Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Essay Fraud

What is the purpose of EssayFraud.org? According to the organization website, its members provide freelance research and composition services to students, and it expects students to use these services responsibly.
If a consumer contracts a freelance writer to research and compose an example document from which the consumer intends to glean unique insights/viewpoints on a given topic, the consumer must properly cite that writer and/or that writer's employing Web site when writing his/her own paper.

Yeah, right.

Some people might think that the best clue about the purpose of EssayFraud.org is contained in the name of the organization. See my posts on Cheating 1 and 2.

Essay Fraud is currently engaged in a campaign to encourage students to buy American essays (sorry, I should have said research insights) rather than cheaper services from Pakistan or Ukraine.

The wider effect of the Essay Fraud phenomenon is that essay outsourcing undermines the supposed purposes of the American education system. If Americans are paying Pakistanis and Ukrainians to write their essays, it won't be long before Americans have to pay Pakistanis and Ukrainians to run their companies.

Whoops! According to some software industry leaders, this is already starting to happen. See my post on the Globally Integrated Enterprise.

Who is being clever here, and who is being stupid? (In a later post, Jack van Hoof calls this Paying to Stay Dumb.)



Comments to this post have now been switched off.

2 comments:

  1. I ask you not to be deceived by this so called “ profitless “ web site, the real purpose of this web site, in views of many persons is to fight competitors of another essay mill company- Essaytown.com( the company that according to reliable sources is located in Russia). Moreover, as this web site might indicate this organization could be located in Russia as well (http://www.innovation-team.ru/index.php?page=portfolio&group=15).
    So far neither essaytown nor essayfraud has presented ANY evidence that they are located in the USA.
    Your assertion and your suspicions as far as this organisation is concerned are not new ones. You may read more about it here http://hiramhover.typepad.com/hiramhover/2006/01/a_consumer_watc.html as well as here http://www.freelancewriting.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=03c6ab72f0c2257137459e1b2308a10c&topic=1435.15 you also might be interested to know that this organization has been trying to insert its link in various articles on plagiarism in Wikipedia, though this “ profitless “ organization has been unsuccessful in convincing prudent and intelligent members of Wikipedia that the web site Essayfraud(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plagiarism) see under the number 19, is designed to fight plagiarism, because there are several grounds to believe that the real purpose of this web site is to fight competitors of Essaytown.com- notorious paper mill which is listed here(www.artsci.wustl.edu/~iteach/chapman_papermills.pdf). Students are encouraged by this University not to seek any assistance from this company and rather turn to their professors and tutors instead.
    While essayfraud( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:SarahTeach&oldid=41165407) does attack some term paper mills, it looks like it is connected with other essay writing companies moreover, it encourages students to use the web sites with so called essayfraud recognition logo, which in my opinion is nothing less than indirect advertisement of essaytown and companies affiliated with it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Ukrainian essay mill owner (a.k.a. "Nancy") who posted this nonsense is determined to undermine EssayFraud.org by putting as much misinformation out there as he possibly can. (This proves that EssayFraud.org is making a serious dent in essay mill sales. These criminals wouldn't invest so much time libeling EssayFraud.org if we weren't hurting their bottom lines!) The whole essaytown thing has gotten really tiring. The Ukrainian essay mill owner uses circumstantial information (such as how we happen to use the same, very popular [PR8] Web host [Bluehost] as essaytown) to convince uniformed people that we own essaytown. That is both ridiculous and insulting. But what do you expect from a determined criminal who also makes the laughable claim that we are Russian? He makes that absurd claim simply because we hired a freelance programmer (prior to launching our site) through scriptlance.com to help us with a minor part of our complicated forum setup. We had absolutely no idea that he was Russian, as programmers don't exactly post their nationality as part of their programming skills! That programmer, without our knowledge, soon listed EssayFraud.org's forum as one of his work experience credits on his personal, Russian language Web site. That is completely out of our control. Of course, the Ukrainian essay mill owner ("Nancy") couldn't wait to twist that information in his favor by claiming that we are Russian.

    Students have grown absolutely indifferent to the standard anti-plagiarism message. We at EssayFraud.org can't be the only people who recognize that fact, can we? Our unique approach entails enabling students to share their horror stories in dealing with fraudulent essay mills. Students may be willing to risk getting caught for cheating, but are they also willing to risk being ripped off and losing hundreds of dollars to some overseas scam outfits? We think not. Young people value their money, especially college students who often do not have much expendable income. We are extremely successful in convincing students to avoid fraudulent sites and to simply write their own papers. That's been our goal from the beginning.

    We would appreciate constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement.

    Thank you,
    Elizabeth
    www.essayfraud.org

    ReplyDelete