cheat essay in english

Essays About Cheating: Top 5 Examples and 9 Writing Prompts

Essays about cheating show the value of honesty, see our top picks for examples and prompts you can use in writing.

In the US, 95% of high school students admitted to participating in some form of academic cheating . This includes exams and plagiarism. However, cheating doesn’t only occur in schools. It’s also prevalent in couples. Psychologists say that 50% of divorce cases in the country are because of infidelity . Other forms of cheating exist, such as cheating on a diet, a business deal, etc.

Because cheating is an intriguing subject, many want to read about it. However, to write essays about cheating appropriately, you must first pick a subtopic you’re comfortable discussing. Therefore, we have selected five simple but exemplary pieces you can read to get inspiration for writing your paper.

See below our round-up of top example essays about cheating.

1. Long Essay On Cheating In School By Prasanna

2. the reality of cheating in college essay by writer kip, 3. why cheating is wrong by bernadette mcbride, 4. what counts as cheating in a relationship by anonymous on gradesfixer, 5. emotional cheating by anonymous on papersowl, 1. types of cheating, 2. i was cheated on, 3. is cheating a mistake or choice, 4. tax evasion and cheating , 5. when i cheated, 6. cheating in american schools and universities, 7. review a famous book or film about cheating, 8. a famous cheating quote, 9. cause and effects of cheating.

“Cheating is a false representation of the child’s ability which he may not be able to give without cheating. It is unfair to everyone involved as it deprives the true one of the chance to come on the top.”

Prasanna begins the essay by defining cheating in schools and then incorporates how this unethical behavior occurs in reality. She further delves into the argument that cheating is not learning but an addiction that can result in students losing self-confidence, sanity, and integrity. 

Apart from showing the common causes and harmful effects of cheating on students, Prasanna also adds parents’ and teachers’ critical roles in helping students in their studies to keep them from cheating.

“It’s human nature to want to win, and some of us will go against the rules to do so. It can be harmless, but in many cases, it is annoying, or even hurtful.”

Kip defines cheating as human nature and focuses his essay on individuals who are hell-bent on wanting to win in online games. Unfortunately, these players’ desire to be on top is all-consuming, and they’re willing to go against the rules and disregard their integrity.

He talks about his experiences of being cheated in a game called AoE. He also incorporates the effects of these instances on newbies. These cheaters will humiliate, dishearten, and traumatize beginners who only want to have fun.

Check out these essays about cooperation .

“A cheater is more than likely lying to themselves more than to the people around them. A person can only go so far before their lies catch up to them, begin to accumulate, and start to penalize you.”

Mcbride dedicates her essay to answering why cheating is wrong, no matter the circumstance. She points out that there will always be a definite punishment for cheaters, whether they get caught. Mcbride believes that students who cheat, copy, and have someone else do their work are lazy and irresponsible. These students will never gain knowledge.

However, she also acknowledges that some cheaters are desperate, while some don’t realize the repercussions of their behaviors. At the end of the essay, she admits to cheating but says she’s no longer part of that vicious cycle, promising she has already realized her mistakes and doesn’t want to cheat again.

“Keep in mind that relationships are not based on logic, but are influenced by our emotions.”

The author explains how it’s challenging to define cheating in a relationship. It’s because every person has varying views on the topic. What others consider an affair may be acceptable to some. This includes the partners’ interaction with others while also analyzing the individual’s personality, such as flirting, sleeping in the same bed, and spending time with folks.

The essay further explains experts’ opinions on why men and women cheat and how partners heal and rebuild their trust. Finally, examples of different forms of cheating are discussed in the piece to give the readers more information on the subject. 

“…emotional cheating can be described as a desire to engage in another relationship without physically leaving his or her primary relationship.”

There’s an ongoing debate about whether emotional cheating should be labeled as such. The essay digs into the causes of emotional cheating to answer this issue. These reasons include lack of attention to each other, shortage of affectionate gestures, and misunderstandings or absence of proper communication. 

All of these may lead to the partner comparing their relationship to others. Soon, they fall out of love and fail to maintain boundaries, leading to insensitivity and selfishness. When a person in a relationship feels any of these, it can be a reason to look for someone else who can value them and their feelings.

9 Helpful Prompts in Writing Essays About Cheating

Here are some cheating subtopics you can focus your essay on:

Some types of cheating include deception, fabrication, bribery, impersonation, sabotage, and professional misconduct. Explain their definitions and have examples to make it easier for readers to understand.

You can use this prompt even if you don’t have any personal experience of being cheated on. You can instead relay events from a close friend or relative. First, narrate what happened and why. Then add what the person did to move on from the situation and how it affected them. Finally, incorporate lessons they’ve learned.

While this topic is still discussed by many, for you, is cheating a redeemable mistake? Or is it a choice with consequences? Express your opinion on this matter. Gather reliable evidence to support your claims, such as studies and research findings, to increase your essay’s credibility.

Tax evasion is a crime with severe penalties. Explain what it is and its punishments through a famous tax evasion case your readers can immediately recognize. For example, you can use Al Capone and his 11-year imprisonment and $215,000 back taxes . Talk through why he was charged with such and add your opinion. Ensure you have adequate and reliable sources to back up your claims.

Start with a  5 paragraph essay  to better organize your points.

Some say everyone will cheat at some point in their life. Talk about the time you cheated – it can be at a school exam, during work, or while on a diet. Put the perspective that made you think cheating was reasonable. Did you feel guilt? What did you do after, and did you cheat again? Answer these questions in your essay for an engaging and thrilling piece of writing.

Since academic cheating is notorious in America, use this topic for your essay. Find out which areas have high rates of academic cheating. What are their penalties? Why is cheating widespread? Include any measures the academe put in place.

Cheating is a frequent cause of conflict on small and big screens. Watch a film or read a story and write a review. Briefly summarize the plot, critique the characters, and add your realizations after finishing the piece. 

Goodreads has a list of books related to cheating. Currently, Thoughtless by S.C. Stephens has the highest rating.

Use this as an opportunity to write a unique essay by explaining the quote based on your understanding. It can be quotes from famous personalities or something that resonates with you and your experiences.

Since cheating’s cause and effect is a standard prompt, center your essay on an area unrelated to academics or relationships. For instance, write about cheating on your diet or cheating yourself of the opportunities life presents you.

Create a top-notch essay with excellent grammar. See our list of the best grammar checkers.

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

View all posts

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Now AI can write students’ essays for them, will everyone become a cheat?

Teachers and parents can’t detect this new form of plagiarism. Tech companies could step in – if they had the will to do so

P arents and teachers across the world are rejoicing as students have returned to classrooms. But unbeknownst to them, an unexpected insidious academic threat is on the scene: a revolution in artificial intelligence has created powerful new automatic writing tools. These are machines optimised for cheating on school and university papers, a potential siren song for students that is difficult, if not outright impossible, to catch.

Of course, cheats have always existed, and there is an eternal and familiar cat-and-mouse dynamic between students and teachers. But where once the cheat had to pay someone to write an essay for them, or download an essay from the web that was easily detectable by plagiarism software, new AI language-generation technologies make it easy to produce high-quality essays.

The breakthrough technology is a new kind of machine learning system called a large language model. Give the model a prompt, hit return, and you get back full paragraphs of unique text. These models are capable of producing all kinds of outputs – essays, blogposts, poetry, op-eds, lyrics and even computer code.

Initially developed by AI researchers just a few years ago, they were treated with caution and concern. OpenAI, the first company to develop such models, restricted their external use and did not release the source code of its most recent model as it was so worried about potential abuse. OpenAI now has a comprehensive policy focused on permissible uses and content moderation.

But as the race to commercialise the technology has kicked off, those responsible precautions have not been adopted across the industry. In the past six months, easy-to-use commercial versions of these powerful AI tools have proliferated, many of them without the barest of limits or restrictions.

One company’s stated mission is to employ cutting edge-AI technology in order to make writing painless. Another released an app for smartphones with an eyebrow-raising sample prompt for a high schooler: “Write an article about the themes of Macbeth.” We won’t name any of those companies here – no need to make it easier for cheaters – but they are easy to find, and they often cost nothing to use, at least for now. For a high school pupil, a well written and unique English essay on Hamlet or short argument about the causes of the first world war is now just a few clicks away.

While it’s important that parents and teachers know about these new tools for cheating, there’s not much they can do about it. It’s almost impossible to prevent kids from accessing these new technologies, and schools will be outmatched when it comes to detecting their use. This also isn’t a problem that lends itself to government regulation. While the government is already intervening (albeit slowly) to address the potential misuse of AI in various domains – for example, in hiring staff, or facial recognition – there is much less understanding of language models and how their potential harms can be addressed.

In this situation, the solution lies in getting technology companies and the community of AI developers to embrace an ethic of responsibility. Unlike in law or medicine, there are no widely accepted standards in technology for what counts as responsible behaviour. There are scant legal requirements for beneficial uses of technology. In law and medicine, standards were a product of deliberate decisions by leading practitioners to adopt a form of self-regulation. In this case, that would mean companies establishing a shared framework for the responsible development, deployment or release of language models to mitigate their harmful effects, especially in the hands of adversarial users.

What could companies do that would promote the socially beneficial uses and deter or prevent the obviously negative uses, such as using a text generator to cheat in school?

There are a number of obvious possibilities. Perhaps all text generated by commercially available language models could be placed in an independent repository to allow for plagiarism detection. A second would be age restrictions and age-verification systems to make clear that pupils should not access the software. Finally, and more ambitiously, leading AI developers could establish an independent review board that would authorise whether and how to release language models, prioritising access to independent researchers who can help assess risks and suggest mitigation strategies, rather than speeding toward commercialisation.

After all, because language models can be adapted to so many downstream applications, no single company could foresee all the potential risks (or benefits). Years ago, software companies realised that it was necessary to thoroughly test their products for technical problems before they were released – a process now known in the industry as quality assurance. It’s high time tech companies realised that their products need to go through a social assurance process before being released, to anticipate and mitigate the societal problems that may result.

In an environment in which technology outpaces democracy, we need to develop an ethic of responsibility on the technological frontier. Powerful tech companies cannot treat the ethical and social implications of their products as an afterthought. If they simply rush to occupy the marketplace, and then apologise later if necessary – a story we’ve become all too familiar with in recent years – society pays the price for others’ lack of foresight.

Rob Reich is a professor of political science at Stanford University. His colleagues, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein, co-authored this piece. Together they are the authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

• Artificial intelligence (AI)

Most viewed

Target’s version of 'The Tortured Poets Department' contains two special poems: Read and shop them here

• TODAY Plaza
• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Concert Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show

Teachers sound off on ChatGPT, the new AI tool that can write students’ essays for them

Teachers are talking about a new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT — with dread about its potential to help students cheat, and with anticipation over how it might change education as we know it.

On Nov. 30, research lab OpenAI released the free AI tool ChatGPT , a conversational language model that lets users type questions — “What is the Civil War?” or “Who was Leonardo da Vinci?” — and receive articulate, sophisticated and human-like responses in seconds. Ask it to solve complex math equations and it spits out the answer, sometimes with step-by-step explanations for how it got there.

According to a fact sheet sent to TODAY.com by OpenAI, ChatGPT can answer follow-up questions, correct false information, contextualize information and even acknowledge its own mistakes.

Some educators worry that students will use ChatGPT to get away with cheating more easily  — especially when it comes to the five-paragraph essays assigned in middle and high school and the formulaic papers assigned in college courses. Compared with traditional cheating in which information is plagiarized by being copied directly or pasted together from other work, ChatGPT pulls content from all corners of the internet to form brand new answers that aren't derived from one specific source, or even cited.

Therefore, if you paste a ChatGPT-generated essay into the internet, you likely won't find it word-for-word anywhere else. This has many teachers spooked — even as OpenAI is trying to reassure educators .

"We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system," an OpenAI spokesperson tells TODAY.com "We look forward to working with educators on useful solutions, and other ways to help teachers and students benefit from artificial intelligence."

Still, #TeacherTok is weighing in about potential consequences in the classroom.

"So the robots are here and they’re going to be doing our students' homework,” educator Dan Lewer said in a TikTok video . “Great! As if teachers needed something else to be worried about.”

“If you’re a teacher, you need to know about this new (tool) that students can use to cheat in your class,” educational consultant Tyler Tarver said on TikTok .

“Kids can just tell it what they want it to do: Write a 500-word essay on ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,’” Tarver said. “This thing just starts writing it, and it looks legit.”

Taking steps to prevent cheating

ChatGPT is already being prohibited at some K-12 schools and colleges.

On Jan. 4, the New York City Department of Education restricted ChatGPT on school networks and devices "due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content," Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, tells TODAY.com. "While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success."

A student who attends Lawrence University in Wisconsin tells TODAY.com that one of her professors warned students, both verbally and in a class syllabus, not to use artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to write papers or risk receiving a zero score.

And last month, a student at Furman University in South Carolina got caught using ChatGPT to complete a 1,200-word take-home exam on the 18th century philosopher David Hume.

“The essay confidently and thoroughly described Hume’s views on the paradox of horror in (ways) that were thoroughly wrong,” Darren Hick, an assistant professor of philosophy, explained in a Dec. 15 Facebook post . “It did say some true things about Hume, and it knew what the paradox of horror was, but it was just bullsh--ting after that.”

Hick tells TODAY.com that traditional cheating signs — for example, sudden shifts in a person’s writing style — weren’t apparent in the student’s essay.

To confirm his suspicions, Hick says he ran passages from the essay through a separate OpenAI detector, which indicated the writing was AI-generated. Hick then did the same thing with essays from other students. That time around, the detector suggested that the essays had been written by human beings.

Eventually, Hick met with the student, who confessed to using ChatGPT. She received a failing grade for the class and faces further disciplinary action.

“I give this student credit for being updated on new technology,” says Hick. “Unfortunately, in their case, so am I.”

Getting at the heart of teaching

OpenAI acknowledges that its ChatGPT tool is capable of providing false or harmful answers. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman tweeted that ChatGPT is meant for “ fun creative inspiration ” and that “ it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.” 

Kendall Hartley, an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, notes that ChatGPT is "blowing up fast," presenting new challenges for detection software like iThenticate and TurnItIn , which teachers use to cross-reference student work to material published online.

Still, even with all the concerns being raised, many educators say they are hopeful about ChatGPT's potential in the classroom.

When you think about the amazing teachers you’ve had, it’s likely because they connected with you as a student. That won’t change with the introduction of AI.”

Tiffany Wycoff, a former school principal

"I'm excited by how it could support assessment or students with learning disabilities or those who are English language learners," Lisa M. Harrison, a former seventh grade math teacher and a board of trustee for the Association for Middle Level Education , tells TODAY.com. Harrison speculates that ChatGPT could support all sorts of students with special needs by supplementing skills they haven’t yet mastered.

Harrison suggests workarounds to cheating through coursework that requires additional citations or verbal components. She says personalized assignments — such as asking students to apply a world event to their own personal experiences — could deter the use of AI.

Educators also could try embracing the technology, she says.

"Students could write essays comparing their work to what's produced by ChatGPT or learn about AI," says Harrison.

Tiffany Wycoff, a former elementary and high school principal who is now the chief operating officer of the professional development company Learning Innovation Catalyst (LINC), says AI offers great potential in education.

“Art instructors can use image-based AI generators to (produce) characters or scenes that inspire projects," Wycoff tells TODAY.com. "P.E. coaches could design fitness or sports curriculums, and teachers can discuss systemic biases in writing.”

Wycoff went straight to the source, asking ChatGPT, "How will generative AI affect teaching and learning in classrooms?" and published a lengthy answer on her company's blog .

According to ChatGPT's answer, AI can give student feedback in real time, create interactive educational content (videos, simulations and more), and create customized learning materials based on individual student needs.

The heart of teaching, however, can't be replaced by bots.

"When you think about the amazing teachers you’ve had, it’s likely because they connected with you as a student," Wycoff says. "That won’t change with the introduction of AI."

Tarver agrees, telling TODAY.com, "If a student is struggling and then suddenly gets a 98 (on a test), teachers will know."

"And if students can go in and type answers in ChatGPT," he adds, "we're asking the wrong questions.”

Elise Solé is a writer and editor who lives in Los Angeles and covers parenting for TODAY Parents. She was previously a news editor at Yahoo and has also worked at Marie Claire and Women's Health. Her bylines have appeared in Shondaland, SheKnows, Happify and more.

Login or sign up to be automatically entered into our next $10,000 scholarship giveaway

Get Searching

• College Search
• College Search Map
• Graduate Programs
• Featured Colleges
• Scholarship Search
• Lists & Rankings

Articles & Advice

• Ask the Experts
• Campus Visits
• Catholic Colleges and Universities
• Christian Colleges and Universities
• College Admission
• College Athletics
• College Diversity
• Counselors and Consultants
• Education and Teaching
• Financial Aid
• Graduate School
• Health and Medicine
• International Students
• Internships and Careers
• Majors and Academics
• Performing and Visual Arts
• Public Colleges and Universities
• Science and Engineering
• Student Life
• Transfer Students
• Why CollegeXpress
• $10,000 Scholarship
• CollegeXpress Store
• Corporate Website
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• CA and EU Privacy Policy

Articles & Advice > Majors and Academics > Blog

English Grammar Cheat Sheet for Students

Struggling with grammar as you write your English essays, term papers, and other school assignments? Here's a cheat sheet with everything students need to know!

by Emily Rogan CollegeXpress Student Writer

Last Updated: Mar 20, 2024

Originally Posted: Jan 17, 2017

I don’t care if you’ve been at the top of your English class since sixth grade: every student, regardless of age or discipline, knows the struggle of trying to write a paper. We’ve all been there. And a big part of that struggle is grammar, style, and usage. Especially when it comes to all-important term papers or that gen ed English class you loathe, writing papers with correct style and grammar is important. Occasionally, you’ll come along a professor who doesn’t care—or doesn’t even use correct grammar themselves—but most of the time, students need to be on top of grammar, punctuation, style, citations, and all the other little things that seem impossible to keep track of.

If you struggle with common grammar and usage, or if your papers always come back to you with lots of red marks and corrections, you should do yourself a favor and learn these rules now . And not just because it’ll help you do better on your English papers; out in the real world, these mistakes can really cost you. (Do you think your boss will be happy if you send an email to an important person with misspellings and other errors? No. No, they will not be happy.)

The most common grammar mistakes

• A lot: It’s two words. (But there are so many, countless, tons, myriad, plenty, numerous, innumerable, more descriptive words you could use instead of “a lot”!).
• Commas: In short, use them wisely. I’ve read so many papers of classmates who put, too, many, commas, in, to, their, writing. A super basic rule of thumb might be “when in doubt, leave it out.” But! There are tons of comma rules out there that are worth learning: Don’t use a comma between nouns and verbs. Do use a comma to set off long-form dates (July 4, 2017 is correct). But don’t use a comma for month and year (July 2017 is correct). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s okay if you don’t learn all the comma rules perfectly, but you should check out this easy guide to using commas whenever you’re unsure.
• Its/it’s: “Its” means possession/ownership. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is.” For example, “The campus has its own special vibe. It’s a place for doers and dreamers to come together.” (By the way, doesn’t that sound like every college brochure ever?!)
• Semicolons: I used to swear these were the greatest things ever—until I discovered the many ways you can mess up grammatically using them. Semicolons are often poetically described as the punctuation equivalent of “I could’ve stopped here, but I decided not to.” They basically work in two ways: First, they link related sentences and let you skip using conjunctions like “and” or “but.” So you could say, “We’re going to the beach; it’s the perfect day for it.” Or you could say, “We’re going to the beach, and it’s the perfect day for it.” However, if you’re unsure about how to use the semicolon, it’s often safer to just start a new sentence. Second, semicolons separate items within a series within  another series. For example, you would write, “The students’ spring break choices were Cancun, Mexico; Washington, DC; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.” But simple sentences don’t need a semicolon; for example, “He brought the ice cream, I brought the sprinkles, and Jenny brought the chocolate sauce.”
• Subject-verb agreement: I know this one sounds very elementary school-ish, but it’s a common grammar mistake even among college students. And subject-verb agreement can get especially tricky if you have a crazy-long sentence with lots of clauses. In any case, double-check to make sure your verb truly matches whatever it’s actually talking about, not just the word it comes right after .
• There/they’re/their: “There” is a place. “They’re” is the contraction of “they are.” And “their” means possession/ownership. For example, “They’re riding their bikes over there."
• Your/you’re:  “Your” means possession/ownership; “you’re” is a contraction of “you are.” For example, “You’re going to use up all of your meal credits if you go to the dining hall five times a day.”

Related: Steering Clear of College Application Essay Mistakes

More simple style and usage tips to keep in mind for your papers

• Pay attention to what style you’re supposed to use for citations in your papers. MLA , APA , and Turabian are all common, and the style will often vary with the subject area.
• Make sure you cite enough and appropriately. This isn’t just about giving credit where it’s due; it’s about protecting yourself from getting into trouble with plagiarism . Plus, it serves as a guide for readers to find more information should they want to.
• Remember that titles of full-length books, magazines, and plays are italicized . However, titles of songs, essays, and short stories included in larger works are put in “quotation marks.”
• Proofread, proofread, proofread! Very often, we can skip over the same grammar or usage mistake several times in our own writing. I just reread something of mine this week that I wrote almost two years ago—something I’ve read through countless times since—and found a mistake that I hadn’t caught in all those times. You should also give yourself some time away from whatever you’re writing and come back to it for editing. When you’re writing an essay, try to finish a day or two before the deadline. Then leave it alone for at least an hour (ideally a whole day) and read back through it after that breather so you’ll have new eyes. Hopefully you’ll catch anything you didn’t see before.

Related: College Application Proofreading Tips from an Editor–in–Chief  

Other places and people that can help with your writing

• First things first: if you are truly struggling, please do not turn to a professional essay writing service . It won't help strengthen your writing and grammar skills at all, plus you could get in major trouble.
• The Purdue OWL Writing Lab is awesome for general writing and grammar help for students, whether you’re in college or high school (or older!).
• Take advantage of your school’s tutoring and/or writing centers . It should be free for you to go, but also remember if you’re in college, you’re essentially paying for that stuff anyway with your tuition and fees—so you might as well get your money’s worth and visit.
• Have someone else read your writing. A friend, sibling, parent, mentor—any set of fresh eyes can be helpful. Even if they’re not familiar with the subject material, they can at least look at it for grammar issues and overall tone.
• The best, quickest, and easiest way to learn how to write better? Read good writing! There’s so much amazing writing online (look for respected websites) and a bajillion books out there to read. The more you read, the better your writing will be. Also, reading is great. Fact.

If you use this grammar cheat sheet, you’ll impress everyone who reads your school essays and other writing from now on! This list is by no means comprehensive, but it’s a good place to start for the most common paper-writing and grammar errors students face. 

Does this grammar cheat sheet have what you’re looking for? What grammar, style, and usage things do you struggle with in your writing? Or if this stuff comes easy to you (lucky!), are there any tips for students we should add? Follow us on social media and  tag us @CollegeXpress!

Like what you’re reading?

Join the CollegeXpress community! Create a free account and we’ll notify you about new articles, scholarship deadlines, and more.

Tags: academics essay tips essays grammar study guides writing writing tips

← Previous Post

Next Post →

About Emily Rogan

Emily Rogan is a student at Morehead State University , where she's studying Communications and Theater. When she's not in school, she is an actor, musician, singer, and writer.

Join our community of over 5 million students!

CollegeXpress has everything you need to simplify your college search, get connected to schools, and find your perfect fit.

Victoria Fuss

March Madness Scholarship Winner, Class of 2022

CollegeXpress has helped me dramatically. Moving on to the next level has been a dream of my mine since I was just a young kid, and the support and help CollegeXpress has given me will help me further my education. I couldn’t be more grateful to everyone at CollegeXpress!

Jeannie Borin, MEd

President and Founder, College Connections

I frequently visit CollegeXpress to answer questions from students and parents. There are countless hot topics in admissions that need to be addressed. I enjoy reading what my colleagues post and gain additional insight from different perspectives.

Lexie Knutson

High School Class of 2021

This whole website has helped me overcome the attitude I had before. I was scared to even approach the thought of college because it was so much. I knew it wasn’t just a few easy steps, and I panicked mostly, instead of actually trying. Without realizing it, CollegeXpress did exactly what I usually do when I panic, which is take it one step at a time. With college I forget that because it’s more than just a small to-do list, but this website was really helpful and overall amazing. So thank you!

Sadie Hartmann

I'm a senior in high school, and CollegeXpress has helped me in so many ways this year in trying to navigate the process of deciding and committing to a university. The COVID-19 Student Resource Center has helped me many times with the most up-to-date and accurate information, along with financial aid and student life [advice]. During these uncertain times, CollegeXpress has been a great recourse to relieve the stress as a senior. Along with the COVID-19 Student Resource Center, I'm constantly using the extremely helpful tools off the site to aid me during this stressful process. Tools like the lists and rankings of universities have been the most beneficial. I've also used the site to receive expert advice on topics like financial aid. Finally, CollegeXpress has helped me easily apply for several scholarships. I'm thankful to be given the chance to win a scholarship to lessen the burden of my college debt.

Damian Rangel

September 2021 Mini Scholarship Winner, High School Class of 2022

CollegeXpress has helped me tackle college expenses, which will allow me to put more of my time and effort into my studies without the need of worrying as much about finances.

Colleges You May Be Interested In

University of North Georgia

Dahlonega, GA

University of Iowa

Iowa City, IA

Cleveland State University

Cleveland, OH

SUNY Oneonta

Oneonta, NY

University of Cincinnati

Cincinnati, OH

Personalize your experience on CollegeXpress.

With this information, we'll do our best to display content relevant to your interests. By subscribing, you agree to receive CollegeXpress emails and to make your information available to colleges and universities, scholarship programs, and other companies that have relevant/related offers.

Already have an account?

Log in to be directly connected to

Not a CollegeXpress user?

Don't want to register.

Provide your information below to connect with

Doing away with essays won’t necessarily stop students cheating

Honorary Fellow, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Julie Hare does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

It’s never been easier for university students to cheat. We just need look to the scandal in 2015 that revealed up to 1,000 students from 16 Australian universities had hired the Sydney-based MyMaster company to ghost-write their assignments and sit online tests.

It’s known as contract cheating – when a student pays a third party to undertake their assignments which they then pass off as their own. Contract cheating isn’t new – the term was coined in 2006 . But it’s becoming more commonplace because new technologies, such as the smart phone, are enablers.

Read more: 15% of students admit to buying essays. What can universities do about it?

Cheating is taken seriously by universities and the national regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency . Much of the focus has been on changing assessment tasks to ones deemed to be harder for a third party to undertake. This is called “ authentic assessment ”.

This type of assessment has been widely adopted at universities . They are comprised of tasks that evaluate knowledge and skills by presenting students with real-world scenarios or problems relevant to the kinds of challenges they would face following graduation. But new research found authentic assessment may be as vulnerable to cheating as other more obvious examples, such as essays.

What the research shows

This new study was conducted by academics from six universities, led by Tracey Bretag and Rowena Harper from the University of South Australia. The research – part of the federal government’s Contract Cheating and Assessment Design project – surveyed 14,086 students and 1,147 staff.

The goal of this research was to collect and understand student’s perceptions of the likelihood of cheating on 13 different assessment tasks. The research then asked teaching staff which of the 13 tasks they used.

The researchers have previously reported from this data set that 6% of students admitted to cheating. The purpose of the current round of analysis was not to understand the extent of cheating, but perceptions of how easily it might be done, and if that correlated with the tasks educators set.

They found, for both students and teachers, assessments with a short turnaround time and heavily weighted in the final mark were perceived as the tasks which were the most likely to attract contract cheating.

Assessments perceived as the least likely to attract contract cheating were in-class tasks, personalised and unique tasks, vivas (oral explanations of a written task) and reflections on practical placements. But these tasks were the least likely to be set by educators, presumably because they’re resource and time intensive.

Contract cheating and assessment design

The research confirms the relationship between contract cheating and assessment design is a complex one. There was no assessment tasks for which students reported a 0% likelihood of contract cheating. Students who engage in contract cheating both see and look for opportunities to cheat regardless of the assessment task.

For universities, that means they must assume cheating is always possible and simply changing what assessments they use will not combat the problem.

Many experts have advocated the use of supervised exams to combat cheating. But this new research adds to a growing body of evidence that exams provide universities and accrediting bodies with a false sense of security. In fact, previous data has shown students reported engaging in undetected cheating on supervised exams at higher rates than other types of cheating.

Another common approach is to use a series of small, graded tasks, such as spontaneous in-class tests, sometimes called continuous assessment . Even here, students indicated these were the third most likely form of assessment to be outsourced.

Who’s most likely to cheat?

There has been much attention , particularly during the MyMaster scandal , on international students’ use of contract cheating. The new research suggests both international students and domestic students from non-English speaking backgrounds are more likely to engage in contract cheating than other students.

Read more: Don't assume online students are more likely to cheat. The evidence is murky

The research also found business and commerce degrees were more likely be perceived as attracting contract cheating. Engineering was also particularly vulnerable to cheating.

Students from non-English speaking backgrounds hypothesised cheating would be most likely to occur in assessments that required research, analysis and thinking skills (essays), heavily weighted assignments and assessments with short turnaround times.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, students who indicated they were satisfied with the quality of teaching were less likely to think breaches of academic integrity were likely. In other words, this confirms previous research which showed students dissatisfied with their educational experience are more likely to cheat.

So what do we do about it?

This research provides yet more compelling evidence that curriculum and changes to teaching strategies and early intervention must be employed to support students’ academic endeavours.

The researchers also point out high levels of cheating risks undermining the reputation and quality of Australia’s A$34 billion export sector in international education.

The data demonstrates assessment tasks designed to develop relevant professional skills, which teachers are highly likely to set, were perceived by students as tasks that can easily be cheated on. These might include asking accounting students to memorandums, reports or other communication groups to stakeholders, such as shareholders. In fact, among students from a non-English speaking background, the risks of cheating might actually increase for these tasks. This means authentic assessment might run the increasing risk of being outsourced.

Read more: Assessment design won’t stop cheating, but our relationships with students might

This research shows the relationship between contract cheating and assessment design is not a simple product of cause and effect. In fact, the nature of the task itself may be less relevant to the prevalence of cheating than other factors such as a student’s from non-English speaking background’s status, perceived opportunities to cheat or satisfaction with the teaching and learning environment.

All educators must remain vigilant about cheating. Teachers must be properly resourced by their universities to ensure they can create rich learning environments which uphold the integrity of the higher education system.

Burdened with large debts and facing a precarious job market after graduation, it’s perhaps unsurprising some students, particularly those who are struggling academically, take a transactional approach to their education. This new research provides more clear evidence contract cheating is a systemic problem that requires a sector-wide response.

• University assessment
• MyMaster cheating scandal
• Essay mills
• Exam cheating
• Essay writing
• Contract cheating

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

Senior Disability Services Advisor

Deputy Social Media Producer

Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

GRAINS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION CHAIRPERSON

• Our Mission

Why Students Cheat—and What to Do About It

A teacher seeks answers from researchers and psychologists. 

“Why did you cheat in high school?” I posed the question to a dozen former students.

“I wanted good grades and I didn’t want to work,” said Sonya, who graduates from college in June. [The students’ names in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.]

My current students were less candid than Sonya. To excuse her plagiarized Cannery Row essay, Erin, a ninth-grader with straight As, complained vaguely and unconvincingly of overwhelming stress. When he was caught copying a review of the documentary Hypernormalism , Jeremy, a senior, stood by his “hard work” and said my accusation hurt his feelings.

Cases like the much-publicized ( and enduring ) 2012 cheating scandal at high-achieving Stuyvesant High School in New York City confirm that academic dishonesty is rampant and touches even the most prestigious of schools. The data confirms this as well. A 2012 Josephson Institute’s Center for Youth Ethics report revealed that more than half of high school students admitted to cheating on a test, while 74 percent reported copying their friends’ homework. And a survey of 70,000 high school students across the United States between 2002 and 2015 found that 58 percent had plagiarized papers, while 95 percent admitted to cheating in some capacity.

So why do students cheat—and how do we stop them?

According to researchers and psychologists, the real reasons vary just as much as my students’ explanations. But educators can still learn to identify motivations for student cheating and think critically about solutions to keep even the most audacious cheaters in their classrooms from doing it again.

Rationalizing It


First, know that students realize cheating is wrong—they simply see themselves as moral in spite of it.

“They cheat just enough to maintain a self-concept as honest people. They make their behavior an exception to a general rule,” said Dr. David Rettinger , professor at the University of Mary Washington and executive director of the Center for Honor, Leadership, and Service, a campus organization dedicated to integrity.

According to Rettinger and other researchers, students who cheat can still see themselves as principled people by rationalizing cheating for reasons they see as legitimate.

Some do it when they don’t see the value of work they’re assigned, such as drill-and-kill homework assignments, or when they perceive an overemphasis on teaching content linked to high-stakes tests.

“There was no critical thinking, and teachers seemed pressured to squish it into their curriculum,” said Javier, a former student and recent liberal arts college graduate. “They questioned you on material that was never covered in class, and if you failed the test, it was progressively harder to pass the next time around.”

But students also rationalize cheating on assignments they see as having value.

High-achieving students who feel pressured to attain perfection (and Ivy League acceptances) may turn to cheating as a way to find an edge on the competition or to keep a single bad test score from sabotaging months of hard work. At Stuyvesant, for example, students and teachers identified the cutthroat environment as a factor in the rampant dishonesty that plagued the school.

And research has found that students who receive praise for being smart—as opposed to praise for effort and progress—are more inclined to exaggerate their performance and to cheat on assignments , likely because they are carrying the burden of lofty expectations.

A Developmental Stage

When it comes to risk management, adolescent students are bullish. Research has found that teenagers are biologically predisposed to be more tolerant of unknown outcomes and less bothered by stated risks than their older peers.

“In high school, they’re risk takers developmentally, and can’t see the consequences of immediate actions,” Rettinger says. “Even delayed consequences are remote to them.”

While cheating may not be a thrill ride, students already inclined to rebel against curfews and dabble in illicit substances have a certain comfort level with being reckless. They’re willing to gamble when they think they can keep up the ruse—and more inclined to believe they can get away with it.

Cheating also appears to be almost contagious among young people—and may even serve as a kind of social adhesive, at least in environments where it is widely accepted.  A study of military academy students from 1959 to 2002 revealed that students in communities where cheating is tolerated easily cave in to peer pressure, finding it harder not to cheat out of fear of losing social status if they don’t.

Michael, a former student, explained that while he didn’t need to help classmates cheat, he felt “unable to say no.” Once he started, he couldn’t stop.

Technology Facilitates and Normalizes It

With smartphones and Alexa at their fingertips, today’s students have easy access to quick answers and content they can reproduce for exams and papers.  Studies show that technology has made cheating in school easier, more convenient, and harder to catch than ever before.

To Liz Ruff, an English teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, students’ use of social media can erode their understanding of authenticity and intellectual property. Because students are used to reposting images, repurposing memes, and watching parody videos, they “see ownership as nebulous,” she said.

As a result, while they may want to avoid penalties for plagiarism, they may not see it as wrong or even know that they’re doing it.

This confirms what Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University Business School professor,  reported in his 2012 book ; he found that more than 60 percent of surveyed students who had cheated considered digital plagiarism to be “trivial”—effectively, students believed it was not actually cheating at all.

Strategies for Reducing Cheating

Even moral students need help acting morally, said  Dr. Jason M. Stephens , who researches academic motivation and moral development in adolescents at the University of Auckland’s School of Learning, Development, and Professional Practice. According to Stephens, teachers are uniquely positioned to infuse students with a sense of responsibility and help them overcome the rationalizations that enable them to think cheating is OK.

1. Turn down the pressure cooker. Students are less likely to cheat on work in which they feel invested. A multiple-choice assessment tempts would-be cheaters, while a unique, multiphase writing project measuring competencies can make cheating much harder and less enticing. Repetitive homework assignments are also a culprit, according to research , so teachers should look at creating take-home assignments that encourage students to think critically and expand on class discussions. Teachers could also give students one free pass on a homework assignment each quarter, for example, or let them drop their lowest score on an assignment.

2. Be thoughtful about your language.   Research indicates that using the language of fixed mindsets , like praising children for being smart as opposed to praising them for effort and progress , is both demotivating and increases cheating. When delivering feedback, researchers suggest using phrases focused on effort like, “You made really great progress on this paper” or “This is excellent work, but there are still a few areas where you can grow.”

3. Create student honor councils. Give students the opportunity to enforce honor codes or write their own classroom/school bylaws through honor councils so they can develop a full understanding of how cheating affects themselves and others. At Fredericksburg Academy, high school students elect two Honor Council members per grade. These students teach the Honor Code to fifth graders, who, in turn, explain it to younger elementary school students to help establish a student-driven culture of integrity. Students also write a pledge of authenticity on every assignment. And if there is an honor code transgression, the council gathers to discuss possible consequences. 

4. Use metacognition. Research shows that metacognition, a process sometimes described as “ thinking about thinking ,” can help students process their motivations, goals, and actions. With my ninth graders, I use a centuries-old resource to discuss moral quandaries: the play Macbeth . Before they meet the infamous Thane of Glamis, they role-play as medical school applicants, soccer players, and politicians, deciding if they’d cheat, injure, or lie to achieve goals. I push students to consider the steps they take to get the outcomes they desire. Why do we tend to act in the ways we do? What will we do to get what we want? And how will doing those things change who we are? Every tragedy is about us, I say, not just, as in Macbeth’s case, about a man who succumbs to “vaulting ambition.”

5. Bring honesty right into the curriculum. Teachers can weave a discussion of ethical behavior into curriculum. Ruff and many other teachers have been inspired to teach media literacy to help students understand digital plagiarism and navigate the widespread availability of secondary sources online, using guidance from organizations like Common Sense Media .

There are complicated psychological dynamics at play when students cheat, according to experts and researchers. While enforcing rules and consequences is important, knowing what’s really motivating students to cheat can help you foster integrity in the classroom instead of just penalizing the cheating.

• Have your assignments done by seasoned writers. 24/7
• Contact us:
• +1 (213) 221-0069
• [email protected]

9 Proven Essay Hacks: Cheat Sheet and Tips to cheat on essays

In this comprehensive guide, we show you proven essay hacks to use as an essay cheat sheet and tips on how to cheat on essays. Earn the grades legally. If you effectively apply these 9 tips and tricks, you will significantly save your time in writing essays, and the efforts you put on your homework and earn high grades easily.

In many essays and assignments, students get stranded due to the lack of knowledge on how to navigate from one step to another in the writing process. Sometimes, there are easy ways to write essays, but they only work when you know the tips. Let us now discuss each in detail.

Easy navigation table

Proven Essay Hacks to legally Cheat on Essays

1. hire a professional essay writer.

This is one of the most convenient and easiest ways through which a student can cheat on essays, homework, and other assignments. The student hires a professional essay writer.

Professional essay writers can be accessed through professional writing websites. Grade Bees essay writing is one of the best ones. Several writing websites have experienced and competent writers who can handle different types of essays or any other assignment 24/7.

When you hire a professional essay writer, you can be assured that your paper will be of high quality and it will be delivered on time as your work.

However, there are some things you should consider before hiring a professional essay writer online. You should conduct a thorough research concerning the credibility of your selected writing services provider.

Make your Order

Give Instructions

Your writer completes the task

Download your File

The credibility can be gauged based on how long the website has provided witting services to students, the consistency of the website regarding the delivery of quality essays to students, and most importantly the support system within the site.

Once you are satisfied with the website offering professional writing services, you will be assigned a verified essay writer to complete your assignment.

The assigned professional write will deliver your essay, homework, or any other assignment according to the instructions you provided and the deadline you gave.

Of course, those services are not free. You will have to pay. The price may differ from one service provider to another.

2. Plagiarize wisely without getting caught

This is also an ingenious method of cheating on your essays, homework, and more.

While plagiarizing is academic dishonesty that is punishable by law, plagiarizing wisely without getting caught can help you cheat on essays if you believe it is morally right.

The first method of plagiarizing wisely is to add adverbs and adjectives into original sentences to make them sound and appear different or unique.

Also, you should note that plagiarism detecting tools look for overlapping text between your essay and other works from other writers.

If you add adverbs and adjectives, the similarity or overlapping text will disappear and you will be good.

You can also change the order of text within the original sentences. This is an easy method of plagiarizing because plagiarism detecting tools such as SafeAssign and Turnitin will be incapable of detecting any overlaps between your essay and the original work.

Changing the word order can also be achieved by Article Rewriting tools. Those tools are several on Google.

What they do is to take the original text and jumble it in such a way that it maintains meaning and coherence while becoming different from the original work.

Finally, you can utilize several quotes within your essay. However, this will depend on whether your instructor accepts them or not.

If you use quotes, be sure to quote (“…”) the original text and add an in-text citation at the end of the quote to avoid detection.

Check our our guide how to plagiarize wisely without getting caught especially when dealing with Turnitin or SafeAssign.

 3. Paraphrase your essay well

Paraphrasing is when a student takes the original text and mixes the words in such a way that they look original while retaining the same meaning with the original text.

You should note that even though you have paraphrased, you should correctly cite the source in the right format.

Below are some of the tips that can be used to help you paraphrase your work well:

• Use a Dissimilar first sentence
• Use relevant synonyms
• Change sentence structure
• Break long sentences

We can explain these points in detail below;

1. Use a Dissimilar first sentence

First, you should begin your essay, or the first sentence of your essay, at a dissimilar point from that of the original.

This means that you will not follow the structure of the source. You will have to find the structure through which you will rewrite the source’s text.

2. Use relevant synonyms

Secondly, you should use synonyms. This is a clever way of paraphrasing because you will exchange the original words with their synonyms.

This can easily fool plagiarism detecting tools. The Saurus Tool can help you if you are stuck.

3. Change sentence structure

Thirdly, you can change the sentence structure. If the original sentence has been written in the active form, you can change it into a passive form.

4. Break long sentences

Finally, you can break long sentences or information into smaller and separate sentences. This will make your essay original while maintaining the original or intended information.

Read our guide on the Dos and Don’ts of paraphrasing – and learn how to paraphrase well.

4. Submit late assignments wisely

It is a requirement that all assignments should be submitted before the deadline.

Any late submissions are not accepted by most instructors because the students have not followed the instructions and they may have used that opportunity to cheat on their essays.

Depending on the institution you are studying in, your instructors have different preferences when it comes to submitting assignments.

Most will require you to submit the assignments via plagiarism detecting tools such as Turnitin or SafeAssign while others may require you to physically hand in your work.

Either way, late submissions are unacceptable. This is because they can be used as a loophole to cheat.

Read our guide on how to submit late assignments and escape with it.

To ensure that you turn in your late assignments, be sure to upload a corrupted file before the deadline. The instructor will struggle to open the file without success.

During that time, take the opportunity to complete the assignment. You can also seek help from your smart classmates because they will assume that you have also uploaded the file and their help will not have any impact on your paper.

By the time your instructor requests you to re-upload your assignment, you will have completed your paper. Voila!

5. Work with homework help tutor

This method cannot be considered as an unethical approach to cheating on essays. This is because a homework help tutor is just like your teacher or instructor who wants to make you better understand the course and the homework.

Again, parents who think that their children are not at par with their peers at school will most likely hire extra help from such tutors. Those tutors can also help you while completing your homework.

Well, homework help tutors can be actual physical people who you interact with or someone/something that you interact within a virtual space (online).

In either case, both can provide valuable information that can help you complete your homework.

Their experience as tutors and the academic information they possess guarantees that you will complete your homework and expect the best results. 

For example, if you have been given Chemistry homework and you feel that it is difficult to complete because you do not understand the concepts, you can seek homework help tutor

Maybe the grade you will get from the assignment will impact your final grade. Though you will have cheated, seeking help will save your grade.

Look out for our homework help services and see if you can get someone to walk your academic journey with you

This is one of the most effective and successful methods of cheating on essays, homework, and more without getting caught. You have legally or morally done nothing wrong.

6. Re-use previous papers from you or others

This method of cheating on essays, homework, and more can be very risky if not done wisely. As we have noted, some tools are used by institutions to check for plagiarism.

Tools such as SafeAssign and Turnitin can detect any overlaps between your submitted papers and other papers, essays, or works that are available within their databases.

If they detect any overlaps, then your paper has a degree of plagiarism that is dictated by the similarity index.

If the previous papers from you or others to be reused have been previously submitted through either of plagiarism checking tools, then your paper will be detected and rejected because of a high similarity index.

However, it should be noted that the two plagiarism checking tools use different databases and they do not check the other’s databases.

Therefore, it may be possible to reuse a paper that has been previously submitted using Turnitin by submitting it through SafeAssign and vice versa.

Turnitin stores all the papers that have been submitted through it to its database. In the case of SafeAssign, students and instructors can choose to donate those papers as resources.

The key thing to note is that most of the tools used to check for plagiarism have a mechanism of detecting papers that have been previously submitted through them.

Read our guide how to re-use previous papers without self-plagiarism and apply this crazy hack.

However, if your paper or another person’s paper has not been submitted through such tools, you can confidently reuse them.

 7. Smartly cheat your online tests

Some smart methods can be used by students to cheat during their online tests. One of the most commonly used methods is screen mirroring or sharing.

Since online tests are given to students from remote locations, you have the freedom to use more than one monitor.

Those monitors are used to simultaneously mirror the test questions to your smart friends who can provide answers.

The second method you can use to cheat during online tests is by using devices to cheat. Some Bluetooth devices are very tiny and undetectable.

You can place them strategically into your ear and use them to receive voiced answers from your smart friends or any other person you have hired to help you during the online test.

Another device you can use to cheat during online tests is your smartphone. They can store valuable information and answers. They are connected to the internet and you can search your answers on cheating websites like Sparknotes or more.

Another method that can be used to cheat during online tests is impersonation. Here, the candidate hires or uses another person to do the test on their behalf.

You can read our full guide how to cheat online tests and get some easy hacks that may help you escape being caught.

Administering online tests remotely allows the candidates to use impersonators who are more knowledgeable and are likely to attain good grades for the candidates. However, we give a disclaimer that such cheating in school is wrong , and you should try it at your own peril.

Though this is the case, most institutions are now administering online exams though proctored programs like web browsers and tools to avoid cheating incidences. 

8. Use free model essays to write your essays

Copying or using model essays/papers to write your essays/papers is also an effective method of cheating on essays, homework, and more. Model essays have been created by individuals who are well versed in the course content and its requirements.

Most likely, those individuals create those model essays/papers to guide or provide an actual example of how students should do their papers or essays. In most cases, the model essays or papers have been written or approved by the instructor. Therefore, they can be valuable assets when writing your paper or essay.

What you should note is that not all model essays or papers will completely match the assignment requirements given by your instructor.

Read our post on how to use completely free sample essays as models for your paper.

You should carefully check the contents and the context of the model essay or papers before copying or using them to write your essays or papers.

If by chance the model paper is similar to your assignment, you can proceed to copy the points in your paper or essay. However, do not copy-paste. Read our guide on paraphrasing hack 3 above.

If you decide to completely copy the model paper or essay, be sure to check for similarity through plagiarism checking tools such as Turnitin Self-Check, Grammarly, or any other tool. This will ensure that the paper does not exist within the databases of those tools. If they do exist, you can plagiarize or paraphrase wisely to avoid getting caught. If they do not exist, then you can copy and upload the paper as your own.

9. Have someone take your class online

As aforementioned, online classes and courses are administered remotely. Therefore, students and tutors do not physically interact. This gives students a lot of freedom to cheat. One of the methods is to have someone take your online class from the start to end. Due to proctoring tools and online authentication through biometrics and student IDs that are taken

during the start of the online course, having someone take the online class from the start will ensure that they will have assumed your identity. They will also do online proctored tests and exams without any problem.

Essay Cheat Sheet and Tips to improve your writing

1. use proofreading tools to polish your work.

Proofreading tools like Grammarly and writecheck can be very helpful when completing your essays.

They are easy to use and they make your work to be significantly easier.

At the same time, they will take lesser time and save you on the deadline.

When you are done writing your essay or research paper and you need to proofread your work to correct any grammatical errors, punctuation, and so on, you can just copy-paste or upload the file directly to the tool.

Some of the proofreading tools are free while others require a subscription fee.

Read our hacks on how to use Grammarly Premium version for free and see how it works.

Once uploaded, the tool will automatically detect any errors or issues within your paper. You can correct them as required.

2. Format your paper well – cite referencing, etc.

Formatting your paper well will guarantee more points. After you are done writing your paper, it is important to format it following the academic guidelines provided by your instructor.

The format will dictate the arrangement of your paper in terms of paragraphs, the in-text citations, presence or absence of endnotes or footnotes, and the placement of the bibliography/works cited/reference page.

Read our guide how to format papers in APA or MLA and get a quick lesson or essay hack on the same.

The common and acceptable formats include APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard. Be sure to follow the format dictated by your instructor to be graded.

Some instructors will not grade papers that do not follow the correct format that is well done.

You can hire one of our cheap essay writers from our website to proofread your work professionally.

3. Self-check your papers for plagiarism

This is also a very important step to do before submitting your paper. As we have noted earlier, most instructors will require you to submit your papers and essays through plagiarism checking tools such as SafeAssign and Turnitin.

However, some submissions can only be done once because they are taken as final copies rather than drafts. It is therefore important to perform a self-check through tools.

Read our guide on Turnitin Self-check alternatives and learn more.

Some of the tools discussed in that article include Turnitin’s Feedback Studio, Grammarly, PlagScan, DupliChecker, and so on before submitting your drafts as final copies.

4. Keep your plagiarism score within the acceptable range

Different institutions and instructors have different standards when it comes to plagiarism scores.

Some will be strict while others will be lenient depending on the course discipline and the writing prowess of the students.

Check out our post on the acceptable plagiarism score on Turnitin and know how not to surpass that level.

As a student, you should take note of the accepted range and try as much as possible to keep your plagiarism score within the acceptable range.

You will not be penalized due to plagiarized content if you keep your score within the acceptable range.

5. Follow online guides on how to write essays and papers

If you google or search the web for topics on how to write different types of papers, you will find several results.

Read our comprehensive guides how to write an essay and how to write research papers for detailed lessons.

Some many websites and blogs provide free guides on how to write different papers. You should however check the credibility of the online sources because some of them may misguide you.

Different papers will take different forms. The most credible sites will give you guidelines in terms of structure, outline, format, tone, and how to effectively cite sources.

6. Know the allowed plagiarism – easy essay cheat sheet

Different institutions and instructors have different standards when it comes to how much plagiarism is allowed. Some institutions or instructors will not allow students’ papers with a plagiarism score of more than 5%. Watch the video below to learn how to reduce your plagiarism.

Others can allow a score of below 25% while others can allow as much as 30% depending on the course’s discipline and the writing proficiency of the students.

If your instructor or institution allows or tolerates a plagiarism score of 30%, then you can plagiarize to that extent.

However, if they do not tolerate that (5% and below), then avoid plagiarism by using the aforementioned methods.

• Share on twitter
• Share on facebook

The college admission essay should be used as a cheating detector

Comparing students’ writing abilities in subsequent assignments with this yardstick could help combat contract cheating, says dave tomar.

• Share on linkedin
• Share on mail

For would-be college students sweating over the prospect of writing their admission essay for the application season, here’s a cheery thought. This will be the last writing checkpoint they will pass in their whole educational journey.

Get through this, and they will never again have to worry about being a competent writer. Or, at least, nobody will ever again try to make them into a competent writer. After all, once they’re in college, the assumption is that they already know how to write.

Except that we all know that this is by no means universally true. That is why I had enough customers to make a living during my decade of ghostwriting students’ papers. And that is why, more than a decade since my retirement from professional cheating, others like me continue to make a living .

When higher education was an elite pursuit, it was assumed that admitted students had all the basic educational tools needed to survive. It was also assumed that technical writing instruction was beneath the dignity of professors. But as educational opportunities multiplied in the second half of the 20th century, competition for space at the most prestigious institutions intensified. By necessity, their admissions process grew more complex.

Superficially speaking, the admission essay is designed to add colour and depth to each applicant’s academic profile. But, more importantly, it is the primary piece of evidence used to confirm that a college applicant has the basic ability to write.

This is important because, massification notwithstanding, college students still do not receive meaningful writing instruction. Yes, I’m aware of your school’s 100-level expository writing requirement; I built my early ghostwriting portfolio churning out these cookie-cutter assignments for struggling students. But they don’t work. That is, students who start college without the ability to write will probably leave college without the ability to write. Many of them will leave without a degree, too – and it is a desperate way to experience college.

It is high time we admitted that things need to change. Classical education is dead. Students go to college to develop practical skills for the 21st century workplace. These are not the same students as the less than 3 per cent of the college-aged population who attended an institution of higher learning in 1910 , armed with prep-school grooming and patrician breeding. It can no longer be assumed that students arrive with the basic academic skills needed to succeed. A 40 per cent non-completion rate within six years serves as pretty damning evidence to the contrary.

Certainly, if we are willing to enrol in college students who struggle to write, we must also be willing to support their academic needs, even if it means re-examining the relationship between college and basic writing instruction. And that could start with the admission essay. If we can use this first active writing sample to better identify and serve students who need meaningful, effective (and ideally ungraded) writing instruction, these students will become significantly less likely to cheat further down the line.

Of course, there will be those who are tempted to cheat on their admission essay, too. I’ve worked for some of them. I once completed an essay for a student applying to Brown University . The essay prompt invited the student “to tell us something more about yourself that would help us toward a sense of who you are, how you think, and what issues and ideas interest you most”. The customer – an aspiring doctor – instructed me to “throw some sort of hook that will make them really look at me. I need about 1,500 words that will we [sic].”

I have no way of knowing if he got into Brown – or the University of Pennsylvania , whose admission essay I also wrote for him. But using his admission essay as a diagnostic tool might have served as its own deterrent. Those like him who are tempted to fake their way through the admission process might be dissuaded by the thought that all their future writing could be measured against this ghostwritten sample. After all, buying your way through every single assignment over four years does not come cheap.

Moreover, those who wrote their own admission essay may be dissuaded from cheating on subsequent college assignments by the thought that this yardstick of their true writing ability exists.

Rather than treating the admission essay as the last writing checkpoint, then, it may be more intuitive to think of it as the first step in the intervention process.

Dave Tomar is a freelance writer and managing editor for Inflection Magazine . His latest book is The Complete Guide to Contract Cheating in Higher Education .

Register to continue

Why register?

• Registration is free and only takes a moment
• Once registered, you can read 3 articles a month
• Sign up for our newsletter

Or subscribe for unlimited access to:

• Unlimited access to news, views, insights & reviews
• Digital editions
• Digital access to THE’s university and college rankings analysis

Already registered or a current subscriber? Login

Related articles

Australia blocks access to biggest contract cheating websites

New cooperative approach targets biggest essay mills without need for court action

Judge contract cheating law ‘on culture change, not prosecutions’

Campaigners say English legislation unlikely to result in many prosecutions but will change student outlook on essay mills

Contract cheating requests ‘blatant and wide-ranging’

New research finds students paying low prices to cheat on introductory courses

AI bot poses as essay writer for hire to catch contract cheaters

Essay mill expert likens Georgia Tech’s tactics to entrapment

Reader's comments (2)

You might also like.

Embed climate change content in health degrees, experts say

Climate change is ‘exacerbating almost every type of illness’, and health graduates of all stripes must be geared up for it

Your students won’t read any more? Are you sure you’re paying attention?

Simplistic analyses belie the complex evolution of students, instruction, reading practices, college regulations and communications media, says Harvey Graff

• Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

Esther Perel on What the Other Woman Knows

The relationship expert reads one of the most controversial modern love essays ever published..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From “The New York Times,” I’m Anna Martin. This is “Modern Love.” Today, I’m talking to the most famous couples therapist in the world, Esther Perel. Esther’s books, “Mating in Captivity” and “State of Affairs,” have forced so many of us, myself included, to rethink our assumptions about love. Like maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the passion and fire we feel at the beginning of a relationship to last forever. And when one partner cheats on the other, what if it could actually bring the couple closer, instead of tearing them apart?

On her podcast, “Where Should We Begin,” Esther lets us eavesdrop on sessions with real couples. People come to her with impossible problems, and she somehow guides them to a breakthrough. She gives them hope. When I listen to Esther’s podcast, I feel like I’m getting a free therapy session, so I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when she told me that people come up to her in public all the time and ask her deeply personal questions.

The grocery store is one place, but airplanes is even better.

Oh, no, Esther. If I were you, I’d be really scared to fly.

[LAUGHS]: They’re suspended in the air, and they tell you lots of things. And it is often about, can trust be repaired when it’s been broken? Can you bring a spark back when it’s gone? Can you rekindle desire when it’s been dormant for so long? What do you do when you’re angry at yourself for having stayed when you think you should have left? Or what do you do when you’re angry at yourself when you’ve left and now you think you should have stayed?

You’re like, I’m just at the grocery store, man. I need to check out.

Clearly, people are struggling so much to be happy in long-term relationships that they’re cornering this woman basically everywhere she goes. And these things people ask Esther about, they’re exactly the kinds of high-stakes, make-or-break questions that come up in the essay she chose for our show today. It’s called “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity,” by Karin Jones.

Karin’s essay was one of the most controversial pieces ever published in the history of the “Modern Love” column. But when it comes to talking about sex and relationships, nothing is too taboo for Esther.

Esther Perel, welcome to “Modern Love.”

It’s a pleasure to be here.

So you’re going to read Karin Jones’s “Modern Love” essay. We’re going to talk all about infidelity. But before we get into that, I learned something about you that I need to know more about. You are fluent in nine languages. And you conduct therapy in seven of them? Is that true?

Yes. So I grew up in Belgium, in the Flemish part of Belgium, and I was educated in Flemish for 12 years. But we also spoke French and German and Polish and Yiddish at home.

So we had five languages in the house. And then I studied Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, and English. That comes to nine.

Would you ever do one more just to bring it to a solid 10?

I always wanted to study Arabic.

OK, in your free time, in your ample free time.

Are there certain languages that have better vocabulary for talking about the nuances of love and relationships than others?

That is a very difficult question to answer because my love language, the language in which I learned poetry, songs, novels, et cetera, was primarily French. And so, of course, I would say French. But that may be because I was inducted in it, rather than the language itself. What I can say is that certain cultures are more fluent in the language of feelings, love, relationships, and desire and sexuality than maybe English or Anglo cultures that are more pragmatic, more practical.

I think in therapy, sometimes, I find that there is certain cultures that allow me to speak differently about death, differently about the relationship of the individual to the collective. What I will say is this. In a therapy session, if a person tells me something and it needs to be said in his own language, I will ask them to translate it and to say it in their mother tongue, because you hear instantly the difference, the tone, the timber, the tremble.

And I know it. It’s like, I don’t even have to understand what they’re saying. I know that there is an authenticity and a truth to it that is very different. Sometimes, afterwards, I say, what did you say? But sometimes, I don’t even need to. I know when they say, “I feel alone,” “I ache for you,” “I miss you,” “where have you gone,” “I can’t forget you.” You don’t really need to understand the words to understand the effect.

Esther, the “Modern Love” essay you’re going to read for us today tackles a topic that I bet is very hard to talk about in almost any language. It’s called “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity” by Karin Jones. The author Karin is recently divorced, and she becomes the other woman to several men.

When I read that title, I kind of expect this story is going to be about all the sex she’s having or the secrets or how they’re hiding it. But you’ve worked with so many couples who are in the throes of dealing with cheating. So what does the word “infidelity” signal to you?

I wrote a book about infidelity. So I will say that one of my attempts in writing this book was to translate in writing the complexity of this experience that can be so shattering, that can fracture a family and an entire legacy. It needs more than just good, bad, victim, perpetrator, villain, saint. That there’s too much happening and for too many people that are involved to try to reduce it.

Infidelity is often about a lot of things, but sex. It’s about betrayal. It’s about violation of trust. It’s about lying. It’s about duplicity. It’s about deception. And sex is a piece of this, but that is not necessarily the only thing.

Oof. Esther, I am so excited to hear you read this. Whenever you’re ready.

OK. “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity” by Karin Jones.

“I’m not sure it’s possible to justify my liaison with married men, but what I learned from having them warrants discussion. Not between the wives and me, though I would be interested to hear their side. No, this discussion should happen between wives and husbands annually, the way we inspect the tire tread on the family car to avoid accidents.

A few years ago, while living in London, I dated married men for companionship while I processed the grief of being newly divorced.

When I created a profile on Tinder and on OkCupid saying I was looking for no strings attached encounters, plenty of single men messaged me, and I got together with several of them. But many married men messaged me, too.

After being married for 23 years, I wanted sex, but not a relationship. This is dicey because you can’t always control emotional attachments when body chemicals mix. But with the married man, I guess that the fact that they had wives, children, and mortgages would keep them from going overboard with their affections. And I was right. They didn’t get overly attached, and neither did I. We were safe bets for each other.

I was careful about the men I met. I wanted to make sure they had no interest in leaving their wives or otherwise threatening all they had built together. In a couple of cases, the men I met were married to women who had become disabled and could no longer be sexual, but the husbands remained devoted to them.

All told, I communicated with maybe a dozen men during that time in my life. I had sex with fewer than half. Others, I texted or talked with, which sometimes felt nearly as intimate. Before I met each man, I would ask, why are you doing this? I wanted assurance that all he desired was sex. What surprised me was that these husbands weren’t looking to have more sex. They were looking to have any sex.

I met one man whose wife had implicitly consented to her husband having a lover because she was no longer interested in sex at all. They both, to some degree, got what they needed without having to give up what they wanted. But the other husbands I met would have preferred to be having sex with their wives, and for whatever reason, that wasn’t happening.

I know what it feels like to go off sex, and I know what it’s like to want more than my partner. It’s also a tall order to have sex with the same person for more years than our ancestors ever hoped to live. Then, at menopause, a woman’s hormones suddenly drop, and her desire can wane. At 49, I was just about there myself and terrified of losing my desire for sex. Men don’t have this drastic change, so we have an imbalance, an elephant-sized problem so burdensome and shameful, we can scarcely muster the strength to talk about it.

If you read the work of Esther Perel, the author of the book ‘State of Affairs,’ you’ll learn that for many wives, sex outside of marriage is their way of breaking free from being the responsible spouses and mothers they have to be at home. Married sex for them often feels obligatory. An affair is adventure. Meanwhile, the husbands I spent time with would have been fine with obligatory sex. For them, adventure was not the main reason for their adultery.

The first time I saw my favorite married man pick up his pint of beer, the sleeve of his well-tailored suit pulled back from his wrist to reveal a geometric kaleidoscope of tattoos. He was clean shaven and well-mannered with a little rebel yell underneath. The night I saw the full canvas of his tattoo masterpiece, we drank prosecco, listened to ‘80s music, and, yes, had sex.

We also talked. I asked him, what if you said to your wife, look, I love you and the kids, but I need sex in my life? Can I just have the occasional fling or a casual affair? He sighed. If I asked her that kind of question, it would kill her, he said. So you don’t want to hurt her, but you lie to her instead? Personally, I’d rather know, I said.

It’s not necessarily a lie if you don’t confess the truth. It’s kind of to stay silent, he said. I’m just saying I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be afraid of talking honestly about my sex life with the man I’m married to, and that includes being able to at least raise the subject of sex outside of marriage, I said. Good luck with that, he said.

I never convinced any husband that he can be honest about what he was doing, but they were mostly good-natured about it, like a patient father responding to a child who keeps asking why, why, why. Maybe I was being too pragmatic about the issues that are loaded with guilt, resentment, and fear. After all, it’s far easier to talk theoretically about marriage than to navigate it.

But my attitude is that if my spouse were to need something I couldn’t give him, I wouldn’t keep him from getting it elsewhere, as long as he did so in a way that didn’t endanger our family. I suppose I would hope his needs would involve fishing trips or beers with friends, but sex is basic.

Physical intimacy with other human beings is essential to our health and well-being. So how do we deny such a need to the one that we care about most? If our primary relationship nourishes and stabilizes us, but lacks intimacy, we shouldn’t have to destroy our marriage to get that intimacy somewhere else. Should we?

I didn’t have a full-on affair with the tattooed husband. We slept together maybe four times over a few years. More often, we talked on the phone. After our second night together, though, I could tell this was about more than sex for him. He was desperate for affection. He said he wanted to be close to his wife, but couldn’t because they were unable to get past their fundamental disconnect — lack of sex. That led to a lack of closeness, which made sex even less likely, and then turned into resentment and blame.

I’m not saying the answer is non-monogamy. That can be rife with risks and unintended entanglements. I believe the answer is honesty and dialogue, no matter how frightening. Lack of sex in marriage is common, and it shouldn’t lead to shame and silence. By the same token, an affair doesn’t have to lead to the end of a marriage. What if an affair, or ideally, simply, the urge to have one, can be the beginning of a necessary conversation about sex and intimacy?

What these husbands couldn’t do was have the difficult discussion with their wives that would force them to tackle the issues at the root of their cheating. They tried to convince me that they were being kind by keeping their affairs secret. They seemed to have convinced themselves. But deception and lying are ultimately corrosive, not kind.

In the end, I had to wonder if what these men couldn’t face was something else altogether — hearing why their wives no longer wanted to have sex with them. It’s much easier after all to set up an account on Tinder.”

Thanks so much for that reading, Esther. You know, it’s so funny because Karin Jones directly quotes you in her piece. And I feel like that is the first time ever we’ve had someone read an essay where they’re directly quoted.

Did anything jump out at you as you were reading?

What jumps out is she tackles a lot of different things — the subject of what is sexual aliveness, what is it that people actually lose when they stop being sexual with their partner, and how that loss of intimacy makes the sex even more complicated. She talked about the loss, the longing that this man has. I’ve often said that at the heart of affairs, you find duplicity and cheating and betrayal, but you also find longing and loss for the life that one had, for the parts of oneself that have been denied.

When we come back, I talk to Esther about the harsh criticism this essay got and why Esther thinks Karin Jones deserves more credit. Stay with us.

So Esther, this essay by Karin Jones was kind of a lightning rod when it was published. A ton of people were very critical of the author, saying she was sleeping with these men, but then also having conversations with them where she was like, it’s very wrong of you not to tell your wife what you’re up to. Why do you think this essay got so much backlash?

I think that the reaction to stories of infidelity are often intense. It’s a subject for which people are very quickly dogmatic because they have experienced the effects of it.

When I am in an audience, like if I was to ask, have you been affected by the experience of infidelity in your life, either because one of your parents was unfaithful or because you yourself had a child of an illicit affair, or because you had a friend on whose shoulder somebody weeping, or you had a confidant of someone who is in a complete bliss of an affair, or because you are the third person in the triangle, and about 80 percent of the people will raise their hand.

Wow. I mean, 80 percent sounds like a surprisingly large number, but when you explain it like that with different tendrils of an affair that affect everyone around the affair, not just the people in it, it makes total sense.

And it raises intense feelings in people. Karin Jones, she may have gotten the range of it, but you will hear more loudly the ones who say, you are a homewrecker, which, by the way, does not exist in the masculine.

Right, right.

The homewrecker is always a woman because the woman is the one who says yes, and therefore, if the woman hadn’t said yes, then he wouldn’t be able to do it. And then he would not be wrecking his family.

Yeah, there’s no other man either, by the way. It’s always the other woman.

Huh, there’s no other man.

Not in any of nine languages you speak.

No, because there’s never been another man who necessarily was willing to live in the shadow of a woman for his entire life.

That is so fascinating.

Her lover, [INAUDIBLE] you know her lover, but the other woman usually means that she lives in the shadow. She doesn’t just have a secret. She is the secret. That is the hardest thing about it. When people are writing to her, you can ask yourself, are they looking from the perspective of what it meant for her, or are they looking from the perspective of what it did to me, or to us?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the criticism directed at Karin Jones, it seems, is coming from that perspective of saying, look what she did. Look at the harm she caused. Look at the pain she caused.

Which it is. Which it is.

Right, not discounting that, but it is interesting because her piece is so much about meaning making, right? That’s the whole conceit of her essay, is mining these experiences for meaning, and yet, people came with criticism. I wonder if this is like a kind of unfair question, but I wonder if there is an ethical way to be the other person. Is there a responsible way to do it without participating in hurt?

That depends. That depends. If you think the whole thing is unethical and is an egregious betrayal of trust and violation, then you will say no. I think the responsibility lies on the person who goes out, not on the lover.

Here’s what many people often say, is like, if you had asked me or if you had told me, but you made a decision without me. You made a decision about our marriage that did not involve me at all. And fair point. Of course, they know for a fact, too, that if they had been asked, they would have said no. But there is the things that you say after, and there is the things that you say before.

So, ultimately, I feel like I hear you agreeing with Karin Jones here that there are really important conversations that need to be happening between these husbands and their wives that actually don’t even have that much to do with Karin. Can you tell me more about that?

The conversation that Karin Jones would like these men to have with their wives is the conversations that take place in my book “Mating in Captivity,” because “Mating in Captivity” explored the dilemmas of desire inside relationships and why do people cease wanting. And could they want what they already have? And why does good sex fade, even in couples who still love each other as much as ever? And why do kids often deliver a fatal erotic blow?

What happens when they don’t have this conversation and they go elsewhere — and it’s not just a conversation about monogamy. It’s really a conversation of, what does sex mean to you? What do you want to experience in sex? Is it a place for connection?

Is it a place for transcendence, for spiritual union, to be naughty, to finally not be a good citizen, to be playful, to be taken care of, to surrender, to be safely dominant? What parts of you do you connect with through sexuality, rather than how often do we have sex, and we never have sex, and why don’t we do it more. So, that is a very different conversation.

But as Karin points to in her essay, and as you certainly point to in your book, those conversations are so difficult to have, even though this is the person we’re supposed to be the closest to. Why is that?

Because we grow up learning to be silent about sex and never talk about it. And then suddenly, we are expected to talk about it with the person we lov. Or in other words, sex is dirty, but save it for the one you love. It’s like we have very little practice talking about it.

We don’t get any of it in schools. Certainly, most families don’t talk about it either. And when we talk about sexuality, we talk about the dangers and the diseases and the dysfunctions. We don’t talk about intimacy. We don’t actually mix the word “sexuality” and “relationships” as one whole.

Yeah, and I mean, if we don’t talk about intimacy or the lack of it with a partner, that can, in some cases, lead to people going outside the marriage to find that intimacy they’re lacking in it. I’m thinking about Karin’s favorite married man, the one with all the tattoos. He says, it’s not necessarily a lie if you don’t confess the truth. It’s kinder to stay silent. In your experience working with couples, is he right? Is that true?

This is a very cultural question.

Because you live in a society here that believes in the moral cure of truth. But there are many societies for whom truth and honesty are not measured by the confession, but they are measured by what it will be like for the other person to walk with this on the street, meaning that they will consider the confession often as cruelty.

That, so what? So now you’ve got it off your chest. So now you’re less guilty, and now I have to live with this? Why don’t you just keep this to yourself, kind of thing. This is very cultural because in the United States, that is not the common view.

The common view is that the confession is the best state, even if you’re going to wreck the other person’s life for the next five years to come, which — and I am left with a question mark. But when I answer this question, I ask people about their own cultural codes as well. I do not impose mine. And mine fluctuates depending on the context. I think these questions are highly contextual, more than dogmatic.

We’ve talked about how there’s so many unsaid things between a couple that can lead to distance and infidelity. If a couple is feeling themselves drifting apart from each other emotionally, sexually, both, what are some things you could encourage them to do that might help?

Hmm. I like to coach people to do letter writing. Sometimes I make one person turn their back, and I make the other person write a letter on the back of the other person.

Oh, physically on the back?

Yes, but it’s a fake. You’re writing — you’re pretending to write, but you’re writing on the back. But that way, you don’t see the person.

Interesting.

Hi, Anna. This is something that I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time. And I give them the prompt. We never talk much about sexuality between us. For some reason, I decided a long time ago that you wouldn’t want to. But maybe it was I who didn’t know how to. And basically, they write these whole letters, in which they end up telling each other much of what they have never spoken.

I love that. What a kind and beautiful and compassionate way of easing into a conversation you’ve been afraid of having. Esther Perel, thank you so much for that idea. And thank you for talking with me today.

Thank you for having me.

Esther Perel is on tour in the US right now. Her show is called An Evening with Esther Perel, The Future of Relationships, Love, and Desire. Check her website for more details and to buy tickets. She told me she’s going to create an erotic experience in these theaters, so you do not want to miss that.

“Modern Love” is produced by Julia Botero, Chrstina Djossa, Reva Goldberg, Davis Land, and Emily Lange. It’s edited by our executive producer Jen Poyant and Davis Land. The “Modern Love” theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Rowan Niemisto, Carole Sabouraud, and Diane Wong.

This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez. Our show was recorded by Maddy Masiello. Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly. The “Modern Love” column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of “Modern Love” projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.

• April 17, 2024   •   35:54 Why John Magaro of ‘Past Lives’ Could Never Love a Picky Eater
• April 10, 2024   •   29:18 Esther Perel on What the Other Woman Knows
• April 3, 2024   •   27:31 The Second Best Way to Get Divorced, According to Maya Hawke
• March 27, 2024   •   32:38 How to Be Real With Your Kids
• March 20, 2024   •   32:14 Why Samin Nosrat Is Now ‘Fully YOLO’
• March 13, 2024   •   32:32 Brittany Howard Sings Through the Pangs of New Love
• March 6, 2024   •   33:21 Novelist Celeste Ng on the Big Power of Little Things
• February 28, 2024   •   37:46 Three Powerful Lessons About Love
• February 23, 2024   •   33:45 Modern Love at the Movies: Our Favorite Oscar-Worthy Love Stories
• February 21, 2024   •   25:21 A Politics Reporter Walks Into a Singles Mixer
• February 14, 2024   •   28:39 Un-Marry Me!
• December 6, 2023   •   29:18 I Married My Subway Crush

Hosted by Anna Martin

Produced by Julia Botero ,  Christina Djossa ,  Reva Goldberg and Emily Lang

Edited by Jen Poyant and Davis Land

Engineered by Daniel Ramirez

Original music by Pat McCusker ,  Marion Lozano ,  Carole Sabouraud ,  Rowan Niemisto ,  Diane Wong and Dan Powell

Listen and follow Modern Love Apple Podcasts | Spotify

‘at the heart of affairs, you find duplicity and cheating and betrayal, but you also find longing and loss for the life that one had, for the parts of oneself that have been denied’.

Over the last two decades, Esther Perel has become a world-famous couples therapist by persistently advocating frank conversations about infidelity, sex and intimacy. Today, Perel reads one of the most provocative Modern Love essays ever published: “ What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity ,” by Karin Jones.

In her 2018 essay, Jones wrote about her experience seeking out no-strings-attached flings with married men after her divorce. What she found, to her surprise, was how much the men missed having sex with their own wives, and how afraid they were to tell them.

Jones faced a heavy backlash after the essay was published. Perel reflects on why conversations around infidelity are still so difficult and why she thinks Jones deserves more credit.

Esther Perel is on tour in the U.S. Her show is called “An Evening With Esther Perel: The Future of Relationships, Love & Desire.” Check her website for more details.

Links to transcripts of episodes generally appear on these pages within a week.

Modern Love is hosted by Anna Martin and produced by Julia Botero, Reva Goldberg, Emily Lang and Christina Djossa. The show is edited by Davis Land and Jen Poyant, our executive producer. The show is mixed by Daniel Ramirez and recorded by Maddy Masiello. It features original music by Pat McCusker, Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Carole Sabouraud, Rowan Niemisto and Diane Wong. Our theme music is by Dan Powell.

Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Kate LoPresti, Lisa Tobin, Daniel Jones, Miya Lee, Mahima Chablani, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, Isabella Anderson, Reyna Desai, Renan Borelli, Nina Lassam and Julia Simon.

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] . Want more from Modern Love ? Read past stories . Watch the TV series and sign up for the newsletter . We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “ Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption ” and “ Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less .”

Advertisement

94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best cheating topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ good research topics about cheating, 👍 simple & easy cheating essay titles, ❓ questions about cheating.

• Education: Why Do Students Cheat? Lack of adequate skills and knowledge are some of the reasons that lead to the loss of confidence by students. Teachers should evaluate their students in order to determine the most important teaching methods that […]
• Consequences of a College Student Cheating in Exams Another effect of cheating in exams is that the honest present and even the future students in the system also suffer from the cheating behaviour. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Why People Cheat In the world of sports, a lot of people have been perplexed by the tendencies of great teams to cheat despite prior warning regarding the consequences of cheating.
• “Why We Cheat” by Fang Ferric and Arturo Casadevall For example, if students cheat in class, their peers may start to do so too when they see that there is no punishment for lying. It is possible to say that many humans cheat because […]
• Cheating in High Schools: Issue Analysis It is, therefore, right to say that cheating is widespread in every part of the world, and it is escalating in all levels of education.
• Why Students Cheat in Public Schools? However, even some of the students who retain a suitable connection to school take part in cheating. The majorities are found in public institutions and are a much diversified set of students.
• Academic Integrity: Addressing Contract Cheating It is also worth noting that academic integrity is an aspect that one acquires and develops in the process of gaining experience and awareness of the importance of such things as honesty and responsibility.
• Trust & Threat Messaging and Academic Cheating Each student was randomly assigned to one of the four conditions, with 71 in the traditional exam condition, 81 in the collective-punishment trust-exam condition, 82 in the individual-punishment trust-exam condition, and 62 in the no-punishment […]
• Problem of Cheating in Nursing Programs The most common types of cheating in nursing include copying tests and homework, referring to materials during tests, and collaborations without permission. Investigations on the causes of academic dishonesty acts are critical to achieving academic […]
• The Consequences of School Cheating Cheating also leads to corrupted morals since students begin to cheat more frequently and try to rationalize their dishonesty. Academic dishonesty also affects personal relationships since friends and family can begin to question one’s honesty […]
• Cheating in the Test: Issue Review He may have believed that the college entrance exam is not very significant at the moment and that there is nothing wrong in cheating for a test which will decide whether he should be admitted […]
• Why College Students Cheat: Discussion In the case of the Internet, it has become a tool for students to cheat because information is readily at their fingertips.
• Is Cheating Okay or Not: Discussion The one involved in cheating is seen to do so at the expense of others and with the aim of getting more where one has invested less.
• Using Technology to Cheat: Discussion Easy access to the internet is one of the reason why there has been a drop in academic honesty and responsibility specifically in the case of plagiarism as there are indications of extensive plagiarism in […]
• Cognitive Dissonance in Dealing With Exam Cheating John’s plan was to use less than two hours in the test with a plan to utilize the rest of the time texting his friends.
• Group Learning and Cheating in Classrooms The aim of the project is to clarify the conditions under which students should work, evaluate the conditions students create independently, observe how different students can work in groups, and introduce new approaches to how […]
• Students’ Behavior and Cheating During Exams Another aspect demonstrating that the research does not warrant an informed consent is the consideration that an informed consent may diminish the merits of the research.
• Signs of Cheating in Oral or Written Statements The second signal of deception is the reference to past events using the present tense. The eighth reason to question whether the interviewee is telling the truth or not is the lack of detail.
• Cheating and Plagiarism in Academic Settings Their main task is to show that the main objective of learning is to gain knowledge and skills, and that education cannot be reduced only to good grades and recognition of other people. This is […]
• Cheating: Making It a Teachable Moment This statement implies that the initiative of the authority to curb the vice of exam cheating should take into account the efforts of the both the teachers and students in a bid to obtain relevant […]
• Academic Integrity: Cheating and Plagiarism Instructors need to understand their students to find out what drives them to cheat in exams. Administrators and other stakeholders in educational institutions, need to discourage their students from cheating, to ensure they maintain high […]
• Reasons for Academic Cheating The students are on the other hand have to yield for the pressure and the easiest way of enabling this is by cheating in the examination.
• Cheating in the Internet The presence of ecommerce has increased the number of fraudulent deals in the internet. However, with the increasing number of transactions in the internet, fraudsters are taking advantage of the situation.
• Why Kids at Harvard Cheat It is a compelling issue to have students cheating in their examinations as this beats the logic and sole purpose of learning.
• Cheating in the Universities or in the Schools Cheating is condemned in the academic discipline as that which undermines academic integrity of the learner at different levels of their academic pursuits by causing students gain academic grades that do not reflect the academic […]
• Cheating, Gender Roles, and the Nineteenth-Century Croquet Craze The author’s main thesis is, “Yet was this, in fact, how the game was played on the croquet lawns of the nineteenth century?” Whereas authors of croquet manuals and magazines emphasize so much on the […]
• Cheating Plagiarism Issues Cheating in exams and assignments among college and university students is in the rise due to the access of the internet and poor culture where integrity is not a key aspect.
• Cheating on College Exams is Demoralizing The research focuses on the effect of cheating on the college exams. Indeed, cheating on the college tests is a transgression of the school’s policies.
• Marginal Analysis of Cheating Of the various forms of cheating in existence, arguably the most prevalent one is the use of cheat notes. The major disadvantage of this cheating technique is that there exists physical evidence of the cheating […]
• The Auditor and the Firm: A Simple Model of Corporate Cheating and Intermediation
• Cheating, Incentives, and Money Manipulation
• Marriage and High Technology: The Behavior of Cheating in Relationships
• Separating Will From Grace: An Experiment on Conformity and Awareness in Cheating
• Individual and Group Cheating Behavior: A Field Experiment With Adolescents
• Cheating and Loss Aversion: Do People Lie More to Avoid a Loss
• Firm-Oriented Policies, Tax Cheating, and Perverse Outcomes
• Does Bad Company Corrupt Good Morals? Social Bonding and Academic Cheating Among Teens
• Cheating, Its Consequences, and Findings on Cheating
• Cheating More for Less: Upward Social Comparisons Motivate the Poorly Compensated to Cheat
• Careful Cheating: People Cheat Groups Rather Than Individuals
• Cheating Spouse Infidelity Investigations
• Efficient Redistribution Using Quotas and Subsidies in the Presence of Misrepresentation and Cheating
• Cheating Ourselves: The Economics of Tax Evasion
• “But Everybody’s Doing It!”: A Model of Peer Effects on Student Cheating
• Decision Frame and Opportunity as Determinants of Tax Cheating: An International Experimental Study
• Marketable Permits, Market Power, and Cheating
• Academic Dishonesty: Internet Cheating
• Cheating and Technology: How Modern Technology Has Affected Education
• Honesty and Intermediation: Corporate Cheating, Auditor Involvement and the Implications for Development
• Can Cheat the Cheater: Consequences of Cheating
• Attitudes Toward Cheating Behavior Among College Students
• Cheating and Incentives: Learning From a Policy Experiment
• Cheating for Fun and Profit: If You Over-Fill, You Are Cheating Yourself; If You Under-Fill, You Are Cheating the Customer
• Cheating Explained Through Sociological Concepts
• Academic Dishonesty and Prevalent Cheating Strategy
• Dismissal Students From College for Cases of Cheating or Plagiarism
• Cheating for the Common Good in a Macroeconomic Policy Game
• Tax Evasion: Cheating Rationally or Deciding Emotionally
• Sabotaging Another: Priming Competition Increases Cheating Behavior in Tournaments
• Competition and Extrinsic Motivation as Predictors of Academic Cheating
• Catching Cheating Teachers: The Results of an Unusual Experiment
• The Impact of the VW Emission-Cheating Scandal on the Interrelation Between Large Automakers’ Equity and Credit Markets
• Cheating, Emotions, and Rationality: An Experiment on Tax Evasion
• Disguising Lies—Image Concerns and Partial Lying in Cheating Games
• All-Time Cheaters Versus Cheaters in Distress: An Examination of Cheating and Oil Prices in OPEC
• Cheating: The Ethical Dilemma All Junior Officers Face
• Episodic Future: Thinking About the Ideal Self Induces Lower Discounting, Leading to a Decreased Tendency Toward Cheating
• The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
• Revisiting Revise: Testing Unique and Combined Effects of Reminding, Visibility, and Self-Engagement Manipulations on Cheating Behavior
• Are Competition and Extrinsic Motivation Reliable Predictors of Academic Cheating?
• Are Students Cheating Due to Pressure?
• Does Competition Enhance Performance or Cheating?
• Does Gen Z’s Emotional Intelligence Promote Cheating?
• Has Cheating Become the New Fair Play?
• How Chinese Students Are Cheating To Get Into U.S.?
• How Educators Are Preventing High-Tech Cheating?
• How Income and Tax Rates Provoke Cheating?
• Why Academic Cheating Occurs?
• Why Cheating and Plagiarism Are on the Rise?
• Why Schools Should Crack Down on Cheating?
• What Is the Major Cause of Academic Cheating?
• Why Is Academic Cheating a Problem?
• How Can Cheating in School Affect Your Future?
• What Are the Effect of Cheating?
• How Do You Deal with a Cheating Student?
• What Should a Teacher Do to a Student Caught Cheating?
• What Does Cheating Mean in School?
• What Are the Five Types of Cheating?
• How Common Is Cheating in School?
• What Leads to Cheating in School?
• Why Students Should Stop Cheating?
• Why Is Cheating in Schools Getting Worse?
• What Are the Advantages of Cheating?
• How Often Do Students Get Caught Cheating?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/cheating-essay-topics/

"94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 2 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/cheating-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 2 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/cheating-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/cheating-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/cheating-essay-topics/.

• Academic Dishonesty Research Ideas
• Freakonomics Topics
• Plagiarism Research Ideas
• Business Failure Ideas
• Problem Solving Essay Ideas
• Conflict Research Topics
• Cyber Bullying Essay Ideas
• Government Regulation Titles
• Social Justice Essay Ideas
• Victimology Research Ideas
• College Students Research Ideas
• Integrity Questions
• Motivation Research Ideas
• Bitcoin Research Topics
• Ethical Dilemma Titles

• Features for Creative Writers
• Features for Work
• Features for Higher Education
• Features for Teachers
• Features for Non-Native Speakers
• Learn Blog Grammar Guide Community Events FAQ
• Grammar Guide

Essay Checker: Free Online Paper Corrector

Your Best Chance for an A+ Essay. Try Our Free Essay Checker Below.

Start typing, paste, or use

Get more suggestions to enhance this text and all your future writing

Your suggestions will show once you've entered some text.

Great job! We didn't find any suggestions in your text.

Why Should You Use a Free Essay Checker?

The simple answer? Good grammar is necessary, but it’s not easy. You've already done countless hours of research to write the essay. You don’t want to spend countless hours correcting it, too.

You'll get a better grade

Good grammar or its absence can determine if you get a good grade or a failing one. Impress your lecturer not just with how grammatically sound your writing is, but how clear it is and how it flows.

You'll save time

Essay writing can be a long and tedious process. ProWritingAid's essay checker saves you the hassle by acting as the first line of defense against pesky grammar issues.

You'll become a better writer

Essay writing is a particular skill and one that becomes better with practice. Every time you run your essay through ProWritingAid’s essay corrector, you get to see what your common mistakes are and how to fix them.

Good Writing = Good Grades

It’s already hard to know what to write in an essay. Don’t let grammar mistakes hinder your writing and prevent you from getting a good grade. ProWritingAid’s essay checker will help you write your best essay yet. Since the checker is powered by AI, using it means that grammar errors don’t stand a chance. Give your professors something to look forward to reading with clear, concise, and professional writing.

How Does ProWritingAid’s Essay Checker Work?

Your goal in essay writing is to convey your message as best as possible. ProWritingAid's essay checker is the first step towards doing this.

Get Rid of Spelling Errors

ProWritingAid’s essay checker will show you what it thinks are spelling errors and present you with possible corrections. If a word is flagged and it’s actually spelt correctly you can always choose to ignore the suggestion.

Fix Grammar Errors

Professors aren’t fans of poor grammar because it interrupts your message and makes your essay hard to understand. ProWritingAid will run a grammar check on your paper to ensure that your message is precise and is being communicated the way you intended.

Get Rid of Punctuation Mistakes

A missing period or comma here and there may not seem that serious, but you’ll lose marks for punctuation errors. Run ProWritingAid’s paper checker to use the correct punctuation marks every time and elevate your writing.

Improve Readability

Make sure that in the grand scheme your language is not too complicated. The essay checker's built in readability report will show if your essay is easy or hard to read. It specifically zones in on paragraphs that might be difficult to read so you can review them.

What Else Can the Essay Checker Do?

The editing tool analyzes your text and highlights a variety of key writing issues, such as overused words, incohesive sentence structures, punctuation issues, repeated phrases, and inconsistencies.

You don’t need to drown your essay in words just to meet the word count. ProWritingAid’s essay checker will help to make your words more effective. You'll get to construct your arguments and make sure that every word you use builds towards a meaningful conclusion.

Transition words help to organize your ideas by showing the relationship between them. The essay checker has a built in Transition report that highlights and shows the percentage of transitions used in your essay. Use the results to add transitions where necessary.

An engaging essay has sentences of varying lengths. Don’t bore your professor with long, rambling sentences. The essay checker will show you where you need to break long sentences into shorter sentences, or add more sentence length variation.

Generally, in scholarly writing, with its emphasis on precision and clarity, the active voice is preferred. However, the passive voice is acceptable in some instances. When you run your essay through ProWritingAid’s essay checker, you get feedback on whether you 'r e using the passive or active voice to convey your idea.

There are academic specific power verbs like appraise , investigate , debunk , support , etc., that can add more impact to your argument by giving a more positive and confident tone. The essay checker will check your writing for power verbs and notify you if you have less than three throughout your essay.

It's easy to get attached to certain phrases and use them as crutches in your essays but this gives the impression of boring and repetitive writing. The essay checker will highlight your repeats and suggest contextually relevant alternatives.

Gain access to in-house blog reports on citations, how to write a thesis statement, how to write a conclusion, and more. Venture into a world of resources specific to your academic needs.

What Kinds of Papers Does ProWritingAid Correct?

No matter what you’re writing, ProWritingAid will adapt and show you where your edits are needed most.

• Argumentative
• Descriptive
• Textual Analysis
• Lab reports
• Case studies
• Literature reviews
• Presentations
• Dissertations
• Research papers

Professors and students love using ProWritingAid

If you're an English teacher, you need to take a look at this tool - it reinforces what you're teaching, highlights strengths and weaknesses, and makes it easier to personalize instruction.

Jennifer Gonzales

Only reason I managed to get an A in all my freshmen composition classes.

Chris Layton

Great tool for academic work. Easy to use and the reports and summary evaluation of your documents in several categories is very useful. So much more than spelling and grammar!

Debra Callender

Questions & Answers

1. how do i use the essay checker online tool.

You can either copy and paste your essay in the essay checker field or upload your essay from your computer. Your suggestions will show once you enter text. You’ll see a number of possible grammar and spelling issues. Sign up for free to get unlimited suggestions to improve your writing style, grammar, and sentence structure. Avoid unintentional plagiarism with a premium account.

2. Does the essay checker work with British English and American English?

The essay checker works with both British English and American English. Just choose the one you would like to use and your corrections will reflect this.

3. Is using an essay checker cheating?

No. The essay checker won’t ever write the essay for you. It will point out possible edits and advise you on changes you need to make. You have full autonomy and get to decide which changes to accept.

4. Will the essay checker auto-correct my work?

The essay writing power remains in your hands. You choose which suggestions you want to accept and you can ignore those that you don’t think apply.

5. Is there a student discount?

Students who have an eligible student email address can get 20% off ProWritingAid Premium. Email [email protected] from your student email address to access your discount.

6. Does ProWritingAid have a plagiarism checker?

Yes! ProWritingAid’s plagiarism checker will check your work against over a billion web-pages, published works, and academic papers, so you can be sure of its originality. Find out more about pricing for plagiarism checks here .

A good grade is closer than you think

Drop us a line or let's stay in touch via :

Places on our 2024 summer school are filling fast. Don’t miss out. Enrol now to avoid disappointment

• 40 Useful Words and Phrases for Top-Notch Essays

To be truly brilliant, an essay needs to utilise the right language. You could make a great point, but if it’s not intelligently articulated, you almost needn’t have bothered.

Developing the language skills to build an argument and to write persuasively is crucial if you’re to write outstanding essays every time. In this article, we’re going to equip you with the words and phrases you need to write a top-notch essay, along with examples of how to utilise them.

It’s by no means an exhaustive list, and there will often be other ways of using the words and phrases we describe that we won’t have room to include, but there should be more than enough below to help you make an instant improvement to your essay-writing skills.

If you’re interested in developing your language and persuasive skills, Oxford Royale offers summer courses at its Oxford Summer School , Cambridge Summer School , London Summer School , San Francisco Summer School and Yale Summer School . You can study courses to learn english , prepare for careers in law , medicine , business , engineering and leadership.

General explaining

Let’s start by looking at language for general explanations of complex points.

1. In order to

Usage: “In order to” can be used to introduce an explanation for the purpose of an argument. Example: “In order to understand X, we need first to understand Y.”

2. In other words

Usage: Use “in other words” when you want to express something in a different way (more simply), to make it easier to understand, or to emphasise or expand on a point. Example: “Frogs are amphibians. In other words, they live on the land and in the water.”

3. To put it another way

Usage: This phrase is another way of saying “in other words”, and can be used in particularly complex points, when you feel that an alternative way of wording a problem may help the reader achieve a better understanding of its significance. Example: “Plants rely on photosynthesis. To put it another way, they will die without the sun.”

4. That is to say

Usage: “That is” and “that is to say” can be used to add further detail to your explanation, or to be more precise. Example: “Whales are mammals. That is to say, they must breathe air.”

5. To that end

Usage: Use “to that end” or “to this end” in a similar way to “in order to” or “so”. Example: “Zoologists have long sought to understand how animals communicate with each other. To that end, a new study has been launched that looks at elephant sounds and their possible meanings.”

Adding additional information to support a point

Students often make the mistake of using synonyms of “and” each time they want to add further information in support of a point they’re making, or to build an argument . Here are some cleverer ways of doing this.

6. Moreover

Usage: Employ “moreover” at the start of a sentence to add extra information in support of a point you’re making. Example: “Moreover, the results of a recent piece of research provide compelling evidence in support of…”

7. Furthermore

Usage:This is also generally used at the start of a sentence, to add extra information. Example: “Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that…”

8. What’s more

Usage: This is used in the same way as “moreover” and “furthermore”. Example: “What’s more, this isn’t the only evidence that supports this hypothesis.”

9. Likewise

Usage: Use “likewise” when you want to talk about something that agrees with what you’ve just mentioned. Example: “Scholar A believes X. Likewise, Scholar B argues compellingly in favour of this point of view.”

10. Similarly

Usage: Use “similarly” in the same way as “likewise”. Example: “Audiences at the time reacted with shock to Beethoven’s new work, because it was very different to what they were used to. Similarly, we have a tendency to react with surprise to the unfamiliar.”

11. Another key thing to remember

Usage: Use the phrase “another key point to remember” or “another key fact to remember” to introduce additional facts without using the word “also”. Example: “As a Romantic, Blake was a proponent of a closer relationship between humans and nature. Another key point to remember is that Blake was writing during the Industrial Revolution, which had a major impact on the world around him.”

12. As well as

Usage: Use “as well as” instead of “also” or “and”. Example: “Scholar A argued that this was due to X, as well as Y.”

13. Not only… but also

Usage: This wording is used to add an extra piece of information, often something that’s in some way more surprising or unexpected than the first piece of information. Example: “Not only did Edmund Hillary have the honour of being the first to reach the summit of Everest, but he was also appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.”

14. Coupled with

Usage: Used when considering two or more arguments at a time. Example: “Coupled with the literary evidence, the statistics paint a compelling view of…”

15. Firstly, secondly, thirdly…

Usage: This can be used to structure an argument, presenting facts clearly one after the other. Example: “There are many points in support of this view. Firstly, X. Secondly, Y. And thirdly, Z.

16. Not to mention/to say nothing of

Usage: “Not to mention” and “to say nothing of” can be used to add extra information with a bit of emphasis. Example: “The war caused unprecedented suffering to millions of people, not to mention its impact on the country’s economy.”

Words and phrases for demonstrating contrast

When you’re developing an argument, you will often need to present contrasting or opposing opinions or evidence – “it could show this, but it could also show this”, or “X says this, but Y disagrees”. This section covers words you can use instead of the “but” in these examples, to make your writing sound more intelligent and interesting.

17. However

Usage: Use “however” to introduce a point that disagrees with what you’ve just said. Example: “Scholar A thinks this. However, Scholar B reached a different conclusion.”

18. On the other hand

Usage: Usage of this phrase includes introducing a contrasting interpretation of the same piece of evidence, a different piece of evidence that suggests something else, or an opposing opinion. Example: “The historical evidence appears to suggest a clear-cut situation. On the other hand, the archaeological evidence presents a somewhat less straightforward picture of what happened that day.”

19. Having said that

Usage: Used in a similar manner to “on the other hand” or “but”. Example: “The historians are unanimous in telling us X, an agreement that suggests that this version of events must be an accurate account. Having said that, the archaeology tells a different story.”

20. By contrast/in comparison

Usage: Use “by contrast” or “in comparison” when you’re comparing and contrasting pieces of evidence. Example: “Scholar A’s opinion, then, is based on insufficient evidence. By contrast, Scholar B’s opinion seems more plausible.”

21. Then again

Usage: Use this to cast doubt on an assertion. Example: “Writer A asserts that this was the reason for what happened. Then again, it’s possible that he was being paid to say this.”

22. That said

Usage: This is used in the same way as “then again”. Example: “The evidence ostensibly appears to point to this conclusion. That said, much of the evidence is unreliable at best.”

Usage: Use this when you want to introduce a contrasting idea. Example: “Much of scholarship has focused on this evidence. Yet not everyone agrees that this is the most important aspect of the situation.”

Adding a proviso or acknowledging reservations

Sometimes, you may need to acknowledge a shortfalling in a piece of evidence, or add a proviso. Here are some ways of doing so.

24. Despite this

Usage: Use “despite this” or “in spite of this” when you want to outline a point that stands regardless of a shortfalling in the evidence. Example: “The sample size was small, but the results were important despite this.”

25. With this in mind

Usage: Use this when you want your reader to consider a point in the knowledge of something else. Example: “We’ve seen that the methods used in the 19th century study did not always live up to the rigorous standards expected in scientific research today, which makes it difficult to draw definite conclusions. With this in mind, let’s look at a more recent study to see how the results compare.”

26. Provided that

Usage: This means “on condition that”. You can also say “providing that” or just “providing” to mean the same thing. Example: “We may use this as evidence to support our argument, provided that we bear in mind the limitations of the methods used to obtain it.”

27. In view of/in light of

Usage: These phrases are used when something has shed light on something else. Example: “In light of the evidence from the 2013 study, we have a better understanding of…”

28. Nonetheless

Usage: This is similar to “despite this”. Example: “The study had its limitations, but it was nonetheless groundbreaking for its day.”

29. Nevertheless

Usage: This is the same as “nonetheless”. Example: “The study was flawed, but it was important nevertheless.”

30. Notwithstanding

Usage: This is another way of saying “nonetheless”. Example: “Notwithstanding the limitations of the methodology used, it was an important study in the development of how we view the workings of the human mind.”

Giving examples

Good essays always back up points with examples, but it’s going to get boring if you use the expression “for example” every time. Here are a couple of other ways of saying the same thing.

31. For instance

Example: “Some birds migrate to avoid harsher winter climates. Swallows, for instance, leave the UK in early winter and fly south…”

32. To give an illustration

Example: “To give an illustration of what I mean, let’s look at the case of…”

Signifying importance

When you want to demonstrate that a point is particularly important, there are several ways of highlighting it as such.

33. Significantly

Usage: Used to introduce a point that is loaded with meaning that might not be immediately apparent. Example: “Significantly, Tacitus omits to tell us the kind of gossip prevalent in Suetonius’ accounts of the same period.”

34. Notably

Usage: This can be used to mean “significantly” (as above), and it can also be used interchangeably with “in particular” (the example below demonstrates the first of these ways of using it). Example: “Actual figures are notably absent from Scholar A’s analysis.”

35. Importantly

Usage: Use “importantly” interchangeably with “significantly”. Example: “Importantly, Scholar A was being employed by X when he wrote this work, and was presumably therefore under pressure to portray the situation more favourably than he perhaps might otherwise have done.”

Summarising

You’ve almost made it to the end of the essay, but your work isn’t over yet. You need to end by wrapping up everything you’ve talked about, showing that you’ve considered the arguments on both sides and reached the most likely conclusion. Here are some words and phrases to help you.

36. In conclusion

Usage: Typically used to introduce the concluding paragraph or sentence of an essay, summarising what you’ve discussed in a broad overview. Example: “In conclusion, the evidence points almost exclusively to Argument A.”

37. Above all

Usage: Used to signify what you believe to be the most significant point, and the main takeaway from the essay. Example: “Above all, it seems pertinent to remember that…”

38. Persuasive

Usage: This is a useful word to use when summarising which argument you find most convincing. Example: “Scholar A’s point – that Constanze Mozart was motivated by financial gain – seems to me to be the most persuasive argument for her actions following Mozart’s death.”

39. Compelling

Usage: Use in the same way as “persuasive” above. Example: “The most compelling argument is presented by Scholar A.”

40. All things considered

Usage: This means “taking everything into account”. Example: “All things considered, it seems reasonable to assume that…”

How many of these words and phrases will you get into your next essay? And are any of your favourite essay terms missing from our list? Let us know in the comments below, or get in touch here to find out more about courses that can help you with your essays.

At Oxford Royale Academy, we offer a number of  summer school courses for young people who are keen to improve their essay writing skills. Click here to apply for one of our courses today, including law , business , medicine  and engineering .

Comments are closed.

ChatGPT essay cheats are a menace to us all

Students who outsource their thinking to ai tools pose a risk to future employers and more.

The number of students using AI tools like ChatGPT to write papers was a bigger problem than the public was being told. Photograph: Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images

The other day I met a British academic who said something about artificial intelligence that made my jaw drop.

The number of students using AI tools like ChatGPT to write their papers was a much bigger problem than the public was being told, this person said.

AI cheating at their institution was now so rife that large numbers of students had been expelled for academic misconduct — to the point that some courses had lost most of a year’s intake. “I’ve heard similar figures from a few universities,” the academic told me.

Spotting suspicious essays could be easy, because when students were asked why they had included certain terms or data sources not mentioned on the course, they were baffled. “They have clearly never even heard of some of the terms that turn up in their essays.”

Trinity Business School dean: ‘AI brings a huge threat to people’s ability to learn and to upskill’

We must do more to welcome Irish people returning home

Buyers of older homes may pay thousands more per year in mortgage repayments

Family affairs: How Ireland’s newly rich are putting money to work in secretive firms

But detection is only half the battle. Getting administrators to address the problem can be fraught, especially when the cheaters are international students who pay higher fees than locals. Because universities rely heavily on those fees, some administrators take a dim view of efforts to expose the problem. Or as this person put it, “whistleblowing is career-threatening”.

There is more at stake here than the injustice of cheats getting an advantage over honest students. Consider the prospect of allegedly expert graduates heading out into the world and being recruited into organisations, be it a health service or a military, where they are put into positions for which they are underqualified.

So how widespread is the cheating problem?

Panic about ChatGPT transforming educational landscapes took off as soon as the tool was launched in November 2022 and since then, the technology has only advanced. As I type these words, colleagues at the Financial Times have reported that OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, and Meta are set to release souped-up AI models capable of reasoning and planning.

But AI’s exact impact on classrooms is unclear.

In the US, Stanford University researchers said last year that cheating rates did not appear to have been affected by AI. Up to 70 per cent of high school students have long confessed to some form of cheating and nearly a year after ChatGPT’s arrival that proportion had not changed.

The auto-enrolment pension scheme seems good on paper, but how will it actually work?

At universities, research shows half of students are regular generative AI users — not necessarily to cheat — but only about 12 per cent use it daily.

When it comes to the number of student essays written with the help of AI, rates appear relatively steady says Turnitin, a plagiarism detection software group that has a tool for checking generative AI use.

It says students have submitted more than 22 million papers in the past 12 months that show signs of AI help, which was 11 per cent of the total it reviewed. More than six million papers, or 3 per cent of the total, contained at least 80 per cent of AI writing.

That is a lot of papers. But the percentage of AI writing is virtually the same as what Turnitin found last year when it conducted a similar assessment.

“AI usage rates have been stable,” says Turnitin chief executive Chris Caren. And as he told me last week, just because you are using ChatGPT does not necessarily mean you are cheating.

“Some teachers and faculty allow some level of AI assistance in writing an essay, but they also want that properly cited,” he says. “AI can be incredibly useful for doing research and brainstorming ideas.”

I’m sure this is correct. It is also true that university faculty are increasingly using AI to help write lesson plans and I know of some who have tested it to mark essays — unsuccessfully.

But I still find it worrying to think a sizeable number of students are using tools like ChatGPT in a way that is potentially risky for employers and wider society.

Some universities are already increasing face-to-face assessments to detect and discourage AI cheating. I am sure that will continue, but it would also be useful if academics were encouraged to expose the problem and not deterred from trying to fix it. As the scholar I spoke to put it, the purpose of going to university is to learn how to learn. These institutions are supposed to teach you to think for yourself and evaluate evidence, not just recite facts and figures.

Anyone who outsources their thinking to a machine is ultimately going to hurt themselves the most. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024

• Sign up for Business push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
• Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
• Our Inside Business podcast is published weekly - Find the latest episode here

IN THIS SECTION

‘egregious treatment’: former ministerial driver awarded €30,000 for unfair dismissal, dublin business activity accelerates in first quarter, fuelling job growth, how to organise a work day out that doesn’t induce groans among staff, emergency call operator had to call 999 herself over death threat from nuisance caller, man who left estate ‘of a considerable value’ to second wife declared in will that he had already provided for his children, housing crisis: ‘we lived on €20 a week. we saved absolutely everything. there was no avocado toast’, mount juliet estate up for sale with €45m price tag for hotel and golf resort, senior indian politician calls for dublin ambassador to be sacked over irish times letter, markets may be peaking as thiel, bezos and zuckerberg among insiders selling off tech stocks, skorts are meant to make camogie players more ladylike. who asked for that, nursing home firm funded by cash-for-visa applicants is formally wound up, latest stories, the hills of california star laura donnelly: ‘these days, being northern irish is seen for something in and of itself’, mark moriarty: light lunch ideas that are easy on the pocket, yet packed with flavour, tulips: the flowers that get on with almost everything else in the garden, ‘there’s a video of me doing the rounds on this famous tick tocks dot com’, nuala o’connor on her adult autism diagnosis: ‘i’d found out it was my brain pushing me in these directions ... i was euphoric’.

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Information
• Cookie Settings
• Community Standards

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

Hundreds of Jan. 6 Prosecutions—Including Donald Trump’s—Are Suddenly in Peril at the Supreme Court

Will the Supreme Court jeopardize the prosecution of more than 350 defendants involved with Jan. 6, including Donald Trump, by gutting the federal statute that prohibits their unlawful conduct? Maybe so. Tuesday’s oral arguments in Fischer v. United States were rough sledding for the government, as the conservative justices lined up to thwap Joe Biden’s Department of Justice for allegedly overreaching in its pursuit of Jan. 6 convictions. Six members of the court took turns wringing their hands over the application of a criminal obstruction law to the rioters, fretting that they faced overly harsh penalties for participating in the violent attack. Unmentioned but lurking in the background was Trump himself, who can wriggle out of two major charges against him with a favorable decision in this case.

There are, no doubt, too many criminal laws whose vague wording gives prosecutors near-limitless leeway to threaten citizens with decades in prison. But this isn’t one of them. Congress wrote a perfectly legible law and the overwhelming majority of judges have had no trouble applying it. It would be all too telling if the Supreme Court decides to pretend the statute is somehow too sweeping or jumbled to use as a tool of accountability for Jan. 6.

Start with the obstruction law itself, known as Section 1552(c), which Congress enacted to close loopholes that Enron exploited to impede probes into its misconduct . The provision is remarkably straightforward—a far cry from the ambiguous, sloppy, or muddled laws that typically flummox the judiciary. It’s a mainstay of the Department of Justice’s “Capitol siege” prosecutions, deployed in about a quarter of all cases. Overall, 350 people face charges under this statute, Trump among them , and the DOJ has used it to secure the convictions of about 150 rioters . It targets anyone who “corruptly … obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” And it clarifies that an official proceeding includes “a proceeding before the Congress.”

The government argues that some rioters attempted to “obstruct” an “official proceeding” by halting the count of electoral votes through “corrupt” means. That includes Joseph Fischer, the defendant in the current case. Fischer, who served as a police officer before Jan. 6, allegedly texted that the protest “might get violent”; that “they should storm the capital and drag all the democrates [sic] into the street and have a mob trial”; and that protesters should “take democratic congress to the gallows,” because they “can’t vote if they can’t breathe..lol.” Video evidence shows Fischer assaulting multiple police officers on the afternoon of Jan. 6 after breaching the Capitol.

Would anyone seriously argue that this person did not attempt to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding? For a time, it seemed not: 14 of the 15 federal judges—all but Judge Carl Nichols in this case—considering the charge in various Jan. 6 cases agreed that it applied to violent rioters bent on stopping the electoral count. So did every judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit except one, Judge Gregory Katsas. Both Nichols and Katsas were appointed by Trump. Their crusade to kneecap the law caught SCOTUS’ attention, and the court decided to intervene despite overwhelming consensus among lower court judges. The Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for Trump: Two of the four charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the former president’s Jan. 6 prosecution revolve around this offense. A ruling that eviscerates the obstruction law would arguably cut out the heart of the indictment.

At least three justices seem ready to do just that. Justice Clarence Thomas—back on the bench after yesterday’s unexplained absence —grilled Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar over the law’s application to Jan. 6. “There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings. Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past?” Thomas asked, as if to nail the Justice Department for inconsistency and reveal some improper motive for wielding the law against violent insurrectionists. Justice Neil Gorsuch trolled Prelogar by alluding to Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s infamous fire alarm incident . “Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” he asked. Justice Samuel Alito joined in to ask about “protests in the courtroom” when an audience member interrupts the justices and “delays the proceeding for five minutes.”

“For all the protests that have occurred in this court,” Alito noted pointedly, “the Justice Department has not charged any serious offenses, and I don’t think any one of those protestors has been sentenced to even one day in prison.” Why, he wondered, weren’t they charged under the obstruction statute?

Alito, audibly angry, continued: “Yesterday protestors blocked the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and disrupted traffic in San Francisco,” he told Prelogar. “What if something similar to that happened all around the Capitol so … all the bridges from Virginia were blocked, and members from Virginia who needed to appear at a hearing couldn’t get there or were delayed in getting there? Would that be a violation of this provision?”

To be clear, this is trolling: There is simply no comparison between a violent attack on the Capitol and protests that take the form of civil disobedience. And these justices expressed no similar concern about an ongoing red-state effort to persecute peaceful protesters who participate in Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Gorsuch and Alito’s hypotheticals ignore the reality that there are two layers of protection between minor protests and this rather major law. First, the Constitution affords prosecutorial discretion to the executive branch, allowing the Department of Justice to decide when an illegal “protest” is dangerous enough to warrant the use of a criminal law like the obstruction statute. Second, prosecutors must always prove the alleged offense to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, creating a democratic check on the abusive use of a stringent law to punish a silly crime.

Prelogar highlighted this latter point, explaining that juries have indeed acquitted Jan. 6 defendants of obstruction. If prosecutors ever apply this (or any other) criminal statute to a questionable set of facts, they may always be thwarted by a jury. That is how the system is meant to work.

This kind of behavior from Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito is no surprise at this point. And the liberal justices countered them as best they could. What’s troubling is that the other conservative justices jumped in to join the pile-on. Chief Justice John Roberts insistently pressed Prelogar to prove that the Justice Department has interpreted and enforced the obstruction law consistently in the past. This question ignored the fact that, as Prelogar reminded the court, there has never been any crime like the assault on the Capitol , so the agency had no prior opportunity to apply the law in any similar way.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the Justice Department didn’t really need this statute because it has other laws at its disposal. “There are six other counts in the indictment here,” he told Prelogar. Why “aren’t those six counts good enough just from the Justice Department’s perspective given that they don’t have any of the hurdles?” Of course, the DOJ brought the obstruction charge specifically because it was more serious than the others; prosecutors felt an obligation to enforce Congress’ strong protections against intrusions on official proceedings, including those in the Capitol. Kavanaugh appears to think the DOJ should have settled for a smattering of lesser charges. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was not so obtuse; she earnestly worried that the statute was too broad and fished around for narrowing constructions. Yet she seemed unsatisfied with the many options Prelogar provided to keep the law limited to the most egregious interruptions of government business.

What all six justices seemed tempted to do was rip up Section 1552(c) because it happens to include another sentence that applies to the destruction of evidence and other official documents. Jan. 6 rioters didn’t destroy evidence, this argument goes, so they can’t be culpable under a law. That reading is untenable , something Prelogar impressively reinforced at every turn on Tuesday, but it may be attractive if a majority wants to defuse this statute before it’s used against Trump in a court of law.

Smith’s indictment of the former president for his participation in Jan. 6 doesn’t entirely hinge on obstruction. It does, however, weave obstruction into both the facts and the legal theory of the case, placing it at the center of a broader criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. If SCOTUS defuses the law now, Smith would have to scrap two of four charges and restructure the entire indictment, making it that much easier for Trump to demand further delay and, eventually, evade a conviction.

The justices know this. They should have been on their best behavior on Tuesday to avoid any glimmer of impropriety. It was already profoundly disturbing that Thomas sat on the case given his wife’s involvement with the attempt to overturn the election. The other justices’ faux concern about overcriminalization of protesters only added to the foul smell emanating from arguments. There’s no telling how Fischer will turn out; maybe the liberal justices will help their colleagues rediscover their better angels behind the scenes. From Tuesday’s vantage point, though, the argument was a bleak reminder of how easy it is for cloistered jurists to wish away the massive stakes of a case like this.