The Dangers of Buying Essays Online

With the stresses of modern school or college, it's understandable that there is growing increase in students paying for essays. Why is this wrong, and what are the consequences?

Paying someone to write your essays

You've probably seen the adverts online: "Essays for Sale," "A+ Term Papers," and "Custom essays," they say. It seems all too easy. Get someone is a different country to write an essay, pay them little more than the price of a Pizza, and you can spend the time elsewhere.

These online services normally employ people in countries where the wages are far lower - that's why they seem quite cheap. The people they hire churn out these essays to order. All you do is tell them what you want to write about, pay them, and they will send you your essay. Some have a stock of thousands of essays waiting to go. You just pay, and can download it instantly.

This seems like a really good idea, doesn't it?

Why write an essay?

Teachers and lecturers don't get you to write essays for the fun of it. Being able to write something, form an argument, and meet a deadline, are all critical life skills. These can only be developed by writing an essay, thesis, or report.

It's also a much better way to learn that just reading a book. You may have heard the phrase "if you want to learn something, try teaching it to someone else." Writing an essay means that you have to understand what you are talking about.

By not actually writing the essay, you think you are getting one over on the teacher, but it is actually yourself you are cheating. In the long run, you will suffer.

The Consequences

The consequences of cheating by buying essays are very serious - for both yourself, and society.

Imagine that you were in a car accident. You get rushed to the emergency room, and a surgeon starts putting on his rubber gloves. Sweat begins to trickle down his forehead - the essay he submitted to pass this part of his medical course was one he bought online. He may be officially qualified to operate on you, but he cheated. And now you are going to pay the consequences.

Buying essays - essentially students lying their way through a course - results in people getting jobs that they are unfit to do. People building bridges, without understanding forces properly. Or airline pilots, not knowing how to land. Okay - a bit extreme of an example, but you get the point. Passing an exam, or a term paper, is not the end in itself. All it does is demonstrate that you know something, or how to do something.

Look around the World, and you will see that cheating is rife in most poorer countries. Those same children that pay their way through their essays, grow up to be the officials that accept bribery in senior jobs. Corruption starts in the classroom.

Individually, if you get caught - the price you may pay may be severe. You may get thrown off your course, or have "cheat" permanently follow you wherever you go. Don't believe everything you read about the essays that you buy being "unique." The chances are that the same essay has already been submitted by dozens of other students around the World. Universities, Schools and Colleges are working together to share information. All it takes is for them to scan in your essay, and check it against the database of known copies.

There is also an issue of plagiarism. This is the deliberate copying of someone else's work, then sticking your name on it. In the age of the Internet, it is actually quite easy to catch plagiarists - there are specialist programs that can search the Internet for text in your essay. Even though these companies that sell essays claim to be plagiarism-free, there is no guarantee of this.

So, spending a few dollars online may seem the easy way out of a difficult piece of work. But you wont learn anything from it, and you could find that one little essay results in you getting barred from the college course, or job, that you've been working so hard to get.