quick cheap essay reviews

quick cheap essay reviews

The Impact of Quick and Cheap Essay Reviews on Academic Integrity

1. Introduction

First, is it right to sell cheap and quick reviews of essays which are, according to tutorial material, usually not delivered in less than a week? The main reason for which students seek out this kind of tutorial is, according to the statements given at the essay banks’ sites, the fact that they have failed to follow the established guidelines and deadlines. Some hands-on preparation and immediate help increase the possibility of students with low acceptance capacities to plagiarize without being detected. Second, tutorials tend to be, as we will see, massive products and it is common only to spot-check the final package for errors before releasing it to the student. These checks are not really into the knowledge of the researchers working in the area in which these essays were requested, as tutorial providers claim. The task force team, as affirmed by the tutorial providers, generally scans for completed essays, grammar, and spelling accuracy.

Academic institutions are increasingly relying on courses with a high volume of students for providing basic knowledge not only to their own students but also to students from other faculties. Essays written by students are widely used for assessing their knowledge on particular subjects. Generally, grading essays containing the same content is a repetitive and time-consuming task. Moreover, easy and cheap alternatives arise on the Internet, such as essay banks, electronic searches, and more recently, essay grading software. This paper draws attention to the impact that essay banks provide to students and, consequently, to academic integrity in a general way.

2. The Rise of Quick and Cheap Essay Review Services

Consequently, these firms can estimate the originality of the essays the students submit for additional assessment. There is observable progress towards reviewing essays for reasonable cost. To counter this trend, universities must improve their approaches by making students’ opportunities to review their drafts count, focus on accuracy encompassing originality, provide sound essay practice and work more often utilizing more tightly defined assessment criteria. Universities are under institutional threat from this know-how because they simply do not do enough statutory teaching about demonstrating essay competency or offer clarity to students urgently in need. Universities struggle to achieve student attainment dynamics comparable with the prevailing essay review services. These conflicting pressures and observed differences between student submissions, the review service rating features and the grades returned, suggest the struggles associated with effective essay teaching have wider consequences for discernible University coursework. It has been noted and gradually become more widely accepted that many students’ difficulties are facilitated and compensated by a small number of essay ‘enablers’.

Current essay reviews almost exclusively focus on correctness and lacuna detection, but overlook issues concerned with the originality and distinctness of students’ work. Yet students face pressures to turn to internet-based and other offerings due to consistent difficulties in applying sound technique or lack of previous exposure to essay writing. Existing services remain generalized and expensive since they frequently and needfully rely on professional human observers and assessors. They provide overly expensive personal tutoring alongside. Nevertheless, there are firms appearing in the essay tutoring sector who appear to charge affordable rates for tutoring which seems too good to be fair, purely because of the standard costs otherwise associated with the professional human input they require. These third-party review firms use information bandwidth effectively since they can assess a churn of essays and use integer weighted average and statistical techniques to rank the essays’ similarities or deficiencies.

3. Ethical Implications and Academic Integrity

The literature does, though, suggest a number of ways in which academic castigation might be prevented especially if they are introduced into designing assessments and giving feedback to students, but also on bringing the results of surveys of student behavior, such as this, to the attention of the named course leaders. It has, for example, been suggested that students will be less likely to cheat if assessments are fair, relevant, authentic and inclusive with a focus upon student learning, with clear guidelines that are understood and supported, and a requirement demanding honesty in their submissions and adherence to academic integrity, an aspect in which students have been involved.

Since international students had significantly less concern with ethical issues than domestic students, it was suggested that it was not their failure to understand academic expectations but rather differences in approaches to assessment and uncertainty about their ability to meet performance expectations that ruled. This was exacerbated in high-stakes performance assessments and could lead students to find ways of improving their levels of academic achievement by questionable means. It is not just a matter of finding support for this but of detecting that they do so. Unless those who teach and assess take this on board, it may well be that the adoption of explicit performance criteria will bring about, if only at the same time, an increase in academic dishonesty. That would be a most unfortunate and unintended consequence.

4. Strategies for Promoting Ethical Writing Practices

Most students in many basic writing classes, however, do not share the pact that literature and the newly revised Council of Writing Program Administrators guidelines suggest. They don’t mind cuts and pastes. As a rule, they don’t mind teachers correcting student papers. They feel that their straight and necessarily closed rows of A’s are the rewards their schools give to students who take their money without question and who do as they’re told. And yet, in the same breath that says something like “You shouldn’t do that in college,” they might tell each other how to do it better, faster, and with as little effort as possible.

Instructors from North American institutions of higher education who teach writing and are committed to teaching students to integrate the work of other writers into their own work often use strategies that will help students resist the temptations presented by the internet. Its easy “cut and paste” features are made less attractive by giving students extra time to gather source material so that they can put it into their own words and validate their choices by seeking instructor comment on initial drafts. Sure, writing is a way to assemble a small fortune, but for serious students committed to high ethical standards, time is invested. Facilitating ethical writing is a sales strategy written into a pact that students can share with teachers who align implicit and explicit lesson objectives.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

On a more general level, these results suggest that the least time-consuming approach of all may often not turn out to be the best resource investment in promoting academic integrity. Departments should consider asking someone else to offer an external check on the performance of instructors who tutor or supervise graduate students in charge of grading large numbers of essays in large classes, and conduct some reward system for those who managed to decrease the level of cheating among their major students, at least in part on the basis of instructor effort as assessed by students. Estimates of cheating prevalence in such small courses could be established using the approach described in Section II. By combining reports of cheating behavior with information on the number of essays submitted in each class for quality assurance purposes, departments can reward instructors who seem to supervise student essays in a way that reduces risks of cheating, or try to resolve the problem for those who do not.

In conclusion, these results suggest that the least time-consuming and cheapest way to reduce the incidence of cheating, at least in this course, is to make a small addition in the guidelines provided to those peer graders who were not assigned essays to grade. Instead, instructing them to simply randomly browse a few essays each to look for evidence of plagiarism. Since increasing the number of randomly chosen essays to 3 did not further reduce the incidence of cheating, a trained monkey might have as large an impact as long as the number of randomly reviewed essays was reasonably announced in advance. Implications for the design and implementation of essay grading to maximize its power to change or improve student learning are, however, complex and cannot be answered in this setting.