15 years ago, Jens Schriver and Maximo Migliari, just youngsters at the time, launched an essay site with the contentious name Cheathouse.com. It instantly caused a commotion within the academic community where the assumption was made that such an initiative was unethical by nature and could only encourage dishonest conduct.

”We should have gone with the name WriteWork instead of Cheathouse from the beginning. But back then we thought it was catchy – we were just kids with no clue of what was in store for us. We’ve grown up since then and so has our business.” Says co-founder Maximo Migliari.

The essay site promptly caught the interest of the international press and all of a sudden Schriver and Migliari were featured on CNN, BBC and NPR.

As a reaction to the poor public labeling, the two founders resolved to find out for themselves whether their members actually were using the essay site for cheating.

Personal interviews were carried out and hundreds of members filled out questionnaires. The results showed clearly that a minor portion planned to use the essay site for plagiarism while the vast majority actually perceived the site as a legitimate academic resource that assisted them in finding primary sources and improving their grades.

What is more, the study showed that the minority with dishonorable intentions were mostly high school students – an interesting aspect when considering that the main audience was university and college students.

“Maximo and I are perfect examples that getting inspiration from essay examples doesn’t necessarily facilitate plagiarism and cheating. We both have university degrees and during the years we spent studying neither of us ever turned in an assignment that wasn’t original – despite the fact that we were running one of the most comprehensive essay resources in the world.” Says co-founder Jens Schriver

Since then, Schriver and Migliari have focused their resources on tuning their site to earnest university and college students – changing the name to WriteWork is an crucial step in the right direction.

Among the new features that will be appear on WriteWork in the near future is a collection of outlines for writing essays, research papers and book reports as well as a guide for citations and bibliographies.

Via EPR Network
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