Free College Essays: Incredibly Bad Idea

The odd thing about a website is you have to anticipate what questions your readers are using search engines to ask, so right now I’m using Google’s keyword tools to study what students interested in free college are trying to learn more about. I got some good ideas for future projects, but the first and most urgent thing that jumped out was the number of people searching for free college essays.

This is an incredibly bad idea. I can’t stress that enough. There are several reasons why students should not use pre-written essays for admissions, courses, or scholarship applications. I might have though the reasons were obvious but apparently this is a popular topic and I want to remind everyone what is at stake.

• Ethics – Its cheating. Taking credit for someone else’s work is not just unethical but in many cases it is illegal. Even if a service is offering permission for you to use their essays, it is still a violation of the educational contract the student has with the university. If he or she is caught, expulsion is the most likely result. Once cheating is on a student’s academic record, its not very likely that other schools will want to admit them either.
• Education – Learning is what you’re paying big money for at school. Copying an essay might theoretically get you a good grade if you avoid getting caught, but it completely defeats the purpose of that major tuition check paid out on the student’s behalf.
• Easily Detected – Several tools exist on the internet for detecting duplicate content. Usually, web publishers use this to see if someone else is ripping off their work, but teachers and professors can and do often use these sites for studying suspicious essays.
• Poor Quality – Moral, legal, ethical, and education concerns aside, even if you did find a free essay and get away with using it, chances are if it is free it is also poorly written. If a no-cost paper is actually any good, then the chances are that its been used over and over again and your professor might have seen it already.

All I can suggest is that if you got here looking for free college essays, just take the time to write the essay yourself. Writing skills can really only be learned through practice and sharing your work with people who will give you opinions and advice. Ask teachers, parents, a school advisor or counselor for help. If you fail or don’t get accepted to the program your essay applies for, take the experience as a chance to improve in the future – don’t take a risk on ruining that future with a record of fraud.