by Jayden Harlow

Created on: November 06, 2008

Yes, I absolutely believe that using an academic ghost writer - or, more accurately, a professional essay writer - is dishonest. Assignments test more than knowledge; they test a student's ability to communicate that knowledge effectively, and one significant component of communication is the ability to write. If a student must work in tandem with a ghost writer, then that student is essentially admitting that he or she lacks the ability to communicate knowledge in written form.

I should say at this point that I feel particularly qualified to address this question because I am a freelance writer, and I have ghost-written material for a number of professionals over the years, including speeches and newspaper op-ed articles. I have never ghost-written material for a student, and I never will because it is, quite simply, cheating. The student is turning in work he or she didn't complete personally and attempting to fraudulently earn a grade for that work. Submitting an essay written by someone else is no different than having someone else sit an exam for you; it's lying, plain and simple, about the quality of your accomplishments.

One argument used in support of using professional essay writers is that it's no different than the assistance a student might receive from a tutor. Presuming the tutor is ethical, that is simply not true. A good tutor will always take the position of responding to a student's work, never generating it personally. While the tutor might provide examples, these should be generic and should never directly preview work the student is expected to accomplish. For example, if a student came to me for help with an essay on President Reagan, I might show a sample outline for a biography of Charles Dickens - this would help the student understand how a good biography paper should be structured, but it wouldn't give him or her a jumpstart on the essay at hand. When a student does bring work to a tutor, the tutor should help identify errors but should never correct them personally; rather, the student should be guided to learn the issues involved and make the corrections. This is very different from the role of a professional essay writer, who is actually doing some or all of the work for the student.

One of the more far-fetched arguments that I've read is that a student who hires a professional essay writer is demonstrating skills in outsourcing and is replicating the realities of the business world much more exactly than if he or she wrote the paper

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