Site promotes plagiarism
Issue date: 3/20/08 Section: Editorial
Editorial
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.
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.
