Formula sheets for a tenner, anyone?
Unless you've been under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you are likely to have had a leaflet for Oxbridge Essays shoved in your face as you walked around the South Kensington campus. And for those that have skipped the front page story last week and went straight for the rugby boys naked centrefold, all is forgiven: I'm here once again to entertain and inform.
Oxbridge Essays is a company whose idea is simple and brilliant: get students at Oxbridge to write your essays for you, charge extraordinary amounts of money, pay the Oxbridge student a happy amount so they have money to spend on Pepsi and Sprite when they're in need of a tipple at the Advanced Algebra Society meeting on Saturday night, and pocket the rest of the money.
My initial reaction as I read the flier in a boring lecture was probably the same as the rest of the student population at Imperial: "Oxford and Cambridge..." followed by a few choice words which I've been told by the editor I'm not allowed to repeat. Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that Oxbridge may not be as guilty as they first appear.
The company is actually owned by a student at Birmingham University and his brother at King's College. The former was recently cleared of bringing his university into disrepute because `what Oxbridge Essays does is entirely legal'. Okay, they have a sentence on the website stating that nobody should hand the essays in as their own work but I go on the assumption that people buy these essays to plagiarise. If anybody reading this thinks that someone would pay £1,440 for a 3000 word undergraduate essay to an upper first standard and not hand it in, please write in to Felix and state your opinion clearly, so I can send off your complimentary tin foil hat.
So why is the company so successful in the first place? It's reasonable to assume they must be, since they keep recruiting more and more Oxbridge students to write things for strangers. However, who in their right mind would pay that much for someone else to write what you could probably do just as well yourself? And don't forget, the Rector has made it perfectly clear that anyone caught buying and using these essays will be expelled, which is more than fair. After all, if that's the best thing you can think of to spend your money on, I'm more than happy to advise.
Ironically, they even offer services writing Oxbridge entrance essays to people wanting to get in, which means that in a few years' time, the people writing them for you might not even be good enough to write their own.
Assuming an undergraduate studies a four year Master's course at the Imperial international rate averaging £15,000ish a year, that amounts to about 60 "guaranteed first" fast delivery essays. The last time I checked, Imperial's standards haven't dropped low enough that handing in fifteen not-even-upper-second essays a year (while simultaneously flopping your exams) is enough to get you a degree. So who is actually silly enough to believe that plagiarising ten good essays, which could cost the same as a nice new car, is going to get you anywhere closer to success in the real world? Someone must, because the company is making money answers on a postcard.
I was considering grouping together enough money to buy a 6,000 word dissertation about why Imperial kicks Oxbridge into the middle of next week. However, since my wallet can't support that, I'm contemplating setting up my own company: Imperial Essays, and I'll happily write your lab report for you for a measly £500, which is a bargain. I'll even throw in a tin foil hat.
