This or That is a weekly feature in which members of the Perspectives staff weigh in on a campus-related topic and issue their final verdict from two options. This week’s question is “purchasing essays – shady service or study support?” One Essay writing company, Youressaywriter.com, sell essays to students for prices as high as $26 a page. Former teachers make up about one-third of the company’s writing staff. While some claim these essays lead to countless plagiarisms and flat out cheating, some companies state their purpose is to give students just a model.
Joshua Segall
Verdict: Shady Service
Essays are typically assigned by a professor to force students to go out and educate themselves on a given topic while giving students the freedom to formulate many of their own ideas and opinions. Purchasing essays written by other people completely voids this concept.
As students we all made a choice to attend school and meet the academic requirements necessary. This means doing the things we all hate, essays included. Buying essays that we didn’t write minimizes our education and actually creates a great deal of harm to the UA.
The UA has a reputation to maintain. We all get to hear the same speech in every class on academic integrity. A school that is known to house plagiarists is usually lowly regarded. Companies and other universities will frown upon a school with poor academic integrity.
Purchasing essays is detrimental not only your education, but to your own integrity, your fellow classmates and the school you represent. Passing work off as your own when it really isn’t makes you a cheater and degrades the academic integrity that the school works so hard to maintain. Purchasing essays might seem like an easy way out but in the end you’re screwing everyone over, yourself included.
Michelle Monroe
Verdict: Shady Service
There’s a difference between research and copying.
CEO of Youressaywriter.com, John Crestani said people caught in difficult circumstances find his service valuable, including mothers returning to school and parents buying their kids entrance essays. How can a mother tell her children not to cheat, if she cheats? And parents buying essays for children is horrendous.
Buying an essay is cheating. No maybe, kind ofs, or “cheating-ish.”
If a student was truly interested in improving comprehension they would ask their teacher or classmates for more help. If they purchase an essay, they are making the decision to plagiarize and lie to their professor.
The UA has a plagiarism workshop, where teachers can give an incomplete to a student caught cheating, and then grade them once the student completes the workshop.
Bravo to the student who can act like they didn’t know they were cheating.
If you buy an essay, you aren’t using it get an idea for your essay, you’re buying it to turn it in. You aren’t wondering about academic integrity, you’re wondering if you’re going to get caught.
You’re lazy, unethical and don’t deserve to pass the class. Unfortunately you can’t teach someone to respect academic integrity. Either you do, you don’t, or you get caught and now you have to fake it.
Andrew Conlogue
Verdict: Study Support
Many would consider purchasing pre-written essays tantamount to plagiarism. Example essays purchased on the Internet are not inherently evil provided two guidelines are followed in using them. First, they must be used as they are intended to be used. An example essay can give insight to a student, and help them structure their own work. This can be especially helpful if the class provided little in the way of guidelines. Second, pre-purchased essays must be used in moderation. Their best academic use is as a last resort and they are best used provided other more official resources are unavailable. Pre-written essays are simply a tool that can be used for the betterment of a student’s academic career. However, like other tools, there is the temptation to misuse them. Whether or not the potential for abuse is high enough to warrant their eradication is another argument, but something that must go into consideration in that argument is the utility of pre-written essays if used responsibly.
Jacquelyn Abad
Verdict: Shady Service
Purchasing a 15-page college research paper online: $390.
Actually writing the paper yourself: Priceless.
As poor college students, who has money to throw away on pre-written papers?
On the long list of “ways to cheat,” buying pre-written essays falls a little behind sneaking a peek at your notes from your backpack when your professor isn’t looking. Copying off papers, “collaborative learning” and using other people’s work is a sign of laziness. The excuse “I didn’t have time” is complete bull, you did at one point but you decided to waste it on something else like partying. The entire point of college is to learn and apply the knowledge gathered, not swipe someone else’s.
Although some of us have relied on reading a SparkNotes synopsis to pick up the slack from the readings we didn’t do, taking someone else’s work to call it your own takes cheating to a whole new level. To your peers and professors, it looks pathetic when you cheat. Not only is cheating harmful to our academic integrity it also tarnishes our reputations as honest and reliable people.
Invest some time and save some money, write your own papers.
