Ivory Research and Facebook: Let's Promote Cheating!

Last year while employed as a university teaching assistant I wrote a post covering EssayScam.org. EssayScam is a hypocritical watchdog website that aims to protect cheating students from being cheated out of their money when it comes to paying websites to do their university coursework for them. Yes, I am being serious.

Today, while going through my Facebook feeds, I saw a sponsored page from Ivory Research, advertising to do students' essays and dissertations for them in return for a fee. As you would imagine, it didn't exactly please me, so I left a comment just to chastise students who were thinking of taking them up on their offer. Afew hours and likes later, the comment had mysteriously vanished, so evidently Ivory Research have no appetite for defending their services and are happy to play fascist and just remove opposing points of view. I'm amazed that Facebook are happy to let a business that makes money from lazy/desperate students have advertising space on their site, most of which are young people in college, university or in some kind of study.

On their website, Ivory Research state the following regarding the question of whether using their services is cheating or not:

"No. Our papers are designed to be used as aids and models to help you write your own essay. If you use our papers as they are intended – in the same way you would use any journal, book or past paper – it is not cheating. By using our papers in the correct manner, they act as powerful study tools, and are of far greater value to your academic development than presenting them as your own work. Please use our products responsibly."

Not only is this contradicted by an undercover report by Glamorgan University's student newspaper, which found that Ivory -do- promote using their work as the student's own, but their disclaimer makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

To start with, there is a difference between advising students how to write essays, and just doing the essays for them. If Ivory Research were serious about giving students a model to work with, then Ivory could simply post a model essay on an unrelated subject within the same discipline to help the student get an idea of what is needed. Using an essay about, say, conservative ideology, which just so happens to be the topic of the student's, is not helping them; it is doing the work for them. Furthermore if model answers is all Ivory is concerned about, then they would have no need whatsoever to charge students for anything. Provide model answers on their website, and job done.

Second, using an essay from Ivory Research is not remotely like using academic texts, journals or past papers. These are used as citations; students read them, get information from them, mention them in their essays, and cite them in the references. If an Ivory Research paper -was- like them, then what that means is that students would be paying triple or maybe four figure sums of money for an extra reference in their essays; a reference that is not peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal.

The final word in that disclaimer should worry students considering using Ivory or any other essay-writing company. Your piece of work -even your dissertation which could be the jewel of your academic achievements - is just a "product" in their eyes. They are employees in a business who care only about making money; whether your essays pass, fail, get caught in marking, you name it - they simply do not care. Don't believe me? Look out for the University of Glamorgan's student newspaper article on Ivory Research where they interviewed a girl who spent over £3000 (three-thousand) on an essay that failed. Read about their own essay where they paid for 2:2 quality of work - but only just got a third.

Finally, as I said in my earlier post, students who engage in this business worry about whether Turnitin will catch their fake essays or not. The truth is that, in all probability, it won't assuming the company you paid weren't stupid enough to use a copy-and-pasted article from online. What you should be worrying about, however, are flesh-and-blood human teaching assistants and lecturers marking your work. We have the experience to tell when a piece of work does not fit in with the student - whether good or bad quality - so Turnitin should be the least of your worries.

I can only hope that Facebook gets a grip and stops letting cheaters promote their frankly pathetic business.