Many students, whether they’re working on a particularly difficult assignment or just simply don’t feel like doing the work, may be tempted to purchase an assignment from an essay mill.
However, even if we ignore the fact that buying an assignment is cheating and raises serious ethical issues, there are many reasons to be wary of buying a paper online.
So, if you’re contemplating buying a paper online, here are five reasons, beyond purely ethical ones, why you should should reconsider.
1: Many Essay Mills Are Scams
Here’s a quick question: What are you going to do if you pay for a paper and it’s’ never delivered? Are you going to leave a bad review? File a lawsuit? Complaint to the police?
For many who buy papers through essay mills, this is not a hypothetical question, as highlighted by a 2017 article in The Guardian.
It costs virtually nothing to set up an essay mill website, make a few sales and when the papers come due, simply close up shop. They can then reopen under a different name and repeat the whole process.
Doing business with an unscrupulous company is always going to be risky and there is little to stop them from not delivering at all, leaving you poorer, closer to your deadline and still without a paper.
2: Essay Mills Do Low Quality Work
But even if the essay mill does do the work they promise, there’s no guarantee it will net you an A. Study after study on the work of essay mills find that they do, at best, mediocre work.
A 2010 study by economists at Duke University found that even expensive essay mills only returned “gibberish” for their dollar. A 2013 study by Write Check had similar results.
Authors at essay mills are tasked with cranking out large volumes of essays on topics they know little about with very little time. This is hardly a setup conducive to quality academic writing and it shows.
If you want a good grade on your paper, an essay mill is not the way to go.
3: There May Still Be Plagiarism
Authors who are tasked with large amounts of writing in short periods of time often take short cuts. Essay mill authors are no different.
The demands of writing for an essay mill coupled with sloppy citations makes it so that your “guaranteed original” essay may still trigger a plagiarism investigation. Once again, if you’re not satisfied with the project, there isn’t much you can do. Even if you can get your money back, how does it repay for the punishment you’ll likely face?
The only way to be 100% sure your paper doesn’t contain plagiarized passages is to write it yourself and follow the standards set forth by your class and school.
4: Security Risks
Most major credit card processors are reluctant to work with essay mill websites. To make matters worse, many are located internationally, where financial protections many take for granted are not present.
Even if you manage to complete the transaction and get a decent essay, you’ve still provided your financial data to a less-than-credible company and their credit card processor. While they may not abuse that information directly, credit card breaches can happen and, without proper disclosures, you might be completely unaware.
From a security standpoint, buying an essay is a high-risk activity and one that’s best avoided.
5: Guilt
While it’s easy to make justifications and excuses when buying a paper, many students find they feel different after they submit it.
There’s’ a sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with working hard and completing an assignment well. For most, there’s a very opposite feeling that comes from cheating their way through it.
Even if you get an A on your paper, you’ll always know that the accomplishment is not yours. You’ll not only rob yourself of that accomplishment, but what you might have learned completing it.
No matter what grade you get, you can’t avoid the fact that you cheated yourself too.
That may well be the biggest cheat an essay mill provides.