essay writing service illegal

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https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/04/28/essay-mills-are-now-illegal-skills-minister-calls-on-internet-service-providers-to-crack-down-on-advertising/

Essay mills are now illegal - Skills Minister calls on internet service platforms to crack down on advertising

Skills Minister Alex Burghart has written to internet service platforms to make sure they know that essay mills - which facilitate cheating by helping academic writing, often by appearing to be legitimate - have been made illegal and to call on their support in making sure they can no longer advertise online. Here you can read that letter.

The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill has become law. Through this act, the Government has legislated for landmark reforms that will transform post-16 education and skills, including criminalising essay mills.

As you may know, Essay Mills are online platforms that facilitate contract cheating. Contract cheating happens when a third party completes work for a student which is passed off by the student as their own work. Many essay mill companies use marketing techniques which indicate they are offering ‘legitimate’ academic writing support for students. Reports also indicate that some essay mills seek to blackmail students who use these services. It is right that we have legislated against these insidious crimes.

It is now a criminal offence to provide or arrange for another person to provide contract cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at a post-16 institution or sixth form in England, enrolled at a higher education provider in England and any other person over compulsory school age who has been entered for a regulated qualification at a place in England.

Similarly, it is now an offence for a person to make arrangements for an advertisement in which that person offers, or is described as being available or competent, to provide or arrange for another person to provide a cheating service. Importantly, the offence centres around the act of advertising to students, and for the offence to be committed it does not need to be seen by its target demographic.

There is now a strengthened, collaborative effort across the sector to tackle essay mills and we want you to be part of this campaign. Platforms such as yourself play an integral role in helping us to make the most effective use of the legislation; marketing and advertising are the lifeblood of any successful industry. We are aware that high numbers of essay mills have used your platform to promote their services to students in the past, paying for advertising to promote their companies. Essay mills are now illegal entities, and you should not carry their advertising. It is no longer a moral question; you will be facilitating an illegal activity. I ask you to do everything in your power to prevent the advertising these unscrupulous practices.

Removing essay mill access to online marketing will seriously hamper their efforts to target vulnerable students and I implore you to do so following the introduction of this legislation. We must now all work together to capitalise on it.

I hope that in writing to you today I have underlined the urgency of this issue and the important role that companies like yours play in stamping out essay mills once and for all and am sure I can be confident in your support.

Thank you for your support with this important matter.

Tags: cheating , essay mills , internet service platforms

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Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas

Credit... Illustration by The New York Times

Supported by

By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi

Tuition was due. The rent was, too . So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.

Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.

“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”

Since federal prosecutors charged a group of rich parents and coaches this year in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme , the advantages that wealthy American students enjoy in college admissions have been scrutinized. Less attention has been paid to the tricks some well-off students use to skate by once they are enrolled.

Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites — with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments.

Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.

The essay-for-hire industry has expanded significantly in developing countries with many English speakers , fast internet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya, India and Ukraine. A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya has over 50,000 members .

After a month of training, Ms. Mbugua began producing essays about everything from whether humans should colonize space (“it is not worth the struggle,” she wrote) to euthanasia (it amounts to taking “the place of God,” she wrote). During her best month, she earned $320, more money than she had ever made in her life. The New York Times is identifying Ms. Mbugua by only part of her name because she feared that the attention would prevent her from getting future work.

It is not clear how widely sites for paid-to-order essays, known as “contract cheating” in higher education circles, are used. A 2005 study of students in North America found that 7 percent of undergraduates admitted to turning in papers written by someone else, while 3 percent admitted to obtaining essays from essay mills. Cath Ellis, a leading researcher on the topic, said millions of essays are ordered online every year worldwide.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Tricia Bertram Gallant , director of the academic integrity office at the University of California, San Diego. “If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every accredited university into a diploma mill.”

When such websites first emerged over a decade ago, they featured veiled references to tutoring and editing services, said Dr. Bertram Gallant, who also is a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity, which has worked to highlight the danger of contract cheating . Now the sites are blatant.

“You can relax knowing that our reliable, expert writers will produce you a top quality and 100% plagiarism free essay that is written just for you, while you take care of the more interesting aspects of student life ,” reads the pitch from Academized, which charges about $15 a page for a college freshman’s essay due in two weeks and $42 a page for an essay due in three hours.

“No matter what kind of academic paper you need, it is simple and secure to hire an essay writer for a price you can afford,” promises EssayShark.com. “Save more time for yourself.”

In an email, EssayShark’s public relations department said the company did not consider its services to be cheating, and that it warned students the essays are for “research and reference purposes only” and are not to be passed off as a student’s own work.

“We do not condone, encourage or knowingly take part in plagiarism or any other acts of academic fraud,” it said.

A representative for UvoCorp, another of the companies, said its services were not meant to encourage cheating. “The idea behind our product design is to help people understand and conform to specific requirements they deal with, and our writers assist in approaching this task in a proper way,” the representative said in an email. “According to our policies, customers cannot further use any consultative materials they receive from us as their own.”

Representatives for Academized and Ace-MyHomework did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

A major scandal involving contract cheating in Australia caused university officials there to try to crack down on the practice. A similar effort to confront the industry has emerged in Britain, but not in the United States.

Contract cheating is illegal in 17 states, but punishment tends to be light and enforcement rare . Experts said that no federal law in the United States, or in Kenya, forbids the purchase or sale of academic papers, although questions remain about whether the industry complies with tax laws .

“Because American institutions haven’t been whacked over the head like Australian schools were, it’s easier to pretend that it’s not happening,” said Bill Loller, vice president of product management for Turnitin, a company that develops software to detect plagiarism . “But it’s absolutely happening .”

Mr. Loller said he had worked with some colleges that have students who have never shown up for class or completed a single assignment. “They’ve contracted it all out,” he said.

Contract cheating is harder to detect than plagiarism because ghostwritten essays will not be flagged when compared with a database of previously submitted essays; they are generally original works — simply written by the wrong person . But this year, Turnitin rolled out a new product called Authorship Investigate, which uses a host of clues — including sentence patterns and a document’s metadata — to attempt to determine if it was written by the student who turned it in.

Some of the websites operate like eBay, with buyers and sellers bidding on specific assignments. Others operate like Uber, pairing desperate students with available writers. Either way, the identities and locations of both the writers and the students are masked from view, as are the colleges the assignments are for .

Still, in some of the assignments that Ms. Mbugua provided to The Times, names of colleges that the essays were meant for became clear. One assignment asked students to write about a solution to a community problem, and the essay Ms. Mbugua provided described difficulties with parking around Arizona State University. “Students could always just buck up and take the walk,” the paper said.

Bret Hovell, a spokesman for Arizona State University, said the school was not able to determine whether the essay had been turned in.

In Kenya, a country with a per capita annual income of about $1,700, successful writers can earn as much as $2,000 a month, according to Roynorris Ndiritu, who said he has thrived while writing academic essays for others.

Roynorris Ndiritu , 28, who asked that only part of his name be used because he feared retribution from others in the industry in Kenya, graduated with a degree in civil engineering and still calls that his “passion.” But after years of applying unsuccessfully for jobs, he said, he began writing for others full time. He has earned enough to buy a car and a piece of land, he said, but it has left him jaded about the promises he heard when he was young about the opportunities that would come from studying hard in college.

“You can even get the highest level of education, and still, you might not get that job,” he said.

In interviews with people in Kenya who said they had worked in contract cheating, many said they did not view the practice as unethical.

As more foreign writers have joined the industry, some sites have begun to advertise their American ties, in a strange twist on globalization and outsourcing. One site lists “bringing jobs back to America ” as a key goal. American writers, who sometimes charge as much as $30 per page, say that they offer higher-quality service, without British spellings or idioms that might raise suspicion about an essay’s authorship.

Ms. Mbugua, the Kenyan university student, worked for as little as $4 a page. She said she began carrying a notebook, jotting down vocabulary words she encountered in movies and novels to make her essays more valuable.

Ms. Mbugua, 25, lost her mother to diabetes in 200 1, when she was in the second grade. She vowed to excel in school so that she would one day be able to support her younger brother and sister.

A government loan and aunts and uncles helped her pay for college. But she also worked, landing in an office of 10 writers completing other people’s assignments , including those of American students. The boss stayed up all night, bidding for work on several sites, and then farmed it out in the morning .

“Any job that is difficult, they’re like, ‘Give it to Mary,’” she said.

There were low points. During summer break , work slowed to a trickle. Once, she agonized so much over an American history paper about how the Great Depression ended that she rejected the job at the last minute, and had to pay an $18 fine.

But Ms. Mbugua said she loved learning, and sometimes wished that she were the one enrolled in the American universities she was writing papers for. Once, when she was asked to write an admissions essay for a student in China who was applying to the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University, she said she dreamed of what it would be like to go there herself.

Eventually, Ms. Mbugua said, she decided to strike out on her own, and bought an account from an established writer with UvoCorp. But UvoCorp forbids such transfers, and Ms. Mbugua said the account she had purchased was shut down.

Now Ms. Mbugua finds herself at a crossroads, unsure of what to do next. She graduated from her university in 2018 and has sent her résumé to dozens of employers. Lately she has been selling kitchen utensils.

Ms. Mbugua said she never felt right about the writing she did in the names of American students and others.

“I’ve always had somehow a guilty conscience,” she said.

“People say the education system in the U.S., U.K. and other countries is on a top notch,” she said. “I wouldn’t say those students are better than us,” she said, later adding, “We have studied. We have done the assignments.”

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Essay-writing services to be made illegal in England

22 February 2022 | Applicable law: England and Wales

Essay-writing services, known as essay mills, are to be made illegal under plans announced by the government on 5 October 2021.

The government intends to make it a criminal offence to provide, arrange, or advertise any essay-writing services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at any institution in England providing post-16 education, including universities.

The move follows a number of steps already taken by the government to protect academic integrity from the effect of essay mills. In 2018, 46 university vice-chancellors wrote a joint letter calling for essay-writing services to banned, and the government worked with the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, Universities UK and the National Union of Students to produce guidance on how institutions could counter the threat of contract cheating, and for students to make them better aware of the consequences (which might include removal from their course of study or expulsion from their place of study). The latest efforts to outlaw essay mills and other ‘contract cheating’ has been welcomed by members of all parties and across the education industry, and hailed as safeguarding the academic integrity and standards of post-16 and higher education in England as well as protecting young people during their studies.

The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill (the ‘Bill’) introduces this measure as a means to protect students from the “deceptive marking techniques of contract cheating services”. The Bill also aims to help level up opportunities across the country by transforming the existing educational landscape: alternative training and career routes, such as technical education, apprenticeships, T Levels or traineeships, are to be emphasised and given equal status alongside the traditional academic route (as set out in the Skills for Jobs White Paper ).

Essay mills – given that they profit from committing academic fraud – are largely considered to be unethical, though they remain lawful in most countries. The UK follows in the footsteps of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ireland by taking action against contract cheating.

Ghostwriting services are active globally, and often target students who are studying in a second language. The rise in demand for such services are likely the result of increased competition for university places, especially where coursework and open-book exams contribute to pivotal final grades. Ironically, these services encourage a lack of scholarship that sets students up poorly for further education.

The online learning environment that developed as a result of stay-at-home mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic meant that students became increasingly vulnerable to the lures of essay-writing services. As campus welfare and support became less accessible to students working remotely from home and motivation throughout the academic year dwindled as Zoom-fatigue set in, levels of online cheating exploded: the Quality Assurance Agency estimated in 2021 that there are at least 932 sites in operation in the UK, up from 904 in December 2020, 881 in October 2020 and 635 in June 2018. More brazenly, there are examples of essay mill service providers taking advantage of the difficult circumstances faced by students during the pandemic by offering 2-4-1 deals and other special offers to ‘help’ students navigate a difficult and unusual few academic years.

While the proposals in the Bill are welcome, the measures do not amount to a full solution to online cheating. The International Journal for Educational Integrity has highlighted the increasing number of ways in which students wishing to circumvent rules on academic honesty may do so using technology. For example, the use of file-sharing websites to request assistance from others and receive answers to exam questions – in real time and during exam conditions – has risen by an estimated 196% in the year 2020-21 in STEM subjects. The Bill does not extend to Wales or Scotland, for whom education is a devolved matter: essay mills may yet target UK schools and universities and see plenty reason to maintain operations.

Gareth Crossman, head of policy and public affairs at the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, has touched on the length of the journey ahead, saying: “ [the Bill] sends a clear signal but, with well over 1000 essay mills in operation, the sector must continue working together to put them out of business. ” Only time will tell whether the measures, when implemented, are effective, and whether the government needs to go further to protect students from predatory academic practices in future.

This document (and any information accessed through links in this document) is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Professional legal advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from any action as a result of the contents of this document.

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• Writing Tips

Are Essay Writing Services Legit?

• 5-minute read
• 3rd June 2022

Believe it or not, there are many companies, operating within the law, that write essays for students. This means you can pay someone to write your essay and then submit it to your tutor as your own work.

If that sounds like cheating to you, we wouldn’t disagree! So, how do companies offering essay writing services get away with it? And is it ever okay to use them? Read on to find out.

What is an Essay Mill?

An essay mill is a company that makes money by writing essays and other academic work for students. After providing little more than the title and required word count, clients can sit back and wait for their essay, assignment, or even 40,000-word dissertation, complete with a reference list, to drop into their inbox.

Essay mills use freelance writers, and the copy they produce becomes the property of the customer. They claim to write each assignment from scratch and usually run plagiarism checks as part of their service.

The Downsides of Essay Writing Services

The obvious advantage of using an essay writing service is that it saves you time and effort. So, if you can afford to pay someone else to do your homework, what’s not to like? Here are a few things worth considering before handing over your cash to an essay mill:

●  The writer is unlikely to be an expert in your subject: Essay mills and other companies offering writing services use freelancers. It’s therefore highly unlikely that they will have an expert in every academic field at their disposal. Even if they claim that your essay will be written by an expert, you won’t get to see the writer’s credentials, so you only have their word for it.

●  There’s no guarantee you’ll get a good grade: So, your essay is being produced by a writer who most likely isn’t an expert on the relevant topic. Because they’re a freelancer, they’ll only be getting a percentage of the fee you’ve paid, and they’ve not only got to write your essay, but research it, too. Unless they’re willing to work for a very low hourly rate, they won’t spend enough time on your essay to produce work that’s good enough to score high marks.

●  You could easily get caught: If your tutor is familiar with your usual style of writing, they might be suspicious when you hand in work written by someone else. What if they want you to clarify something or they query one of your references? If you’re caught cheating, it could spell the end of your academic ambitions.

●  It’s dishonest: You’ve probably worked out by now that we don’t approve of essay writing services! Whether or not they are legal (and we’ll cover that in the next section), they certainly aren’t ethical. And it’s a form of cheating, which is taken very seriously by academic institutions.

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●  You’ll miss out on learning opportunities: The whole point of an essay writing assignment is to learn valuable information about a topic. By handing that experience off to someone else, you’re essentially giving up part of the education that you’ve worked hard to qualify for (and are likely paying good money for)!

What Does the Law Say About Essay Writing Services?

The law regarding essay writing services varies from country to country (and from state to state in the US), so whether you’d be breaking the law by using them depends on where you’re studying.

At the moment, essay mills are still legal in most of the US and Canada. However, in some states, it’s illegal for students to use them. In the UK, legislation was passed in April 2022 that makes it a criminal offense to provide essay writing services. And similar laws exist in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Summary: Are Essay Writing Services Legit?

Essay writing services are still legal in some areas, so the question of whether or not you should use them is largely an ethical one. However, even if you’re not committing a crime by paying someone to write your essay, you could get into trouble with your college if anyone finds out.

Unfortunately, essay mills often target international students who may lack confidence in their English writing skills. But, instead of getting someone else to write your essay for you, which is a form of cheating, why not consider just getting help with proofreading? While any tutor would disapprove of handing in someone else’s work, it is perfectly legitimate to have your own words professionally proofread before you submit them.

Our proofreading service includes correcting any errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. In addition, we adapt any unsuitable vocabulary and highlight anything that’s unclear. However, we never make changes that would alter the meaning of what you’ve written. It’s your writing—we just help you make it shine!

You can try our student proofreading service for free by submitting a trial document today. You’ll get it back, error-free, tomorrow!

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Essay writing services now illegal

Under new UK legislation, providing or using professional essay writing services, or 'essay mills', is now a criminal offence. Students have been made aware of this via today's Student News. They have also been advised that using these services directly contravenes the University's code of conduct. If students are found to be using professional writing services, or passing off other people's work as their own, they will face serious disciplinary action. There are a range of resources available to students about  study skills and avoiding plagiarism  on the Oxford Students website. Colleagues are asked to reinforce these messages to students in their parts of the University.

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Essay writing services must be banned to stop cheating, say academics

One in seven students globally believed to have paid others to do their assignments for them

The British government has been urged to outlaw essay writing services that allow university students to pay for coursework for their degrees, after a study found that use of “contract cheating” is rapidly increasing around the world.

The study by Prof Philip Newton at Swansea University’s medical school collected evidence from surveys taken among students in higher education, and calculated that as many as one in seven recent students internationally have paid for someone to produce their assignments, potentially representing 31 million students.

While there is little detail of the involvement of UK-based students, Newton said that students in Britain were unlikely to be any different from their peers in the US and elsewhere, and warned that the UK “risks becoming a country where essay mills find it easy to do business”.

“There are a number of things the government could do to make contract cheating more difficult. The legal steps would probably include a new law – it’s not difficult, other countries such as New Zealand have done it and others like Ireland and Australia are thinking about it,” Newton said.

Staff at British universities regularly report essay-writing services openly advertising for both clients and writers on campus, while numerous websites offer students bespoke “study notes” or “essay aids” for a fee that runs into thousands of pounds depending on the length and deadline.

Essay mills also trawl social media, with automated accounts contacting students who post about essay deadlines and work panic.

Newton is one of a number of British academics who have warned of the dangers of “essay mills,” where students are able to order essays, dissertations or even doctoral theses with as little as eight or 12 hours’ notice. More than 2,000 people have signed a petition to parliament calling for a ban.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Education , analysed 71 survey samples from 65 studies from as far back as 1978, covering 54,000 participants who took part in questionnaires asking if they had ever paid someone to undertake their work.

Across the sample, contract cheating was self-reported by a long-run average of 3.5% of students but that rate was found to increase significantly over time. In studies from 2014 onwards, the percentage admitting to paying for work rose to nearly 16%, while cheating in general also appeared to be on the rise.

“There is an urgent need for a rigorous study to identify the extent of the problem in the UK. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest the UK is as affected as everyone else,” Newton said, adding that surveys were if anything likely to underestimate the extent of the problem.

The government has recently acknowledged the issue. In a written answer to the Gower MP Tonia Antoniazzi in July, the higher education minister Sam Gyimah said: “We are currently focusing on non-legislative options, but remain open to the future need for legislation, and will investigate all options available.”

Newton and his colleagues have proposed a new offence, “to provide or advertise cheating services”, including writing or arranging an essay or other work without the approval of the higher education institution requiring the work.

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Important notice: Essay writing services now illegal in the UK

Following a government reform, it is now illegal to use and/or provide contract cheating services.

On Thursday 28 April 2022, the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill became law, making it a criminal offence to engage in paid cheating services, often known as essay mills.

Essay mills offer students in Post-16 education plagiarism free essays and assignments in exchange for money.

The government has listened to calls for legislation and intervened to criminalise the provision of, and advertising of, cheating services. This aims to minimise the number of these essay mills in operation and to enhance activity already taking place to detect, deter and address incidents of cheating.

In a letter to Higher Education (HE) providers , Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Skills, Alex Burghart MP said: “Cheating of any kind is unacceptable. It not only threatens to undermine the reputation of our world-class higher education sector, but also devalues the hard work of those who succeed on their own merit.”

The university takes academic offences very seriously. Submitting work that is not your own can lead to expulsion.

We want to ensure that all DMU students are following academic regulations, which we outline  here .

The Centre for Learning and Study Support (CLaSS) team work with undergraduate, postgraduate and research students at DMU to provide support and guidance on a range of areas, such as planning assignments, how to approach critical analysis and how to improve your research and referencing.

You can access the CLaSS services here .

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

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Essay Writing Services | Are They Legal?

Nayreth garcia.

• Career Planning , Financial Tips and Scholarships , Non-Traditional Students , Student Wellness

Content Writer At Gradehacker

When you are a non-traditional student, you have many responsibilities in your hands. You need to find a balance between your personal and college life , and you probably don’t have the time or the best writing skills to write a perfect essay. That’s when a professional essay writing service seems like a possible solution. You start searching for professional writers to give you the extra help you need, but your first question is… are essay writing services legal?

This question starts popping up in your mind, among others, since you may have never used an essay service before and you’re afraid of committing a digital crime you are not aware of . This legal topic has been addressed in many debates, forums, and articles for so many years. Most of the people against it are concerned about the fact that they see it as students cheating.

However, the pressure that universities put on their students is enormous. So far, there are no existing laws against the use of essay writing services. It’s certainly not illegal, and there is no punishment for it.

In 2018, more than 40 U.K. universities signed a petition asking the government to take measures and ban essay writing services and several colleges in the U.S. also pressured the government to start creating laws that prohibit ordering essays online, but to this day, there’s no specific legislation registered in the U.S. or U.K.

Essay writing services are now a very popular and heavily used service among students. There are many essay writing service providers online, but what is the reality of the situation? In this article, we’ll explain how essay writing services work and if they are legal for college students who need extra help with their assignments.

Are Essay Writing Services Legal?

It is important for you to know that a legal essay writing service company works in consideration of the laws in the country’s jurisdiction. So the legality of these services should not be questionable outside of personal opinion or bias beyond anyone’s opinion. Therefore the services can’t be called illegal since there is no specific law that prohibits their use.

It’s not the intent of a student wanting to break the law and outsmart the system. It’s an unorthodox effort to overcome challenges and high expectations imposed by professors as long as you are purchasing the product from a legal service provider. In other words, you can go ahead and purchase an essay online from an essay writing service provider without worrying that you are committing a crime in the United States.

Is it legal to hire a professional essay writer online? The answer is also yes; it’s legal to hire an essay writer online in the United States. There are many types of online essay writing service providers you can use to hire a professional essay writer to help you, depending on the essay requirements, class level, or other factors.

There’s not a specific law that prohibits using an essay service, and the majority of the time, people are more conflicted on the ethical aspect of the students. If you have that conflict in your mind, you can read our article Are Essay Writing Services Ethical?

Is it Considered Cheating When Using Essay Writing Services Online?

Many colleges and professors consider using these services as cheating since they see it from an ethical point of view, but in reality, it’s not cheating, and it’s not illegal. It’s a helpful solution for students on a tight schedule who also have difficulty managing part-time jobs, other activities, and commitments. Nowadays, you can find academic writers or experts who can help you with your college workload.

These companies work as a supplement to the efforts of students. They are like guides in their path that show them what they should improve to better understand a subject matter.

When it comes to essays, you should always look for a professional writing service to make sure you will get a high-quality paper, a dedicated writer, quick delivery time, and plagiarism check, among other important factors to keep in mind. Here are: 5 Common Problems With Hiring an Essay Writing Service and How To Avoid Them .

How Does An Essay Writing Service Work?

An essay writing service is a company that offers assistance to college students with their college essays. The essays are written (mostly) by experienced writers with the skills to put together high-quality and original papers. There are many essay writing services online, however, you need to be extra careful since not all of them are trustworthy.

There are many different subjects that students need to write essays for depending on their college level. So how does it work? When a student decides to order essay help, they will be contacted by an agency to let them know their next steps. Of course, every company will have different processes and methods. You can actually learn about our personal experience using three different essay services and see how they worked:

Essay Service Honest Review 2021: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Edubirdie Honest Review 2021 | Everything You Need To Know

Pay Me To Do Your Homework Review 2021: Our Honest Experience

Are Essay Writing Services For College Students Worth It?

You’re having a tough time with work, classes, assignments, and exams. What do you do?  

At first glance, writing a paper for a college class might seem like a challenge. It is a long and tedious process, especially if you don’t have the time to do it correctly. However, it is not as bad as it sounds. 

As a student who hopes to graduate from college,  you usually need to rely on “unorthodox” methods to deal with all the challenges imposed by professors. Since academic writing is becoming one of the most prominent aspects in universities , the trending development of the custom-writing industry with experienced writers shows that students need and look for this help.

Essay writing services are becoming more and more popular these days and, in most situations, are completely legitimate. Not many students have the proper time to plan and develop an extensive essay. When someone needs quick content on a topic, essay writing services come in handy. The essay writing industry provides students a valid alternative for their academic essays, creating a community of satisfied students.

Plagiarism Is A Risk Factor:

If you want to find an essay writing service free of plagiarism problems , take your time and check the site itself. You should be able to find detailed information about their services or some reviews from other customers as well as information about the writers that are part of it. 

Having original content in your essay is essential, so you need to be very careful with the service you select. For example, here at Gradehacker, our team uses plagiarism checkers, and every essay is also reviewed by our Editor-in-Chief to make sure your essay is free of any potential problems. 

Looking for help is no crime!

Essay Writing Services are a reasonably new concept that allows students to get assistance with assignments to meet deadlines. Nowadays, this process has become much more efficient. We hope this article helps you clear your doubts, so you don’t have to hesitate to ask for help with your essay!

As a college student, it is very important to keep your grades up, so you need to make sure you are not falling behind in your classes. Getting extra help is one of the best ways of doing it.

When you hire an experienced professional writer, you get something higher than the quality of an inexperienced writer, such as attention to detail and unique know-how steps to reach your goals. Our team at Gradehacker is more than qualified to lead you.

Now we know you will be able to make the right, legal, and informed choice when searching for help. You can always visit our personalized  Essay Writing Service and explore all the options that Gradehacker has to offer you to make your college life better. You can also read our articles and reviews about other services that may help you:

How Much Does it Cost to Write My Essay?

5 Common Essay Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Top 5 Plagiarism Checking Software For College Students

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This article was updated by the Great British Mag content team on 20 October 2021. 

Have you seen essay writing agencies advertised and been tempted to give them a try? Keep reading to get a better understanding of what essay writing agencies are, how they work and the implications of using them can have on your university education. 

What are essay writing agencies?

As a student, you probably have essay writing agencies very much on your radar. They advertise themselves relentlessly to university goers and seem to offer the perfect solution to tight deadlines.

If their marketing attempts have passed you by so far, a quick Google will pull up countless agencies that promise high-quality easy writing, editing and proofreading services for all levels of higher education. 

For a fee, you can give the agency your essay title and any details you have on what should be included in the content, and they’ll have one of their writers complete it for you within a matter of days.

Are they legal to use?

The UK government announced in June 2021 that it is putting legislation in place to make essay writing agencies that provide pre-written or custom-made essays for students to present as their own illegal. England is leading on implementing these changes. 

Do universities prohibit the use of essay writing agencies?

Absolutely – and they take it very seriously. In fact, there have been several calls over recent years from university leaders for the government to ban ‘essay mills’ (which the agencies are sometimes known as) entirely. In some countries like New Zealand, they’re actually illegal. 

That said, some essay writing agencies frame themselves as providing educational support, in the same way that a private tutor might. They state that the essays they provide aren’t for handing in and passing off as your own work, but for using as a basis from which to research and write your own essay. That makes the legal waters murkier. 

What do universities consider as cheating?

Handing in work that has been completed by someone else is definitely considered cheating – this includes getting a friend or family member to write your coursework for you, as well as going to an essay writing agency. 

Despite this, a   study by Swansea University revealed more students than ever were paying for third parties to write their essays. It found that potentially as many as one in seven recent graduates from around the globe, which equates to around 31 million, had engaged in cheating in this way. 

Indeed, a poll on Instagram that we recently ran suggested that around 25% of our student followers had handed in an essay that they didn’t write themselves. 

Covid-19 seems to have caused an uptick in people using these services too, says Dr Thomas Lancaster , senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London, who has conducted several studies on the topic and actually coined the term ‘contract cheating’, which is what this form of cheating is often referred to as. 

“The pandemic hasn’t helped with the situation. From my own research, we’re seeing many more requests for contract cheating services now than we were before Covid-19 disrupted the sector,” he says. 

With students having to grapple with remote learning, a lack of access to libraries and less face-to-face teaching time, it’s no wonder that more are resorting to using essay-writing services. But no matter the circumstances that cause people to turn to this kind of servive, it’s very much still considered to be cheating. 

How much do essay writing services charge?

This varies hugely depending on the agency, the academic level the essay is for and how close the deadline is. We’ve seen services advertised from as little as £4 for a 2:2 level essay with a long deadline, and up to £260 for a 3,000 assignment with a quick turnaround. 

It’s worth remembering that if a deal on an essay writing agency website sounds too good to be true, it likely is. The cheapest companies will often use writers from overseas whose written English might not be up to scratch. That could not only impact the quality of the essay, but also make it obvious that it’s been written by someone else. 

How likely am I to get caught? 

In all honesty, identifying paid-for essays isn’t easy for university professors. Even if a university does have its suspicions, it’s not a straightforward offence to prove. That said, it’s certainly not impossible – and with cases on the up, more university staff are on high alert of fraudulent submissions.

There is new technology emerging too, specifically designed to detect essays written by third parties. And it’s improving all the time, says Lancaster.

“It works by identifying how we all write. We’ve all got a unique style and it shows in how complex our language is, the words we use too much, indicators like that. If you suddenly then hand in something written with a different writing style, that’s suspicious. 

“There are quite a few detection methods in development that show promise and often there are all sorts of little clues that the university can piece together and use to work out whether the student is submitting work they have done themselves.”

What will happen if I am caught?

Getting caught is perhaps the biggest risk you run – it could ruin your university career. 

While each university is responsible for setting out its own procedure for dealing with cheating (you’ll likely find a page about it on your university’s website), be warned that they all take it very seriously. It’s considered a major violation of academic standards. 

Think about it: for institutions to be handing out degrees to people who aren’t qualified is hugely problematic. They’re breaching the national standards of these respected qualifications, meaning their reputation and status as a higher education provider is very much at stake. 

If you’re suspected of cheating, it’s likely you’ll be interviewed and asked to provide evidence that you wrote the essay in question yourself (think notes and previous drafts). If the allegations hold up after that, it could result in a disciplinary hearing and, ultimately, your expulsion from the university. 

Yep, this is a serious offence and one that could cut your time at university very short. 

What are the other risks?

Expulsion isn’t the only risk you run if you decide to hand in an essay that you didn’t write.  First, of course, there is no guarantee as to the quality of the essay you’ll be supplied with by the agency – you could easily still fail. 

“The writers who work for these agencies tend to be badly paid, so their incentive is to write as quickly as possible, not produce high-quality work,” says Lancaster. “They’ll take shortcuts. They add meaningless content to pad out the word count and make up references.”

So don’t be shocked if, after forking out for a professional writer to secure you a great grade, you still flunk. 

Then there’s the issue that by not studying for one piece of coursework you’re on the back foot for the next assignment – and the next. 

“Students become dependent on these services,” says Lancaster. “They’ve missed out on the learning. And once they’re on a company’s customer list, they’re going to be receiving marketing messages again and again.”

Yes, there is the chance that you pay for an essay, get a killer grade and live happily ever after – but there’s also a lot that can go wrong. 

What should I do if I’m struggling with my studies? 

If you’re struggling with your studies and feeling overwhelmed, talk to your university. There might be ways that they can support you and help ease the strain you’re feeling over coursework and deadlines. You may not need to risk your university career by buying your coursework.  

If it’s the language aspect that is causing you stress and making essay-writing a nightmare for you, then speak to your university – they may well have opportunities you can make the most of to improve your English, such as online courses. There will also be an International Student Support service at your uni, who can help with any non-academic issues that are getting in the way of your studies – everything from visa stresses to feeling at home in your new city. 

If you have any learning differences, like dyslexia, you might be entitled to extra support, so make sure your tutors are aware of the situation. The same goes for if you are experiencing personal problems that are impacting your learning – depending on the situation you might be offered more time to complete work, as well as other forms of help. 

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Are Essay Writing Services Legal? (Yes, Let Me Explain)

by  Antony W

February 16, 2023

With the constant yet arguably unnecessary attacks on essay writing services, it’s time we put the matter to rest permanently by examining the extent to which such services are legal and the limits they shouldn’t cross.

Every day, hundreds of thousands of students seek for online essay help with two main goals: to meet the assignment deadlines and to score good grades. High school, college, and university students that higher reliable services end up submitting their work on time and scoring better grades than they initially would have.

The question still remains, though. Are essay writing services legal in the first place or should there be a ban on them?

Essay writing services are legal and safe provided you use them with the perspective of a student who is seeking for help to understand their assignment better. The paper you receive shouldn’t be the final document you submit to your instructor. You should use it for reference only.

The fact that students seek for essay help online is a clear indication that such services play a significant role world over and therefore their necessity in the current academic sphere is something we can’t quite ignore.

Are Essay Writing Services Legal? (Yes, 4 Reasons Explained)

If use the right way, the services offered by essay writing companies can change the way we look at online academic assistance. Here are at least 5 reasons why we believe it’s legal to hire online essay writing services :

1. Essay Companies are Academic Assistance Platforms

Some people frown at essay writing companies because they think such services are active only to promote academic cheating in school.

While that’s a common way to look at it, we strongly believe that it’s a subjective approach to judging the impact of online essay writing services on the internet.

Perceiving online essay help as a means through which students cheat to pass exams is backward thinking. That’s so because online essay companies are only a source of academic assistance that students can contact to get help with their assignments.

In other words, students should use online essay services as a means through which they get the necessary help to understand their essay better than they would if they did it on their own.

At the end of the day, the burden of proof is on the student to demonstrate that they understood their assignments well and can comfortably answer questions in case instructors ask.

2. Legit Essay Companies Don’t Tolerate Plagiarism

There’s nothing worse than paying for an essay only to discover that it’s someone else’s copied work.

That’s plagiarism , which automatically translates to academic cheating, and it can get you in trouble.

Quite too often, students caught with copied essays face harsh consequences, which may include indefinite expulsion from high school, college, or university.

Legit academic writing services take a completely different approach, particularly in this age where Turnitin plagiarism checker has so much improved from a simple system to a robust database.

Not only do they invest their time in in-depth research. They also write the essays from scratch, making sure that plagiarism checkers can’t find traces of copied words, phrases, or even paragraphs.

At Help for Assessment, we have a strict policy against plagiarism, which our writers and editors follow to a tee. With this policy in place, we’re able to invest our time in research, outlining, drafting, and refining essays, position papers, custom writings, and research papers.

If you hire Help for Assessment to guide you through your essays, or any other type of paper in our list of services , you can be sure to get high quality work written from scratch.

3. Students Hire Essay Services Based on Freewill – Not Under Compulsion

Unless we forget, students don’t hire online academic writing services because anyone forces them to. It all springs from their freewill and an urgent need to tackle more challenging assignments in the shortest time possible.

If you look at it from a different point of view, online academic assistance gets students instant help. Such consultations and assistance often go a long way to help students get good grades.

At the end of the day, the burden of proof is on the student to demonstrate that they understand the course content and subject context, regardless of whether they bought the essay online or did the work on their own.

4. A Counterclaim for Moral Argument

From an academic point of view, the moral argument suggests that online essay writing companies create lazy students by helping them unburden from the workforce they should handle on their own

. The argument also suggests that students can reach out to professors and teachers for help and questions with respect to their assignment.

Unfortunately, that’s a subjective and weak way to look at it. To be clear, students don’t seek online essay help because they’re lazy, and lest we forget, professors and teachers tend to have too much on their plates to attend to the needs of every student.

Besides, the same teachers and professors that students tend to reach out to for help ask students to do their own further research, which sometimes force students to seek for help from online essay writing services.

Moreover, legitimate essay writing services make it clear in their Terms and Conditions of Services that a student should use the academic papers they receive for reference purpose only, not as their final draft.

Is Paying Someone to Write an Essay Illegal?

There’s nothing wrong with paying someone to write your academic essay for you.

• First, teachers and professors aren’t blind to the existence of essay writing services, and know they that students content these mills for help anyway.
• Second, the only illegal thing when it comes to handing in your assignment is to submit plagiarized work.
• Third, asking for essay help online is a great way to get your work done faster, so you can easily beat tight deadlines and score better grades in the process.

Provided you use the document for reference and not as your final draft, you should be completely fine.

About the author 

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

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Are Essay Writing Services Legit and Legal?

If you’ve been busy doing schoolwork and trying to hit deadlines, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen essay writing services advertised online. These claim to take your topic of choice and write an entire essay on them, which you can turn in for top grades. However, are these services legit and legal, and is it a good idea to use them?

Also read: How to Download Entire Websites for Offline Use

Are Essay Writing Services Legit?

Most of the time, an essay writing service will do what it says it does. A company will hire academic writers, either in-house or freelance, and assign them tasks. The writers type up the full essay then hand it to you. The service lets you legally claim the essay as yours so you can just put your name on it.

Often, the service will put a huge emphasis on a no-plagiarism stance. This is because academic institutions often scan submitted pieces to see if they’ve been lifted from a website or book. The writers of the essay will handcraft it themselves so that the client doesn’t get caught cheating.

Are Essay Writing Services Legal?

The entire process is called “ghostwriting.” This is when a writer writes a piece, then allows someone else to claim all the ownership. Ghostwriting is very much a legal avenue of work; some celebrity biographies were ghostwritten by other authors.

As such, someone else writing an essay and releasing their ownership is also legal. There have been efforts by some to ban this practice, such as universities in the UK .

Should You Use Essay Writing Services?

They are legal and legit, so why not use them? While you may be tempted, there are downsides to using a service.

The Potential Problem of Plagiarism

For one, academic institutes will typically ask you to check a box or agree to a statement that says what you submit is your own work. This goes beyond ghostwriting, as the statement will ask you to confirm that you were the original writer of the piece.

What this means is that, if the institute works out that you used an essay writing service, it’s considered plagiarism. This is plagiarism in the fact that you’re claiming that a piece that you did not write is yours. It doesn’t matter if the original writer gave you ownership of it – you didn’t write it, full stop.

While your institute may not find any copy-paste plagiarism in your work, it may raise eyebrows if your essays suddenly have a different “voice” to them or cover something that wasn’t part of the original course.

When Pre-Written Essays Do Damage

Even if you don’t get caught, handing in a pre-written essay hinders more than helps. Sure, you met a deadline without doing work, but essays are meant to further your own education. By having someone else do it, you’re putting yourself back compared to your classmates who did the essay and learned the topic.

Even if you do use a pre-written essay, you may not like what you get. The Guardian did a study on the people who wrote, used, or read an essay written by a service. The people who used it either felt guilty or ended up getting bad grades; the tutors who had prewritten articles submitted to them could smell them out.

As such, it’s not a good idea to use an essay writing service. You don’t learn anything from it, you run the risk of being flagged and kicked out of your course, and – even if everything works out okay – it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get a good grade for it.

Not the Easy Way Out for Essays

While there are plenty of online courses that you can take for free , hiring an essay writing service to complete your work is not recommended. They’re bad for your education, they may not give you a good grade, and if you’re caught doing it, you’ll be in big trouble. Buckle up and get that essay done!

Have you been tempted by essay writing services? Let us know below.

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Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.

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Are Essay Services Legal?

Are Essay Services Legal and Is it realistic to expect a low-cost, High-Quality Essay from a Cheap Paper Writing Service ?

If you like this essay, don’t be shine to  pay people for essays at EssayBasics .

Table of Contents

Hiring an Essay Writer Online

Essay writing services often use academic writers and Professional essayists who are gurus in their fields to assist students who are having difficulty with their schoolwork. These professionals have the necessary knowledge to conduct research and write on a variety of subjects, so ensuring that the paper will be of exceptionally high quality.

In addition, because the primary responsibility of these writers is to complete academic projects, they will complete your assignment well before the deadline, in contrast to a harried student who has a variety of other responsibilities and projects to do. Before turning in the assignment, the essay writers will look it through, make any necessary corrections, and double-check that it is an original piece of work.

Students typically have a large number of tasks that need to be turned in before a given deadline, which is why they turn to these essay-writing services for assistance. They are required to go to school, take part in a variety of extracurricular activities, and even maintain a part-time job in order to cover their living expenses. The majority of students may find this to be too daunting, especially considering that turning in an assignment beyond the due date might get you into a lot of problems academically.

Although you may have enough time to complete your assignment by the due date, you may not be satisfied with the final product. There are some kids who just don’t have the talent necessary, and as a result, they won’t be able to create an exceptional essay.

To help students in this situation, essay writing services are available online. In point of fact, the vast majority of students strongly recommend using these Academic Writing Services . However, there are some people who continue to be dubious and may have concerns about the idea of paying someone else to complete their academic responsibilities on their behalf.

Are Online Essay Writing Services Reliable?

You want to deliver all of your essays on time and with high quality, but you don’t want to run into legal trouble since you used an essay writing service. Then, are these services within the law?

Even though it is not against the law to use a Dissertation Writing Service , you nevertheless run the risk of getting into problems if you do not exercise caution. The following are some considerations that you will need to pay attention to.

It is not acceptable practice to pay another person to complete your essay for you. Your lecturers anticipate that you will independently complete each and every academic assignment, and they might not comprehend the fact that you do not have sufficient time to finish your academic responsibilities. Your essay may not be up to par, but there is still time to hire a professional essayist to rewrite it for you.

There are sketchy and maybe harmful elements to certain research paper writing services. These are the kinds of services that give the impression that they are too good to be true since they provide very low pricing for essay writing. If that’s the case, you run the risk of turning in an essay of poor quality or an assignment that has been duplicated, both of which could get you in hot water.

You run the risk of falling victim to a con if you are not careful. You could pay for an essay online and never receive it if the firm doesn’t have a strong reputation online. Not only will you be unable to hand in your dissertation on time, but you also won’t have the necessary funds in your bank account.

Benefits of Hiring Online Paper Writing Services

The following are some of the advantages of hiring an essay writing service in a legal capacity:

You Learn How to Write a Proper Essay

Before placing an order for an essay, several companies that write essays give students access to example essays written by the company. A student can use them to get an idea of what an appropriate essay looks like to write on their own. They may even be inspired to desire to write their own essays as a result of this.

For instance, students can ask for a sample essay in APA format so that they can become familiar with that citation style prior to beginning work on their own essays.

Avoid Writer’s Block

The process of coming up with ideas and themes for an essay is one of the more tough aspects of writing an essay. The greatest companies that create essays for students use expert writers on staff who also serve in the roles of teachers and advisers. They are able to give kids advice, comments, and ideas for outstanding topics to write about.

Editing for Correctness of Grammar and Spelling

Students who have the confidence to write essays frequently commit a large number of typos and other grammatical and spelling errors along the route. Having their work proofread by a qualified professional essay writer can help ensure that they are properly presenting their views.

Grammar checker applications like Grammarly are utilized by the legit essay writing services in the industry. This guarantees that students will submit essays that have correct grammar and will impress their instructors.

Ethical Citation of Others’ Work

Students that plagiarize the work of others without giving appropriate credit will receive an unfavorable score for their efforts. Why put yourself through the strain of writing a college essay if you’re just going to bomb it because your citations are wrong?

Students can avoid falling into this trap with the assistance of professional essay writing services since these services ensure that students give appropriate acknowledgment to the resources that are used in the students’ writing.

Time-Saving for the Professor

If you can’t believe your eyes, essay writing services are actually beneficial for academics and teachers as well. The utilization of legitimate essay writing services guarantees that a student’s paper will be professionally written and free of the kinds of grammatical errors that are commonly made. Students, having gained knowledge from this experience, eventually become better essay writers, which saves teachers time that would have been spent correcting basic errors.

Spotting Illegal Essay Writing Services

Here’s how to tell if an essay writing service is legit or not:

• They hire non-native English writers.
• They don’t exist as separate entities under the law.
• They do not have any previous essay samples.
• To save money, they contract with low-cost essay writers.
• They violate student confidentiality
• They are dishonest essay services that resell plagiarized essays.
• They don’t offer round-the-clock customer service.
• Students are not permitted to have any contact with the essay writers assigned to them.

As you can see, having someone else write your essay is not considered cheating. For fear of failing out, this service is necessary even for students with part-time jobs.

Please consider these factors before labeling essay writing services as “illegal.”

Is It Safe To Buy Essays Online?

Absolutely! It’s common knowledge that students can use essay writing services to aid them with their schoolwork. On the internet, you can find a great number of businesses that are dependable, trustworthy, and ready to assist you in submitting work at the appropriate time.

However, because of the proliferation of con artists in recent years, this sector of the economy has been tainted in some way by their presence. Prior to making an order with them, one should always make sure to investigate them thoroughly and perform the necessary due diligence. Therefore, we need to know if essay writing services adhere to ethical standards.

Our staff assists you with reaching the objectives you have set for yourself as a learner, our services are completely ethical if you locate a legitimate organization and use the work for referencing purposes.

A custom essay writing service in the United States is very similar to a paid article database. You’re not plagiarizing an essay; rather, you’re acquiring a resource that will help you better understand the material and more easily achieve success in the course.

How Much Does It Cost To Buy An Essay Online?

The price of Essay Basics is extremely low in comparison to the benefits that may be gained from using them. You can have work at the college level delivered to you for a very low cost by paying a fixed rate that varies depending on the length of your paper, the topic it is on, and the time you need it delivered. To achieve this goal, we have developed a price calculator that you can find on our home page through which you can obtain an instant quote for FREE based on the level of study you desire, the length of the project, the deadline, and the required grade.

Turnitin Can Detect Essays Purchased Online?

No, that is not the case. When it comes to plagiarism, as long as your essay is 100 percent original, no plagiarism checker will be able to detect it. Turnitin will, however, identify instances of plagiarism in the student’s essay if it contains plagiarized content. Therefore, you should not be concerned or think too much about these things.

The question now is, what is the most effective technique to check one’s Turnitin score? You simply need to upload your research paper, and the program will immediately provide you with a comprehensive report and highlight any passages that have been plagiarized from online sources. The color green indicates that the work is satisfactory, whereas the color red indicates that a significant number of instances of plagiarism have been found.

The second question concerns whether or not Turnitin examines previously uploaded work. The correct response is “yes.” You are not permitted to reuse any portion of a paper that has been accepted for publication by your educational institution because doing so constitutes plagiarism.

Reliable Paper Writing Services Online At Low Rates

Students can benefit from the professional essay-writing services offered by Essay Basics. Our number one objective is to assist students in attaining higher grades by providing bespoke essays of the highest possible quality. We are aware that certain assignments might be difficult and that meeting deadlines can be a challenge. Essay Basics is dedicated to meeting all of your online writing requirements, and we are available around the clock to provide you with the assistance you require to successfully finish your assignments.

Have you been looking over the internet for an essay writing service that is both affordable and dependable? You are quite fortunate to have found your way to this location! We are a one-stop shop that can meet all of your requirements for writing. Our professional essay writing service is available around the clock, whether you need help with simple and quick projects or the production of a dissertation.

Our team of experienced essay writers can produce work on any subject you require in the shortest amount of time possible. The best essay writing service available online can be found at Essay Basics. We take great pleasure in the expertise of our simple writers, and we guarantee that all of our content is current and relevant at all times. We can proudly say that our essay writing service does not engage in any form of plagiarism at all. We have writers available for hire who are knowledgeable in every field and can create content from scratch or modify what you have already produced. We guarantee the protection of your data, and we never disclose any information regarding customer transactions. Because we work hard to be the greatest, most trustworthy, and most affordable essay writing service, we have gained the trust of our customers over the course of our company’s existence. We have remained committed to our mission of assisting students with the difficulties they face in their educational pursuits.

Prices As Low As $12.95 per Page

• We provide discounts on initial orders as a way to demonstrate our commitment to you, and the reductions you receive increase as you make use of more of our services.
• Our essay writers work hard to make our prices as low as we possibly can, but we promise that the quality of our essays will never suffer. This is because we value education highly, and we only want to offer our clients the very best that the industry has to offer.
• We will assist you in reducing the amount of time and effort required, allowing you to concentrate on completing other duties. EssayBasics.com is home to a team of highly qualified essay writers who will relieve you of the burden of your job so that you don’t even have to stress about it.

If you came here after searching the internet for something like “write my essay,” then you are in the right place. So, tell me, what exactly are you anticipating? As soon as you place the order for the essay, our qualified essay writer will immediately begin working on your project in order to ensure that our online essay writer can complete and submit your academic assignment on time.

Round The Clock Customer Support for Essay Writing Assignments

We are available at any time of the day, every day. Please use our live chat feature if you have any inquiries about the services we provide or if you just want to ask us a question.

Send us a message about your new or current order, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Regarding orders that are already in place, we will keep you updated on the latest developments and adjustments.

Our transactions are secret. No matter what the circumstances may be, we will never disclose the identities of our customers. All of the emails and other messages that we have with our clients are transmitted through encrypted channels. Because we are concerned about your safety, you may have faith that we will keep your name, the specifics of the essays you order, and any other information you supply private and out of the reach of any third party.

Buy Unique Cheap College Essays Online

Every single one of our essays is penned by one of our authors. In addition to that, we have a Quality Assurance team that checks over all of our work before sending you the finished product (i.e., the final paper). We adhere to a highly stringent policy on plagiarism, and we guarantee that all of our customers will receive papers and articles that are completely original. We guarantee that your essay will include no traces of plagiarism!

We place a high priority on achieving your complete happiness. To guarantee the high quality of the essays we write, we offer free revisions till the customer is completely happy with the job we’ve done for them.

Please let us know if you have any problems or if you believe that we did not live up to your expectations, and we will rectify the issue as soon as possible after receiving your feedback. In the event that a refund is necessary, we will process it as quickly as possible. Please rest assured that we will only give the superior quality of service that you really deserve.