EssayScam.Org: The paradox

So there I am Googling for advice on how to mark undergrad essays when I come upon the aforementioned website. At first, I think "oh, good, a website looking out for essay-writing cheats who rely on freelancers to do their essays for them!"

I click on the site out of curiosity to find out that no, that is not the site's intention. EssayScam, you see, is a watchdog set up to look out for essay-writing scammers who may scam...

... PAYING STUDENTS OUT OF COURSEWORK!

That's right. It is trying to save desperate, cheating students from blowing their money getting somebody else to do their coursework for them; somebody else from getting them a first-class grade, while the rest of the student's class has to toil away and meet the same deadline.

I cannot believe the hypocrisy of that website. I honestly can't. How students can resort to such levels of cheating is, frankly, beyond me. It pisses me off so much knowing that while I had to work my ass off getting my first class degree, and a good masters in research degree, there are others out there, nursing hangovers, while some other guy/girl is working on coursework for them.

Scum, they really are.

I like how in some threads they fret about Turnitin. Well, if any of you stumble across my blog, let me, an actual university teaching assistant, give you the low down on Turnitin:

Turnitin is not a plagiarism detection software per se; that is not why Turnitin exists. Turnitin's role is simply to highlight similarities between a student's work and all the texts and data available on the internet; it is the observer, ie, markers like me, who determines if plagiarism is apparent and if references are being properly attributed.

Turnitin matches, we human beings judge on plagiarism.

There is no excuse whatsoever for resorting to online essay writers for your work. If you have encountered serious hardship, say, the death of a close family relative, or a severe illness, then sorry, but although these are certainly understandable circumstances, it does not give you licence to go out there and cheat. Education is based on a meritocracy: the best work gets the best grades, the middle the middle, the worst the worst. If you put in the time, you get the rewards. You do NOT get rewarded for wasting time watching movies and getting drunk, then spending an entire night writing an essay based on half a page of lecture notes.

If you have got the talent, then writing an essay and balancing a social life is very easy. If not, you need to hit the books more. At least  if you got a respectable grade then you can say you genuinely earned it, contrary to someone with a first-class piece of work that somebody else wrote for them.

And as a final note: I wouldn't rejoice if you luckily do get a quality piece of work from an online writer. University lecturers and teaching assistants aren't dumb, we can, and have, identified plagiarism with our grey matter without even needing online sites like Turnitin. This has included PhD theses and masters dissertations - not just a small-piece report by first year undergrads.

Try it if you dare, you cheating scum.