Two weeks later, what we received would best be described as gibberish. A few of the papers attempted to mimic APA style, but none achieved it without glaring errors. The citations were sloppy and the reference lists abominable—including outdated and unknown sources, many of which were online news stories, editorial posts, or blogs, and some that were simply broken links. In terms of the quality of the writing itself, the authors of all of the papers seemed to have a tenuous grasp of the English language and the structure of a basic essay. Paragraphs jumped clumsily from one topic to another and often collapsed into list form, counting off various forms of cheating or providing a long stream of examples that were never explained or connected to the thesis of the paper. Of the many literary affronts, we found the following gems:
At that point we were rather relieved, figuring that the day had not yet arrived when students can submit papers from essay mills and get good grades. Moreover, we concluded that if students did try to buy a paper from an essay mill, just like us, they would feel they had wasted their money and wouldn’t try it again.
