The essay writing industry has been around for several decades now. The rise of the internet was a huge turning point for cheap essay writers because it allowed them to reach a broader audience. As a result, many websites went live in a short period and started competing over market share. But not all companies should be trusted. In the pursuit of quantity, some firms lose the quality of services they provide. And only responsible companies that write essay for money are worthy of students’ attention.
However, developments in recent years have made it harder for inferior firms to survive – which is beneficial for the industry as a whole. Here are five facts that you might have not known about the essay service industry.
Dan Ariely and His Experiment
Dan Ariely is a well-known author and professor who teaches psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He has always been critical of essay mills and essay writing services which churn out poorly written essays without any regard for originality or quality.
In 2012, Ariely decided to conduct an experiment to determine how good these essay mills are. Thus, he created a task similar to what he would assign to his students and ordered a fast essay writing service from four websites.
As expected, the results were less than promising. All four orders were written very poorly and included plagiarized text. In fact, two of the papers had over 30 percent of plagiarism. He concluded that essay mills are not going to write essays that get top grades.
However, this is only true for a cheap writing service. If you work with a legitimate service provider, there is a higher chance that you’ll get a high-quality essay.
The Guardian Wrote a Story About the Industry
In 2014, The Guardian reported on a survey conducted by The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual). Their results were similar to those of Ariely. In their study, the regulatory body commissioned six term papers from various companies, but only one of them received a passing mark.
Plagiarism Software Continued to Improve
Plagiarism software refers to any computer application that compares the similarity of a text to an extensive database of previously published works.
Until 2016, most commercial software for plagiarism used statistical methods to measure similarity. Although these methods are reliable, their error rate is considerable.
However, that year, there was a breakthrough with artificial intelligence technology. Companies began to move their products to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This relatively old concept was impossible to implement until then due to its large computational requirements. CNNs are much more accurate and can detect plagiarism at the sentence level, even if a few words are replaced.
This new development forced many low-quality writing essay services out of business because they were simply unable to produce original content at unusually low rates. However, it turned out to be advantageous to honest companies with some reliable writing essays service since they could now demonstrate their work quality more efficiently.
Market Became More Competitive
According to an industry report, the essay writing service market has become more and more competitive over the last few years. Companies are now fighting with each other to gain market share and obtain better organic search result rankings.
There is also a trend to reduce costs and increase speed, which has made fast essay writing services rely more on automated processes and intelligent software solutions.
Despite these changes, experience shows that companies with the best writers and the most experienced teams are going to win more customers.
The Coronavirus Pandemic Hit Hard
In late 2019, a new virus started spreading from China and soon covered the entire globe. The breakout caused widespread fear, and many countries shut down nearly all their organizations, including schools and universities. The entire education system had to go online overnight, and a lot of people weren’t prepared for that.
The new situation forced many universities to change their exam policies and give more weight to coursework, which meant more essays and more pressure on the students. This resulted in more write my essay online requests, and many academic writing services were overwhelmed by the surge in demand.
The situation continues to unfold, but universities are unlikely to open for the next semester in many countries. Thus, companies can expect a higher level of demand compared to last year.
Bottom Line
The essay service industry has undergone many changes over the last 30 years. Recently, companies with low-quality services and deceptive practices–known as content mills–have been heavily criticized in both the media and academia. However, with developments in artificial intelligence, plagiarism has become easier to detect, and it is now harder for shoddy service providers to cheat students.