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My roommate burst through the front
door of the apartment we were sharing for college and virtually
yelled, “DUDE!” I was staring at my computer screen drifting off
into space. I looked up at him and raised my eyebrow. He had a
massive smile on his face and looked like he was about to pop.
“You're not going to believe this...” He pulled out a college
paper from his backpack and threw it to me.
I looked down. I was confused until I
saw the mark on the top. He was handing me an essay that I wrote for
him. He paid me $20 to write up this two page paper for him. I was
slightly desperate for money at the time, so I accepted the offer.
Now I was looking down at the paper I wrote for him that was now
fully graded. It was a perfect 100.
I wasn't used to getting 100's for
myself. I was more of a low A student. That ended up leaving me
pretty excited about writing essays for other people. That's when I
got started in the business of writing college essays for cash.
That's also where I started to learn my first lesson.
Teacher Expectations Matter
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Teachers change their expectations based on the student. When a C student hands in the same paper as an A student, the C student will typically get a much higher grade for it. In my experience, the difference can be staggering.
One of the things that I always kept
track of was the student I was writing an essay for. I would write
all of my essays to be 100% original. That means, I could adjust
whatever writing I do to match certain ideas for the student. For
example, if I was writing a personal essay for a football player. I
would likely include a football reference. (It looks more natural
that way.)
Another thing that I would always keep
track of is the student I'm writing for's average grade. After that
first essay, I realized how lucky we were the teacher didn't notice
the higher than usual quality essay. From that day forward, I asked
people what their average grade was and I tried to not beat it by
much more than 10 points. So, I would add spelling and grammar errors
to a C student's paper. At one point, I even asked for a sample piece
of writing. At that point, I copied mistakes the student previously
made. (I wanted to make sure they couldn't get caught for anything. I
was pretty good at it.)
A funny thing happened though. I would
be adding spelling and grammar mistakes to the C student's papers but
I would still be getting a much higher grade than expected. While a
teacher would latch onto the A students mistakes, the teacher would
regularly overlook the C student's mistakes. Managing that strange
difference was one of the hardest things I had to do.
Teachers don't judge every student on
the same scale. An A student will have to provide a much higher level
paper to get the same grade as a C student. Throughout my writing
essays career, I found only one teacher that was a possible exception
to the rule.
This can be awfully depressing for a
student looking to get their grade from A to A+ material. There isn't
all that much you can do to change it either. Managing your
expectations is all you can really do to guarantee you're satisfied.
The teachers weren't the only ones that
made it a challenge though.
How To Be “Smart”
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One of the most obvious observations in
my time writing essays was the typical essay buying student. First of
all, virtually no traditionally “good” students bought essays. By
good students, I'm referring to the kind that doesn't skip class. If
a student makes the time to get to class, they seem to be dedicated
enough to write their own essays. That, however, did not make much of
a difference in the grade averages I saw. Some students coming for
essays were getting A averages despite traditionally lazy approaches.
The difference between these A students
and the failing students was usually pretty obvious by after one
question, “When do you need the essay?”
The failing students would virtually
always need the paper completed by the next day. The lower the grade
average, the more likely a student is to come buying an essay at the
last second. The A averaging student's would often give me 1 or 2
weeks notice in advance. In reality, I wrote them in a single night
anyway but it was odd to watch how their priorities affected their
grades.
Take note of that major difference in
strategies and results. The higher scoring students appeared to be
just about as lazy as the low scoring students. The major difference
was how well they planned their laziness.
You Sell The Sizzle
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After writing a few hundred papers, I
started to see when the teachers loved an essay, and when they
didn't. The results were pretty obvious but it took me a while to
completely understand them. Great essays are not necessarily normal.
The majority of my best grades came from the times I took a leap of
faith and did something horribly unusual with an essay.
For example, one time, I was supposed
to interpret a poem for a student's class. I was given a list of
poems that I could choose from. I, naturally, decided to take the
poem that was only 4 lines long. With that poem I ended up writing 4
pages of interpretation. (Not only that, but I did it well.)
Writing essays for teacher's is
basically just marketing to the teacher. If you don't differentiate
your essay from the piles of other essays on their desk, you're not
going to be able to get a top notch grade. Boring doesn't sell. In
fact, the only reason the teacher even reads boring is because they
have to.
Don't go into writing an essay without
making something notable happen. You can read more about this in my
article about how to write a good essay.
Writing a great paper is not about
following the prompt more strictly. It's about taking an idea and
running with it.
My college essay writing career only
lasted a couple of years. Eventually, I realized that the money
wasn't quite worth the hassle. I had plenty of other opportunities I
had to pass up on if I wanted to keep paying my way through college
with essay writing.
The most common questions people ask
when I talk about these days come down to ethics. Was writing those
papers for those students ethical? Ultimately, I don't know. Fooling
the college never really bothered me. The only part that really got
to me was having to regularly deal with the same desperate students
never learning their lesson. It seems like some of the same students
would “want” to do their paper but end up desperate and needy the
night before it was due. They would have the time to complete the
work but they'd be scared of their own score.
Don't be one of those students.
It doesn't matter how poorly (or great)
you've done in the past. You need to be willing to take the risks to
learn. The school will punish you with red marks and a low grade but
forget about that. Grades only matter to the school. What matters is
how you take those red marks. Some students get upset and lose hope.
Others ignore them and pretend they never happened. The students that
do well in life, not just school, are the ones that take those red
marks and do everything they can to never let them happen again.
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