Answered By: David Hughes
Last Updated: Oct 09, 2024     Views: 51

 

An essay mill is a company that you can pay to write your essay or coursework for you. There are many reasons why you shouldn't use an essay mill:

  • It's cheating (the term used for this is called "contract cheating"). You are set coursework in order to assess your understanding of, and evaluate your progress on, the course. Getting someone to write your essay for you defeats the whole point of setting coursework in the first place
  • It undermines trust between learners and teachers. If you're caught contract cheating, then obviously your previous and future work will be suspected
  • It undermines the reputation of academic institutions. How would you feel about the quality of a qualification from an academic institution where contract cheating is rife? 
  • Many essay mills rely on exploiting poorly-paid students from developing countries who are paid per essay and therefore have no motivation to put in the time and effort to produce a good quality piece of work
  • Essay mills do not use subject experts. Your essay on early learning and care might be written by a business student - or vice versa.
  • Following on from the above, there's no guarantee of getting a good mark. The writers don't care about you or your essay
  • There's also no guarantee that the writer won't plagiarise the work they produce for you
  • There are ways of detecting contracting cheating in essay submissions, so you may well be caught
  • Essay mills only care about is getting money out of you. Some require payment in full before the essay is written…if it gets written. It's easy for scammers to set up an essay mill site, demand payment upfront, and then close the site after making some money. So you've wasted your money and still have a coursework deadline to meet...
  • There's always the threat of blackmail. You will have to provide some details: an email address, bank account name or IP address, so you won't be anonymous. There's nothing stopping an essay mill requesting more money from you to ensure they tell no one about your contract cheating.
  • As well as being unethical, essay mills are illegal. The Qualifications and Quality Assurance (Education and Training) (Amendment) Act 2019 makes it an "offence to provide or advertise cheating services"  -  and there is similar legislation in New Zealand England and Australia, while in some US states, it is against the law to use an essay mill. 

 

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