essays for sale

[trochee]

So I was looking up "effects of bilingualism" on Google, because I was talking to a friend about the (positive) effects of bilingual education on children, and the very top link on Google was on a buy-an-essay site here (only 129.35!).

These people may not be evil, but it's definitely moral bankruptcy. They include (on the FAQ page) the following caveat:

Our reports are intented [sic] to be used solely as research aids. They cannot be resold or reproduced in any form. Our company is designed to assist students in writing their own research papers by affording them the opportunity to examine the work of professional writers who have researched similar topics. In this way we believe students can write their own research papers with a better understanding of the material under examination. It is our belief that our research reports can be a valuable resource, in addition to the traditional resources employed by students.

But the rest of their marketspeak does not match this approach:

Need to finish your term paper right away? Our on-file database contains over 70,000 prewritten reports...all of which were written by our professional writing staff. These papers are available for IMMEDIATE DOWNLOAD and AUTO-EMAIL.

.I wonder how the universities fight this kind of "service". (How will I, when I'm teaching?)

Comments

[several-bees.livejournal.com]

Hm. There are a few options along the lines of the Essay Verification Engine; turnitin.com, for example, which checks submitted essays against "a copy of the publicly accessible Internet", "millions of published works (including ABI/Inform, Periodical Abstracts, Business Dateline, and tens of thousands of electronic books)" and "every student paper ever submitted to Turnitin" - though of course it charges for the privilege.

The problem with services like these, apart from the cost, is that the range of essay-providing sites (of which this is a somewhat interesting review) includes places that write essays specifically to order, to be used once and never again. Brief essay questions answered during tutorials may be useful for getting an idea of a student's level of competence, such that it becomes clear when they claim to have written something better than they're actually capable of, but as far as providing proof goes they're useless; all they can do is provoke suspicion, and if the student used one of the written-to-order services then I don't see how anything could be done.