If you spend enough time around college students, you’ll eventually hear them complain about many of the same things: Professors assign too many essays and other academic papers. Essays are too hard. Essays are boring. However, essays are as inevitable for college students as the proverbial death and taxes, which has led students to seek out creative ways to avoid writing them.
For example, many students have tried:
- Using deceptive fonts customized to add extra space between letters or around the margins to make papers seem longer.
- Submitting intentionally corrupt files or using an unreadable file format to gain extra time to write while an instructor tries to contact them about the problem.
- Faking an injury, illness, or family member’s death to extend the deadline, which instructors call “dead grandmother syndrome.” Professors joke that a grandchild’s essay deadline is the leading predictor of death for grandparents.
- Using an A.I. chatbot to generate a generic instant paper, even though many schools now offer A.I. writing detection tools to uncover the deception.
By far, however, the most popular way desperate students try to avoid writing essays is to pay to have someone write your paper. This, of course, raises an important ethical issue. Is it morally acceptable to pay someone to write a paper for you? In this article, we’ll examine the costs and benefits of paying for papers online and the ethics of doing so.
Why Do Students Pay for Papers Online?
The first question to ask is why students pay for papers to be written at all?
While every student’s situation is unique, three reasons are often given:
- Students may lack confidence in their writing skills.
- Students do not have time to write.
- Extenuating circumstances and personal challenges prevent them from finishing their work.
Often, students turn to essay writing services as a way to manage problems and challenges affecting them from outside the classroom, not because they don’t care about their work. Nevertheless, changes in college courses have made the essay problem worse.
In the twenty-first century, colleges and universities have changed in two important ways that have resulted in more essays for students to write. The first change was a growing emphasis on disability accommodations. Instructors are now encouraged to create inclusive assignments rather than offer alternatives when a student can’t participate.
The unintentional result was to incentivize essays as the default because they are considered inclusive and therefore do not require instructors to exercise extra creativity or to create alternative assignments in most cases. The second change revolves around the bureaucratizing of grading and the use of rubrics to provide a rational basis for grades and cut down on grade disputes.
This, again, incentivizes instructors to assign more essays to avoid having to create (and sometimes seek approval for) customized grading rubrics for more creative assignments.
Is It Legal to Pay Someone to Write Your Papers?
In order to think about the ethics of buying papers online, we must first answer the question of whether it’s legal. Obviously, students are always concerned about whether paying experts from an online essay service for help will get them in trouble with the law.
You don’t need to worry. It’s completely legal to pay someone to write a paper for you. Paying for writing falls under the rubric of free speech and is protected by the First Amendment. That means that there are no legal impediments to paying a writer to create a paper on any topic, including the specific assignment your instructor gave you.
This is also the reason that professional paper writing services are able to offer papers for sale online. When you buy a paper from them, you are in fact exercising your free speech writers, and so are the writers who will work with you to create powerfully customized model essays for your benefit.
Is It Ethical to Buy Papers Online?
While the legal question has a clear answer, the ethical one is murkier. If you ask instructors whether it’s ethical to buy a paper, they will say no. They understandably don’t want you to buy a paper and turn it in as your own work.
That’s an obvious violation of academic honesty policies. But there are less black-and-white situations where buying a paper can be a useful guide to help you with your work or aid you in structuring, organizing, and researching your papers.
In these cases, one could argue that it is ethical to buy a paper, at least as much as it is ethical to seek help from a writing coach, tutor, or T.A. to help you understand and develop an assignment.
In evaluating the ethics of paying someone to write your papers, you must consider three things: First, is your intent to deceive your instructor with the paper you bought? If yes, it’s not an ethical purchase. If not, then you may be using it ethically.
Second, you need to ask if you are borrowing directly from the paper by copying its language, structure, ideas, or research. The less you borrow from the paper you purchased, the more ethical your use of it will be. Finally, you need to ask if you are acknowledging your use of the paper properly.
Most essay writing services provide instructions to show you the right way to cite and document your use of the paper, as you would any other research.
By following these simple rules, you are more likely to use a purchased paper ethically.
