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The price of cheating

Posted on 16 Feb 2010 at 12:04

Dave Stevenson reveals how much an A-grade essay is likely to set you back

How much does it cost to buy your way to success? Oxbridge Essays allows you to build your own quotes: for a 2,000-word piece of GCSE coursework with a desired “A” grade and a deadline a month away, we were quoted £110.

A 4,000-word French undergraduate essay with a desired mark of 2:1 will cost £660. At the far end of the scale, a PhD paper of 15,000 words with a short deadline of four days will cost £7,000. Spotting the cheats isn’t cheap either: universities pay up to £6.000 per year for Turnitin.

But can students trust the plagiarism-free claims? Not much, says Will Murray of nLearning. As part of a test, he bought a paper from an essay mill for £120, and a brutal encounter with Turnitin revealed the writer of the essay had taken around 60% of their material from the web.

One of these companies had sold essays to students and hadn’t been paid, and its resolution to this problem was to send the essays to the universities concerned

The company that supplied the paper had guaranteed it would be plagiarism-free, but instead of refunding Murray, it merely offered to help him sue the writer who wrote the essay.

Helping students to cheat isn’t the only devious tactic employed by the essay mills. “One of these companies had sold essays to students and hadn’t been paid, and its resolution to this problem was to send the essays to the universities concerned to try to drop those students in it,” Murray claims.

Essay mills maintain their innocence. Stratos Malamatinas of TORG, owner of Oxbridge Essays, compares delivering essays to clients to a chemist selling Paracetamol to the suicidal. “The person selling it at the counter imagines that you’re taking it to cure a headache.”

Author: Dave Stevenson