Don’t Buy Content Online: Reasons 1-3

It’s the end of term. You have three papers due that make up a huge percentage of your grades for the semester. It’s almost midnight, and you have to have everything turned in first thing in the morning.

You’re getting tired, you’re getting desperate, and you’re ready to do whatever it takes to just be done.

So you pull up Google, intending to get a little more research done, and you notice a paid ad: Papers for Sale! Guaranteed A+! Written by top scholars!

After a minute of internal struggle (worrying about plagiarism), you click, search for your paper topics, and fill out your credit card information.

You totally just escaped academic destruction. Right?

Wrong.

Buying online content is not only unethical, it’s a terrible idea. You’re likely to get a badly written, unedited, factually incorrect piece of junk that’s barely better than if you just typed “I don’t know what to type for this paper” 500 times to fill the pages.

Let’s take a look at why buying online content is such a bad idea.

You’re Going to Get Caught

If you’re buying online content because you’re worried about your grade and think you won’t be able to pass the class without turning something in, then the most important reason not to buy a paper online is because you’re almost guaranteed to get caught.

Professors aren’t dumb. They know that students are often busy, overworked, exhausted, or just plain lazy and that all these things can tempt them to buy a paper online.

So professors have ways to catch cheaters in the act. Frequently, either individual professors or the whole university will have a subscription to a plagiarism-checking service where they can upload every paper submitted and check it against a massive database of other papers (and online sources). Even small duplications of just a few sentences copied word-for-word will raise a red flag.

It just takes one red flag, and you’re going to be failing that assignment, and possibly getting brought up on ethics charges in front of the school’s administration, as legitimate schools forbid plagiarism and buying papers.

Remember, whatever paper you bought, someone else has probably bought, too. That means it’s probably in a plagiarism-checking system somewhere.

Now whatever money you spent on that paper is lost, you’ve flunked the class because the paper was rejected, and you might even get kicked out of school. Was it really worth the time saved?

You Won’t Get a Good (or Even Passing) Grade

Many, if not most papers available from online services are not well written or properly researched. They’re often cranked out by underpaid workers in India or China, for whom English is probably not their first language. The writers might be smart, but they’re writing tons of papers on a huge range of topics, and even if they have great English skills, they’re likely to cut corners just to get a few more papers done.

So purchased papers aren’t cohesive, don’t make solid arguments, and don’t include in-depth research and proper citations. Heck, if you’re choosing from a menu of topics like “papers on Hemingway,” they may not even match up with your professor’s specific expectations, reducing your chances of getting a good grade.

Oh, and if you’re thinking about buying a custom-written paper instead of one “off the shelf” to make sure that it meets all your professor’s requirements? Do you really think that someone is carefully researching and writing a paper exclusively for you in just a day or two for just $100?

Probably not. It’s just a fancied-up version of a prewritten paper, maybe with a few custom additions and an extra reference or two. It’s still likely to be painfully obvious that the paper was churned out at the last minute and that it doesn’t meet the assignment criteria.

3. It’s Expensive

If the chance of failing your class or getting booted out of school hasn’t convinced you not to buy a paper online, how about this? It’s expensive.

Most students are on a pretty tight budget. Is it really worth paying $100 or more per paper just to get out of a few hours of work? Think about how much time you’ll have to put in at your part-time work-study job or waiting tables to make those few hundred dollars back.

Are you really willing to serve coffee to grumpy customers for hours on end just to save yourself a little work, especially when you run the risk of getting caught and losing both the money and the grade as a result?

Kate S.

Don’t Buy Content Online: Reasons 4-6

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