want to think again, writes Phil Baty. An experiment at Loughborough University, in which students bought essays from internet services that write one-off pieces of work to order, found that they were of poor quality, sometimes riddled with mistakes and unlikely to earn more than a third or lower second-class grade. …
bq. The lowest-marked essay was by Essays-R-Us (www.essays-r-us.co.uk), which charged £205 and produced work that barely scraped a third, with 42 per cent. Professor Oppenheim said the essay had basic errors and suffered from “appalling” English. … The best essay was delivered by Degree Essays UK (www.ukessays.com) , part of Academic Answers Ltd, which is registered at Companies House. The service described itself as “the best essays and dissertation service in the UK” and said its essays were “guaranteed to be of a 2.1 or a first class standard”. However, Loughborough gave its essay 56 to 58 per cent – a lower second.
(via “Black Triangle”:http://blacktriangle.org/blog/ . )
{ 7 comments }
Anderson 04.15.05 at 12:52 pm
Ignorance is just so … ignorant.
I wonder how long until we get a lawsuit where a student sues the essay bank over his poor mark? Can one sue anonymously in the UK?
digamma 04.15.05 at 1:00 pm
Any undergraduate student should have easy access to numerous graduate students (I don’t know the appropriate British terms) who are both poor and capable of writing quality undergraduate-level papers in their sleep. Why go online?
An English professor I know has caught plagiarists by Googling phrases from their papers. You’d think people from the IM generation would be able to out-hack a guy who did his dissertation on a typewriter, but you’d be wrong.
ionfish 04.15.05 at 1:23 pm
There was a good programme about this on Radio 4 today, called “Brains For Sale”. Here’s the Listen Again link…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/brainsforsale
dipnut 04.15.05 at 1:47 pm
Essays from essay banks are crap…
In my (very limited) experience, essays from students are crap. Now that everybody’s using graphing calculators, cliffs notes, etc., we might as well just let them get their papers from these typing mills. In effect, promote the student to editor.
sharon 04.15.05 at 5:37 pm
If you read the conditions attached to these ‘services’, it would be very unlikely that a student could sue. The ones I’ve seen were very careful to cover themselves by saying that students shouldn’t hand the essays in as their own work but only use them as research aids (etc etc), and I think that students have to sign contracts that include those conditions before they receive the essays. So, apart from being A Bad Thing, it’s just *stupid* to buy these essays – you’ve really got no comeback if you don’t get what you paid for.
Michael Otsuka 04.15.05 at 6:52 pm
_Any undergraduate student should have easy access to numerous graduate students (I don’t know the appropriate British terms) who are both poor and capable of writing quality undergraduate-level papers in their sleep. Why go online?_
And don’t just pick any graduate student. Buy the services of the TA who’s actually going to grade the paper, so as to leave nothing to chance.
Publius 04.16.05 at 9:56 pm
My old man used to say: “Criminals get into crime because they are stupid. So it’s always easy to catch them. If they were smart, they’d be in legitimate business, making money without breaking the law”.
Since he was (and is) a right-wing free-market Republican entrepreneur, he didn’t intend to make the point that the only difference between crime and business is the degree of sophistication, but he did, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Also, the comments about kids just hiring their TA to write their papers for them reminded me of the segment of “The Yes Men” where they propose a “free market solution” of auctioning votes off on the Internet.
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