purchase essay online

purchase essay online

Exploring the Ethics and Implications of Purchasing Essays Online

1. Introduction to the Phenomenon of Buying Essays Online

A period of social Darwinism is occurring in higher education whereby certain knowledge and practices are being valorized as business models while others are being marginalized or devalued. In a reactive manner, tools and instruments have been developed as solutions to perceived problems of writing in the academy. These tools are used by academia to keep the increase of knowledge and practice of essay production and delivery in check. They play a regulatory role and have been politically deployed in an attempt to ensure that an academic culture abandons individual responsibilities to other academics who buy essays and essays developed from professional or academic sources with consent, skill, and payment. The policy approaches adopted by the academics, papers, and other higher education institutions have thus far focused on deterrence and avoidance of contracting out, turning the commercial market for essays into a modern and effective prior restraint of the kind described by Locke.

Over the years, the focus has shifted from teaching and assessing writing ability to teaching so-called generic skills in an attempt to improve the student experience and decrease workload. These social and political issues surrounding the assessment of writing have contributed to the commercialization of “plagiarism-busting” software. The growing commercialization of higher education and the fragmentation of academic work have combined to open up a market in customized essays for the first time. Results from a survey of higher education in the UK indicate that how the student writes his/her assignments is becoming as important as the fact that the writing is written. This value attached to the process of writing assignments legitimates the existence of certain academic knowledge and practices, such as plagiarism detection software, as well as other knowledge and practices that use technology to evade detection.

2. Ethical and Academic Integrity Considerations

Students must also consider the moral standards of their instructors and administrators. If a college is morally opposed to the notion of students purchasing essays in exchange for a grade, it should be expected that students will face some kind of academic judgment against doing so. This may come in the form of severe penalties, direct expulsion, or the college may simply implement inherent safeguards against the ability for students to cheat the system. Moreover, the perspectives of instructors and administrators differ and often enforce different penalties and strategies against student conduct. Broadly, a dissension exists between the course instructors’ ethical goals of developing students’ self-awareness, aptitude, and skill set against the institutional responsibility to maintain the academic credibility of their degree and the relevance of staff affirmations.

Next, students must weigh their personal ethical considerations against those imposed upon them by external actors. Institution guidelines and country policy help to determine the standards of academic integrity a student must commit to throughout their journey toward earning a degree. Academic integrity guidelines may be made explicit and are usually available within a written form provided at the beginning of study. However, some may be informally transferred from one generation of students to the next, while others may even be shaped by the culture of that individual department or university.

From the student’s perspective, there are a few types of ethical considerations to weigh before engaging in an exchange of money for a good grade. First, they must decide if purchasing an academic paper online is consistent with their own moral standards. Religious systems, personal principles, family heritage, institution beliefs, and personal connections to any applicable factors can all create or discourage a potential customer’s desire to make such a transaction.

3. Impact on Educational Institutions and Future Implications

Academic institutions have a unique opportunity amidst the unprecedented distributed learning infrastructure development driven by COVID-19 to enhance the mechanisms by which they detect and deter academic dishonesty. At the Australian tertiary level, demand for student academic casino services is embedded in off-the-shelf writing services that change the end product slightly in response to academic feedback, thereby reducing the probability of a 73% distinctive match. These distinctive matches are likely to get caught reusing purchased work; meanwhile, cheap essay writing services use AI chatbots, a walled garden of content, keyword placement, and academic social networks to upgrade, increase word count, and create a product that is not even written by a native English speaker.

While difficult to quantify, the impact on higher education institutions can be seen and understood through online reports, social media platforms, Whistle-BlowerTM platforms, popular media reports, and testimonials from students and within other qualitative data. Faculty and educational researchers have written about the threats posed by essay mills for over half a century, and there continues to be a steady stream of media reports of highly educated individuals who have turned to essay mills to improve grades for employment entry, advancement, to maintain academic scholarships, or to improve ratings at service academies. What remains unknown is the true financial impact of the Australian academic ghostwriting trade on the Australian higher education industry, institutions, curricula, and campus culture.

4. Strategies for Promoting Academic Integrity and Preventing Essay Purchasing

Classrooms provide wonderful opportunities for students to practice their writing progression, but this does not lessen the importance of learning how to write in the subject. There is a need to stress to students that communication in an academic setting should remain consistent across disciplines and lines. The real strength in cheating services is their ability to adapt to increasingly advanced detection solutions. Today, in most universities, there are software programs that can help identify the specifics of plagiarism or if an essay can be traced to the copywriter. With such sophisticated technology at educators’ disposal, what do assignment companies, now termed as homework help agencies, do to remain in business?

To a certain degree, some level of commercialization can make apparent the conflict that is inherent in essay services advertising. Given world history, we can often point to a number of situations where legislation was put into place to combat the egregious behavior associated with certain markets. Unfettered capitalism where the sole aim is to make money has always been viewed as problematic because of its lack of virtuous pursuit. Of course, we do not have to look far to see a number of situations in which commercialization within academia is even encouraged. In this case though, the outputs produced from this commercialization should in principle also contribute to some notion of collective public good such as reporting of industry performance, even though the vested interest in doing research is to serve private needs. What is much clearer are the institutional procedures and duties of business organizations working within academia that can help thwart some of the challenges associated with essay advertising.