Site promotes plagiarism

Editorial | The University Echo - Student Newspaper of the University of Tennessee at Chatta Nooga

March 20, 2008

In an age of easy Internet access and highly refined essay-writing sites, cheating on papers is more straightforward and efficient than ever, and according to essaybay.com, it's fairly inexpensive as well.

Essaybay.com is a site that provides custom essays written by students at some of the top universities in the world. Customers post their project on the site, and can include detailed information regarding the length, format and number of sources required for the assignment.

Writers then "bid" on the assignment, much like an auction, and the customer chooses which bid to accept based on the writers' rankings, reviews and proposed prices.

Customers can rest assured their project is actually custom- written because the site boasts a highly advanced plagiarism scanner to insure that the hired writer did not plagiarize someone else's work and then sell it. Likewise, sites like Turnitin.com, which are used to check students' work for plagiarism, will find that the work is original and naturally will not be able to detect that someone was paid to write it in place of the student.

We at The Echo received an e-mail from the public relations director for essaybay.com suggesting that we feature the site in an article. We would be allowed to order an essay from the site at no cost, ask a student at UTC to write an essay on the same topic and then turn in both essays to a "participating and understanding" teacher who would grade the anonymous submissions and compare the results.

In the e-mail, we were told, "Obviously this whole area is highly contentious and we appreciate that, but we think that this would (and has done numerous times in the past) make for a great feature."

Yes, this area is highly contentious, and for a good reason. There may be grey areas in some cases of alleged cheating, such as how much help to give a friend with a paper before it ceases to be their own work. In this case, however, the ethics debate is closed. Paying someone to write an essay on your behalf, which you then plan to submit as your own work, is cheating.

Essaybay.com is only a conduit to facilitate interaction between writers and buyers, and thus does not claim responsibility for the way in which the essays are used. The terms and conditions for many essay sites suggest buyers are expected to use essays obtained through the site only as a reference, much like they would use journal articles on the Internet. The buyer should then rewrite the work so they turn in a custom essay of their own.

However, a buyer who specifies word length and spacing and provides the criteria with which the essay will be judged is unlikely to use the product they purchase as a mere reference tool.

Barclay Littlewood, owner of the site, said projects have been purchased for a little as $20 and as much as $40,000, according to an article in "The Recorder," a newspaper based in Connecticut. Projects range from brief essays to complete dissertations.

According a survey conducted by essaybay.com, athletes comprise nearly half of the buyers, and the majority of those athletes purchase essays with the approval of their coaches to help them stay on a sports team.

Jed Hallam, public relations director for the site, which is based in England, said in an article from Brown University's independent student newspaper: "In the U.K., we've seen parents and grandparents buying essays for a couple of years now to make sure their students are achieving what they set out to do. For coaches to use the essays to ensure their athletes are getting scholarships and into the Ivies is no surprise, but apparently it's become a surprise for America and the American education system."

As the essay industry becomes more advanced, efficient and marketable, purchasing an essay cannot be treated as legitimate means for passing a class or "earning" acceptance to a competitive university.

Submitting someone else's work as one's own is cheating. There is no viable excuse.

Back to EssayBay Press | View this article on the Web