‘The service we offer is 100% legal, very legitimate and won’t make you a cheater’, this site informs us.

Another essay writing service; but whereas the ‘essay-scam’ was almost charming in its feckless hysteria, this one oozes competence, guilt and pathetic self-justification. ‘Why this is not cheating’, it explains:

If you buy one of our model answers, it is no different from using journals, newspaper articles, question-and-answer study books or, indeed, the past paper answers that your own tutor hands out in lectures or seminars. They are just a very powerful learning resource but catered to your own topic.

The site immediately strikes a tone of portenteous moralism: ‘We do understand that some students will use our work dishonestly.’ How dreadful! Fortunately, it is not their fault:

there are a lot of essay companies who permit students to simply pass off the work as their own, and so a minority of students confuse us with those companies and assume we offer the same service.

All they are doing is writing you an essay ‘guaranteed’ to get a 2:1, for a fee (in fact: £1,500 for an ‘upper first class’ undergrad paper of 5,000 words; a PhD is £18,000). Kindly, the site managers will not shop cheats to their universities, since they ‘comply with the 1998 Data Protection Act’, so ‘cannot tell anybody you’ve used our service unless we’re required by law to do so.’ Not that what they do is wrong. Truly: you have nothing to worry about.

In trying to create an air of professionalization within the essay-cheating business, this site reaches depths of moral and intellectual incompetence. There is even a nauseating sense that the authors really believe what they are saying – as if they had read ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote‘, and honestly misunderstood it.

[In which Pierre Menard writes a completely new version of Don Quixote which is word-for-word the same as the original.

Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. […]

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. […]
The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

The story is published in Borges’ Labyrinths.]

The site authors ask students to pay for an essay on the understanding that they will not use it; they feign disgust for the cheats they service; they use what fragments of intelligence they have in constructing vast spiderwebs of exculpation; they despise the education they use to make their pathetic living.

Humanity cannot survive between these contradictions; the centre cannot hold! Let us pray, at least, that these sites are rare humiliations of the human spirit; and not the excrescences, ever swelling in number, of an education system now fatally infected with neoliberalism.