An essay mill (or paper mill) helps students who seek to buy essays and other written homework and to pass off this ghostwritten work as their own. Educators generally see this as a form of academic dishonesty or academic fraud (see also plagiarism).
The typical customers of such a service are university and college students. Universities and colleges may investigate papers suspected to be from an essay mill by using Internet plagiarism detection software, which compares essays against a database of known essay mill essays and by orally testing students on the contents of their papers. In response, many essay mills state that a unique essay will be composed by a ghost author and pre-screened with plagiarism detection software before delivery, and as such will be undetectable as an essay mill product.
Read more about Essay Mill: Types of Products, Criticism and Controversy, Strategies For Combating Academic Fraud, Legal Status, Subcontracting
Famous quotes containing the words essay and/or mill:
“There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)