buy a coursework essays

buy a coursework essays

Exploring the Ethical and Academic Implications of buying Coursework Essays

1. Introduction to the Issue

In this paper, we would be discussing the ethical and academic implications related to students engaging in the practice of buying coursework essays or commissioning their original work.

The case of buying coursework raises discussions of academic integrity, plagiarism, and a range of ethical implications. Going to the root, questioning why students engage in buying coursework – it can be because they are either overburdened with work and limited time or they have procrastinated for the less important classwork in the name of focusing on other more important classes or even on personal self-grooming or work outside college. However, by doing so, students can be vulnerable to academic tribunals which adhere to a different line of thought.

There has been a striking increase in advertisements facilitating students. The global nature of transactions involving assignment provisions means that buyers and sellers of such services may form deals with individuals from countries far beyond the one in which they live. As such, although we write from the basis of operations occurring within the United Kingdom, we note the potential for such work to be purchased or sold globally. Clearly, for academic organisations in receipt of such work, the potential ethical concerns are significant. The increase in the practice of shopping for essays is likely due to a number of different factors: students’ increasing workload, financial pressures, parental ‘hovering’, a perceived erosion in the value of educational qualifications, and a shift in emphasis towards teaching to the test as the primary mode of learning in educational institutions. However, none of these apparent justifications appear to address the underlying issues directly posed by the practice of essay buying.

2. Ethical Considerations of Buying Coursework Essays

Section 2: Ethical considerations

The term ethical can be defined as “relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these.” Moral, as used in this definition, is concerned with considering what is right and wrong in human behavior. With this description and understanding in mind, we should now consider the ethical implications of essay writing services, both from the perspective of the service and the individual using the service.

In certain cultures and situations, having an essay written for you may be considered cheating and, therefore, could be seen as an action that would undermine the rest of your educational career. By seeing this as cheating, it is important to consider the repercussions of this action. Cheating could lead to accusations of academic misconduct being made against you. Such accusations are likely to be fully investigated and will often carry penalties ranging from an informal warning to permanent expulsion from your college or university. You may, therefore, ask yourself whether, in order to avoid such accusations, buying an essay from a professional online service is a means of reducing this risk.

It is therefore worth clarifying the ethical implications of buying essays and whether it should be seen as an individual academic issue or an overall educational concern. In order to explore the wider educational and ethical implications of this, we need to first consider the philosophy of education; in particular, the general purpose of an academic setting and the expectations of all students to take a fair and honest approach to their own academic work.

3. Academic Integrity and Consequences

Academic integrity is a term often used in primary and secondary education, but it is also practiced on an individual level in higher education and in professional practice. According to Edward J. Cutler, academic integrity refers “to the collegiate ideal of ethical behavior based on community values within the academic profession” and the discipline in which it is practiced. By buying essays that others have written as though the work is our own, students are telling the academic community that their word means nothing because it isn’t a reflection of their own hard work and intelligence.

The risks of buying coursework essays are the possibilities of negative consequences that could result in harm to the student and are meant to warn a student of the despicable actions they are contemplating. It can also refer to the consequences of an action as a result of an ethical or academic infraction. The student who thinks deeply about the issue and the risks associated with buying an essay already knows that there are ethical and academic implications. A student who wants to skirt those illegitimate implications doesn’t care what the consequences are and won’t be swayed by any discussion of the ill effects that could result from his/her buying an essay. Students choosing to buy essays off the Internet are doing so with full knowledge that they could be buying someone else’s work. Therefore they must also have full knowledge that college and university officials could refer the student, educator or essay vendor to the Council of Journalism and Mass Communication.

4. Strategies for Promoting Academic Honesty

Strategies for promoting academic honesty focus on reducing what drives the demand for cheating services and proactively helping students to achieve in environments designed around academic integrity values. We highlight interventions that promote positive behavioral decision making—that is, those that can address deceitful practices before they occur.

To discourage students from knowingly engaging in services that do exactly what they are supposed to do, we suggest the development of subtle mechanisms that can help promote negative attitudes towards engaging in contract cheating. Students support a range of suggested behaviors to stem this tide: these interventions focus particularly (but not exclusively) on the demand for cheating services. In making this set of suggestions, we find it is particularly important to refer to biosocial criminology, which argues for understanding criminal activities as a product of persons’ interactions with their environments: “Individuals will abstain from criminal activities if they know that there are significant costs or punishments associated with such conduct”. Given this ‘rational actor’ theory of crime, which sees it as an outcome of motivation and opportunity, we suggest that implementing strategies that can make students view contract cheating as less prevalent, acceptable, or legitimate can help stem demand as it shifts the motivation away from using these services. We also suggest that the role of opportunity is crucial.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

There are no simple solutions to the ethical and academic debates we have entered into, but at the least, we can start to ask some of the questions in ways that open up possibilities for more informed and comprehensive discussions about essay purchase. What is striking and inconclusive about the empirical research we conducted is just how little is known about the subject. Perhaps there is much to be praised in the intrinsic values of secrecy: we learnt far less than even we suspected, and of what we learnt, acres of speculation and conjecture were needed to fill in the many blanks. Could this be a kind of dead knowledge that is unethical to pursue? The topic is worth a more definitive answer than the one we have tried to give, but it is also increasingly becoming a matter of forensic analysis with the potential for extra-curricular interventions. If anything, it demonstrates a need for greater transparency in these murky areas – which we will examine in the next section.

Whether the academic contexts suppose “the scary questions all have easy answers in principle even if they may be difficult to implement in practice” remains to be seen, but since “right action at the micro-level” is, in fact, how “structural injustice can be attacked at the macro-level,” we should at least try to answer. Perhaps the best we can do is recommend greater oversight and professional development in these rather shrouded areas – that is surely a good start that could prove to be the case even if we are completely wrong on several fronts. At the same time, what we have indicated is that scholarship and research are central to processes of inquiry and a consciousness of ethical life.