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.

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.