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

[moroveus.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, I took an upper-division English course in which a third of the class was kicked out for using these on-line essay services. The professor entered class the weekend after we had turned in our midterms* and slammed a stack of papers down on the podium and began cussing out the entire class. She said that she was first alerted to the widespread cheating because two students turned in the same paper! Then she complained that she was going to have go through all the trouble of reading through a lot of on-line essays to make sure that no one else had cheated. Finally, she just through open the door and said, "Class dismissed; I'm too fucking pissed to even be here right now." We all just sat there looking at each other, because this teacher was so meek and pleasant, and then she just exploded (although I have to say that I think it was justified).

The class only had about 15 people, and 5 of them were kicked out of the English department over this fiasco.

*And I admit that the midterm was hard, but there's no excuse for this kind of shit.

[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.

[monslucis.livejournal.com]

as the discussion on nihilistic_kid's page went about this: no tyranny of grades, no cheating.
until recently i would've thought things like that were bad, but now considering the intolerable amount of work students get that doesn't further their education or empowerment (actually disempowers them), it makes sense.
of course one can argue that some that use it are scum or whatever, but i guess i just think grades are structuralized violence, and so cheating to me--even if immoral--is a much less of a concern.