Athletes make up almost half of students who purchase essays online from EssayBay.com and most do so with the approval of their coaches, according to a study conducted by the custom essay site.
EssayBay writers prepare academic essays, job applications and resumes for their customers. In its "About Us" section, the Web site says it "connects writers with buyers that need custom essays, term papers, theses and dissertations and allows writers to offer their services directly based on the strength of their reputation and past results."
A Feb. 14 article in the Miami Hurricane reported that a "customer profiling exercise" conducted by the British service revealed that more than 45 percent of EssayBay customers are athletes using the site to ensure their grades are high enough to qualify for sports scholarships and that 70 percent of those students have approval from their coaches. The study also found that over 90 percent of athlete customers are hoping for admission into a top university.
Jed Hallam, a representative for EssayBay, said the site offers more than most in the essay industry.
"Some places do free essays, but they're not customized to the student's requirements," he said. "The market needs to advance far enough to where EssayBay is - where you can list a word count, an academic level. You can have someone from Oxford write your essay."
Hallam described the process of buying and posting as a "reverse auction." Buyers are able to link the topic of the paper and all the qualifications they want for it - length, grade they want to achieve, types of references they want and sources the writer should use - and then writers bid on the paper in terms of how well they think they can meet customers' needs.
The practice of students buying essays on the internet can raise questions about academic honesty, especially with the recent controversy over coaches urging their athletes to use it, Hallam said. But he said he was not surprised that coaches told their athletes to use EssayBay.
"In the U.K., we've seen parents and grandparents buying essays for a couple of years now to make sure their students are achieving what they set out to do," he said. "For coaches to use the essays to ensure their athletes are getting scholarships and into the Ivies are no surprise, but apparently it's become a surprise for America and the American education system."
Several Brown athletes said they understood what could lead students to buy an essay online. But they added that the practice is unethical and counterproductive.
Kent Holland '10, who is on the men's water polo team and also played the sport in high school, said he can understand the pressure that would lead students to buy papers from Web sites, though he said he had not heard of EssayBay specifically.
"Definitely in high school there's a lot of pressure," he said. "You're kind of on a tight schedule - homework, classes, practice, then you come home and you have two hours to do work before you have to get to bed in order to get enough sleep for practice."
But Holland said using this site just hurts students in the long run. Students should not go to a school they would not be able to get into on their own, he said, because they will just struggle academically once they get there.
"If you're at a school, like an Ivy, and you got there because of someone writing a paper for you, then you'll struggle and you won't get anything out of it," he said.
Jose Yearwood '08, who plays football for Brown, said balancing athletics and academics, though challenging, has given him a better perspective on life.
"I do agree that there's pressure to balance the two, but that in itself is the challenge of being (a student athlete) - it's a good kind of pressure," Yearwood said. "Being a student athlete has made me a better person."
Yearwood said there is nothing wrong with using essays from EssayBay as a reference to see what a good essay on that topic could look like. But if students turn in purchased essays and call them their own work, he said, they would be cheating.
"That just seems very disingenuous," he said. "It's basically just having someone do your work for you. That's like if I went to my buddy and said, 'Hey man, do this test for me' or 'Hey, do my econ homework.'"
Despite Yearwood's concerns, Hallam said plagiarism is not an issue for EssayBay because the Web site only serves as a conduit between the writers and buyers.
EssayBay even has a "Plagiarism Scanner" on its Web site where customers can ensure the essay they bought was not plagiarized. The Plagiarism Scanner section of the Web site asks, "Are you worried you may have accidentally plagiarized your essay or dissertation? Perhaps you've bought an essay from a custom essay company and want to check its originality? Do you really know that you're absolutely safe from infringing ever tightening rules on plagiarism?"
"As far as we're concerned, and from a legal point of view, it is up to that writer to decide what they will do," Hallam said. "In terms of ethical code," he added, "that is literally up to the writer and buyer."
