Talk to a college student long enough and eventually, you’ll hear the same complaints: College courses require too many essays. Essays are too hard. Essays take too long. Essays are boring. Nevertheless, essays are an inescapable facet of academic life, and students develop increasingly creative ways to try to get out of writing them. Consider just some of the ways students try to avoid writing a full essay:
        • They will use deceptive fonts or increase the spaces between letters or around the margins to make a paper look longer.
        • They will submit intentionally corrupt files or files in an unreadable format to try to gain extra time to work on a paper.
        • They will fake illness or the death of a family member to extend the deadline, something instructors jokingly refer to as “dead grandmother syndrome.” A joke paper published decades ago tongue-in-cheek reported that an essay deadline was the leading cause of mortality for grandparents, sometimes leading a student to lose up to half a dozen grandparents apiece over the course of their college careers.

And, of course, the most popular way students try to avoid essays is by purchasing cheap papers from online essay writing services. This raises an interesting question: Is it ethical to buy an essay online? In this article, we’ll look into what happens when you buy essays online and whether it’s ethical to do so.

Why Students Buy Essays from Online Services

So why do students buy essays online instead of writing their own? There are many reasons, but three of the most common are:
• a lack of confidence in their own writing skills;
• a lack of time to complete the work;
• personal obligations, challenges, and crises that prevent them from engaging in  
   learning activities.

More often than not, students are buying essays as a way to compensate for problems and challenges in their own life, not because they are lazy. This problem, however, has been exacerbated by changes in how colleges assign work.

Colleges and universities have made two changes in recent decades that have increased the number of essays students are writing. The first involves disability accommodations. Because assignments must now be inclusive for all students, college essays have become the default assignment type so instructors can avoid the extra work of creating alternative assignments for students who are unable to participate in more creative projects. Essays are generally recognized as accessible and do not require alternatives in most cases. The second change is the rise of rubric grading. To prevent grade disputes from escalating, assignments are now graded on strict criteria, and once again, essays became the default assignment because they require minimal additional work to create new grading rubrics and their rubrics can be standardized across a college to ensure fairness—and minimal disputes.

The Legality Question

Before we can examine the ethics of buying essays online, it’s best to first ask whether it’s legal to do so. Many students are concerned about whether hiring a writer to produce an essay for them is safe and legit. The good news is that it is completely legal to hire someone to write an essay for you. Under the First Amendment, writing a paper falls under free speech and as such is not regulated by the government or subject to legal restrictions. It is completely legal to hire someone to write a paper and for that person to write on any topic, including the assignment you were given in your college course.

This is the legal basis for professional writing services offered by companies like WriteMyPaperHub, from which each and every student can easily and quickly buy essay online written by academic experts in accordance with paper specifications. When you place an order with a company like this, you are exercising your free speech rights, and so are the writers who work with students to develop custom essays that show how a professional would answer your essay question. Actually addressing such academic services is a rather affordable solution available 24/7 online.

The Ethical Issue in Buying Essays

The harder question to answer is whether buying a paper is ethical. If you ask most instructors, the answer will clearly be no. They do not want students buying a paper and turning it in as their own work. That is a clear violation of academic honesty policies. But what about less clear-cut situations, where students use papers as a guide to help them with their work or to aid them in structuring, organizing, and developing their papers, or for finding research. In these cases, it can indeed be ethical to buy a paper, just as it is ethical to seek help from a tutor, writing coach, or T.A to help you understand an assignment and do your best on it.

The key issues revolve around intention, borrowing, and acknowledgment. First: Are you intending to copy or deceive with the paper that you purchased? If yes, you are in ethical hot water. If not, then you are on the path to using a paper appropriately. Second, are you borrowing directly from the paper that you purchased, by copying language, structure, ideas, or information? The less you borrow directly from the paper, the more solid the ethical footing that you are on. Finally, are you acknowledging your source? Most legit essay companies will provide instructions to show you how to document your use of a paper and cite it on your own as you would any other source.

If you follow the rules and use a model paper judiciously as a way to help you develop your own work, then you are more likely to stay on the right side of the ethical line.