If you have £21,250 (about $41,000) but only 15 days until your PhD dissertation is due, Oxbridge Essays LLC will custom-write Your Exact Question for you—with an upper 1st class degree GUARANTEED. Just need something smaller, like a literature review? Yeah, they do those too.
For students interested in using this service, it is up to you to “thoroughly examine...the particular rules, regulations and provisions” to check whether your school allows you to use services like Oxbridge Essays.
The site offers their services to students all over the world, but since it is UK based, I took the liberty of contacting each of the Top 10 Universities in the UK to see whether they permit the "employment of services" such as those offered by Oxbridge Essays LLP.
Not one of them allows it. Each of the replies sounded similar to Helen Thornbury’s, a Graduate Studies Officer at Trinity College Dublin, who said “these type of services would contravene regulations.”
The Oxbridge Essays site says that “We seek to make our business practices as transparent as possible.” I just received an e-mail from Oxbridge Essays asking me to participate in writing essays for their clients (it's great money!), and after perusing the site it seems pretty transparent that the idea is for clients to use this work as their own.
By the way, I wish I could tell you what it said in the aforementioned e-mail or give you a taste of the wording on the attachments...it's so juicy! But apparently “Any review, distribution or copying of this email or any attachment is prohibited” (Oh shoot…does that part count?). Yeah...transparent.
That’s what really annoys me about legal jargon: if they say that they “explicitly and unambiguously condemn plagiarism in all its forms,” it absolves them of all blame for the exact thing they are promoting.
In the fine print, Oxbridge Essays makes sure to tell you (wink) that any writing services sold to the client are “intended solely for the purpose of inspiring that client’s own work through giving an example of model research, writing, expression and structuring of ideas.”
If you do, however, happen to use the work as your own, the service is “Fully confidential” and the essays are “Never Resold, Republished or Stored on Any Database. All written work is brand new and custom-made only for you.”
Ironically, they have several inspirational quotes from prominent authors and academics on their site like this one from the American Civil Rights leader Booker T. Washington: “Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.” Cheating? Yeah, hopefully pretty uncommon for most University students, and certainly not what Washington meant when he said this.
If your conscience is getting the better of you, and you're wondering whether it would compromise your academic integrity to use such a service, you're on your own: “Oxbridge Essays LLP offers the client no advice whatsoever on this question, and leaves the decision solely to the judgement of the client.”
If you're bored, I think it's fun to play around with their pricing guide to find out just how much it would cost you to get that Veterinary School Personal Statement you've always wanted. I recommend the Platinum Custom writing service...slightly more expensive, but personal statements are all about the details.
So…if this site can give you a completely unique, guaranteed 1st class PhD dissertation, custom-written to your exact question in only 15 days, what are all you other lazy PhD candidates doing with the rest of your three years, 350 days? Get writing!
Comments
They may think they know things - otherwise it was dumb to get the degree - but in a realistic sense you have to work on esoteric problems in school and I have solved a lot of real ones. And I don't have 3-4 years of time to kill or the patience not to kill an advisor.
This will not be a popular comment in a site full of PhDs, many of whom are likely advisors. Luckily I have admin ability and can delete it. :)
Hank Campbell | 08/07/08 | 21:36 PM
Actually, this raises a very good point - what is PhD for? In our center, we have technicians who have been in the lab since before I was born. What has my PhD given me that they don't already have from years of experience?
I understand it this way: a PhD is NOT about learning one subject really well (you can do that with lots of reading and lots of experience), it is not about knowing how to work in the lab (again, experienced technicians can do that).
A PhD is about becoming an independent scholar: someone who can head up an independent lab, decide independently which research questions have scientific merit, and lead a scientific field or program intellectually.
That's not to say that there are no people out there without PhDs who can do these things as well - I'm sure there are, but these are skills that don't just come from working in lab for a long time.
Becoming an intellectually independent scientist/scholar is what a PhD program is about. Unfortunately, that's not always the result, and in the life sciences anyway, there are not many good masters programs that provide an alternative for people who don't want to go the PhD route. As a result, many people go for the PhD, which is really an expensive and unnecessary qualification for many scientific jobs.
Mike
Michael White | 08/07/08 | 21:59 PM
You’re right that there are committee members will have followed your graduate career in detail and know your work and writing style well (same in the US as in the UK). So to suddenly turn in a mail-order thesis wouldn’t be an easy thing to get away with. My feeling at Oxford was that this service was used more for things like 5,000 word essays and literature reviews.
Nevertheless, the thesis service is still available, and the site purports to even tackle questions whose answer was unknown until then: they have a site here called Oxbridge Primary Research that I didn’t feature in the original article where they will do ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH for you!
Take a look at this too while you’re at it:
Here’s a very interesting link to an article in the Wall Street Journal by John Hechinger, describing the measures that business schools in the US are taking to catch cheats.
Hechinger cites a case a few years ago of “six fraudsters who took more than 590 exams, including GMATs, for customers who paid at least $3,000.”
They are using “palm scans” that take an infrared picture of the unique patterns of veins in the candidates’ hands, because it looks like there may be a lot of cheating going on especially in business school.
Matthew
Matthew Brown | 08/08/08 | 14:12 PM
But they offer to do research for you? That's insane! The dissertation offer sure takes the cake, but I'm sure you're right that the most common use of this service is for shorter essays.
This seems to be a thriving industry. When I was at the U. of Toronto a couple of weeks ago, I saw the bulletin boards plastered with ads for essay-writing services. And as you point out, US business schools are having problems.
I suppose universities have to raise the stakes - automatic expulsion on the first proven offense, no exceptions.
Mike
Michael White | 08/08/08 | 15:10 PM
ben riose (not verified) | 08/10/08 | 00:08 AM
$41,000 sounds like a lot of money for a dissertation, but then I have never has to write one.
Hopefully these services are targeting students that are trying to beat the system by getting degrees from diploma mills or marginally accredited on-line schools. I would hate to think that students at prestigious institutions would use a service like this.
I went to the U. of Cincinnati (in the days before computers or even calculators). As an undergraduate we found a locker full of essays on multiple subjects. There were at least several hundred that were dated over the previous five years (this was in the 1960's).
You can't imagine our excitement when we found these papers, each of us had visions of never having to write a paper again. Fortunately we all knew this was wrong and if my memory is correct we tossed all the papers in the garbage. I really don't think amy of my friends went back to retrieve these papers, and if they did they certainly didn't share.
Jim Myres | 08/10/08 | 11:02 AM
I went to the U. of Cincinnati (in the days before computers or even calculators).
I have heard of this legendary time! Perchance, did your graduation gown look something like this??? :)
Hank Campbell | 08/10/08 | 11:23 AM
I love the picture - Sorry I still don't wear a tie, and this is Ohio (we wear shoes, that picture must be from UK).
We had a student at work today, and we were talking about this very thing - pre computer & calculator education. I am going to take my Log-Log Duplex Desi Trig Slide Rule to work tomorrow to educate the thugs.
Jim Myres
p.s. I have an abacus someplace in this office too.
Jim Myres | 08/12/08 | 20:07 PM
And hopefully, you've already published at least one or two scientific papers, which will end up as a major part of your dissertation - you've already written them, so why pay someone to rewrite them?
So what is this service offering? Is it something UK students are expected to turn in before they start doing their long-term research? For your final dissertation, you are supposed to have worked on a question whose answer was unknown until you tackled it, not something Oxbridge Essays could look up somewhere else.
Mike