The Increasingly Sloppy World Of Essay Mills

Essay mills, those ghostwriting services that ‘help’ students with their essays and homework for a fee, are obviously quite popular among students and a headache for professors who are worried about their impact on students’ learning. To clearly understand the quality of services of essay mills, Duke University Professor Dan Ariely decided to try them out by hiring four essay mills to write on an ironic topic- cheating.

What Professor Ariely got back as output from them a few weeks later was what he described as ‘gibberish’ and heavily plagiarized. Here’s more from his blog:

A few of the papers attempt to mimic APA style, but none achieve it without glaring errors. Citations are sloppy, and the reference lists abominable – including outdated and unknown sources, many of which are online news stories, editorial posts or blogs, and some that are simply broken links. In terms of the quality of the writing itself, the authors of all four papers seemed to have very little grasp of the English language, or even how to format an essay. Paragraphs jump bluntly from one topic to another, and often fall into the form of a list, counting off various forms of cheating or providing a long stream of examples that are never explained or connected to the “theses” of the paper.

Ariely concludes that with the kind of writing these essay mills offer, students would probably feel they would be better doing their term papers on their own.

Dan Ariely: “Plagiarism and essay mills”

[via NY Times]

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