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Discourage Students from Buying Essays

Prevent Custom Written Essays in Classroom

Jan 27, 2009 Daria Przybyla

How can teachers prevent students from submitting custom written essays? While there is no simple answer to this question there are some ways to reduce this tendency.

Nowadays, dishonest students don’t even have to rephrase already published contents but simply hire a freelancer who will produce an original paper for them or place an order with any essay company. Luckily, there are measures which can be taken with respect to prevention and identification of custom essays submitted as term papers.

How to Fight Plagiarism in Classroom

Students should be provided with extensive academic writing training: good knowledge of the rules of academic writing as well as exceptions from those rules will surely discourage students from commissioning professional writers for doing their homework and encourage their own academic initiative. Students must be aware of copyright issues, possible plagiarism avoidance strategies and understand the consequences of committing it.

Other than that, any writing assignment may contain instructions that will make it difficult to have someone else write the essay such as: including classroom content and discussion references as well as obligatory inclusion of sources distributed during class by teachers themselves.

Identifying Custom Essays in Classroom

The final version of any custom written essay will, usually, bear visible traces of a style of writing and presentation of arguments diverse from the ones taught and observed in class. This is connected with the actual regime under which freelance academic writers work. Whether an essay was purchased individually or through an essay company it might contain similar features indicating its origin which is connected with the actual regime under which freelance writers work.

Academic level of submitted essay might be either higher or lower than required. Writers, quite often, don’t receive very specific instructions as to the research techniques and sources that should be used in writing. Paper format might also be unusual – especially when students don’t bother to edit it. Finally, essay might be slightly off-topic – this is what happens due to flawed communication between students and writers. Despite the most accurate guidelines, writer doesn’t have any precise information about approach or linguistic style that should be followed in the course of writing.

Proving Custom Essays in Classroom

Once teacher has serious grounds to suspect that student who submits an essay didn’t actually write it, he or she can try to investigate the origins of a given paper.

  • Summary of the Essay - student might be asked to summarize the main points of the essay. He or she should be able to explain why particular approach was employed with respect to subsequent arguments; why other sources, given by the teacher as examples, were not found useful for the project and at which stage of researching and writing the assignment appeared problematic.
  • Oral Presentation of Sources – student might also be asked to present one of the sources referenced by the end of the paper. He or she should be able to identify the author of a given source and have an idea what the book or article is about. Student can be asked to explain why specific fragments were used in the essay and where he or she got physical access to the book.
  • Paraphrase of a Fragment – student can also paraphrase chosen sample of the essay to manifest equal as well as similar writing skills, knowledge of vocabulary and writing style. Apart from linguistic focus, this test can show if student understands the paper and can explain it in other words.

This absolutely blatant form of plagiarism is currently on the rise and the web is full of essay companies as well as academic writers offering their services. In spite of that, many purchased essays can be relatively easily identified as custom-written and the plagiarists themselves exposed. Teachers should, nonetheless, work out their own strategies of dealing with this problem.

The copyright of the article Discourage Students from Buying Essays in Academic Writing is owned by Daria Przybyla. Permission to republish Discourage Students from Buying Essays in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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