That's an interesting ad. I mean, I'm usually amused by what Google ads puts up, but this one is rather iffy.
It's a big huge banner that seems to come up every other time I'm on this site, advertising exampleessays.com, which seems to be a site that has, well, essays. Although they say that they're just "examples", how many kids do you think are going to plagarize essays from that site? And do you really think they didn't intend that, or at least consider the possibility?
I'm just an old grump, aren't I?
Posted by quidscribis (Member # 5124) on :
Nope, you're a young grump. I, on the other hand, am an old grump.
And I think they know exactly what's going on. Exactly.
Posted by John Van Pelt (Member # 5767) on :
I get most of my evolution posts for Hatrack from there. For example.
Posted by ketchupqueen (Member # 6877) on :
What's (still) annoying me is that it's every other page. At least. And it's big. And green. And FLASHING.
They must have paid for the "blanket Hatrack with evilness" service.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
Most teachers or professors will know if it's one of their essays. I know that if I'd tried to use that site while I was in school, I'd have been in serious trouble with pretty much any teacher I had in High School or college.
Posted by ketchupqueen (Member # 6877) on :
*nods* I had an English teacher who made it known that she subscribed to at least three of them at all times so she could check essays that looked suspicious or improperly documented (in the case of research papers.)
It was sad that she had to do so, though.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
Then you have this quote from their acceptable use policy:
quote: You acknowledge that any Essays you view from the Site are being delivered to you AS IS, with no warranties. The Company makes no representation or warranty to you regarding the accuracy of any information contained in any Essay, the completeness of any essays, or the copyrights in any Essay.
They also state on the site that there is no guarantee of the quality of papers. It would be a bad idea to use one of their papers as your own because it could be completely inaccurate.
Not that the whole inaccurate/plagerism thing would stop some people.
Posted by MyrddinFyre (Member # 2576) on :
Most teachers I've had through high school and all of them in college claimed to plug paragraphs of papers into search engines for just this reason. They've also said that they have found many a plagarizer this way.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
I knew of a college professor who used to assign a paper on midwest towns with a population of 5000 or less. Then he created a website about an imaginary town. He always had two or three people who would write their paper on his imaginary town.
Of course, with that he was trying to prove that the internet is not a reliable source for research papers. Which it really isn't, but is kind of off topic from the original point of this thread.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
There is actually "anti-plagiarism" software that some colleges use that scans internet essay sites to check out suspicious papers. I would think that using an essay from any of these sites is extremely stupid - if it's possible for you to find the information online it's possible for a teacher to find it as well.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Certainly your teacher can find out about plagiarism; but it requires 1337 g00gle skillz. Any of us here would find out such a scam in about 30 seconds; but I do not think we are representative.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
I don't know about that, King of Men. Most of my daughter's middle school teachers have websites and communicate with parents through email, her teachers are pretty web savvy, looks to me.
Posted by MyrddinFyre (Member # 2576) on :
quote: I knew of a college professor who used to assign a paper on midwest towns with a population of 5000 or less. Then he created a website about an imaginary town. He always had two or three people who would write their paper on his imaginary town.
That's awesome.
Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
I see this sort of thing as the Darwin Award of academia... even if you luck out and don't get caught, you still haven't learned whatever it was you were supposed to learn from writing the essay yourself.
As much as I hated them at the time, I owe a great deal of my current and future success in life to the writing skills I learned from all those stupid essays. Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
Ok. My page just displayed mythesiswriter.com who will actually WRITE your thesis or dissertation FOR YOU. Admittedly you have to do the research but WHAT?! At least the other page was just papers that have already been written that they claim aren't supposed to be used for anything but examples. These people aren't even trying to hide what they are!!!!!
Posted by Little_Doctor (Member # 6635) on :
The teachers in my school use TurnItIn.com. Basically, they upload all of our essays onto this web site, and the site searches pretty much the entire internet for any plagiarized work. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but they've caught a lot of people.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
Yeah, but the thesis writer website states that they have people who actually write the paper for you. If they really are writing unique papers for people then that website won't work. It won't be something that's been plagiarized.
Posted by Palliard (Member # 8109) on :
The thing that bothers me about these sites is that, based on a turn of phrase, you can get fingered as a plagiarist when all you did was re-invent somebody else's paragraph. I realize that many students use essay-mills rather than the time-tested method of staying up until 3AM the night before the paper was due (ah, college days...) but I'd be concerned about false positives in an internet-based.. well, anything.
And the fact that the essay mills even exists point up the extent to which we have commoditized higher education. It's not a point of pride to have earned a degree, it is simply something that you must have that you pay for, like a car.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Palliard: while there are occasionally cases of overzealous pursuit, I've never heard of one where a search on a plagiarism site was the sticking point. Whenever you get a match on such a site it gives you at very least significant context to see if there's an extensive match or if its coincidence. Also, such sites are only aids to instructors' judgements, not replacements, and I think any instructor unable to realize that a certain sentence was just coincidentally the same when there aren't other similarities has far worse problems.
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