An e-mail sent to the student body yesterday by Maurie McInnis, associate dean of the College, warned of a website soliciting college application essays from University students for monetary compensation.
The homepage of the website, The Essay Exchange, establishes itself as a place "where college students get paid for sharing their successful admissions essays and applicants learn from reading successful admissions essays." It states that users who upload their essays will receive $2 every time a prospective student downloads them.
"I found out about this because a student who had been sent the solicitation [e-mail] wrote to Dean [Meredith] Woo, very upset that such a website existed and that University of Virginia students were being solicited to submit application essays," McInnis said.
The website identifies 25 schools from which prospective students can download essays.
"I think their idea from talking to the students is to take the top 25 schools of the U.S., solicit application essays and sell them," McInnis said.
In her e-mail, McInnis told students that engaging in this activity violates the spirit of the honor code.
"Even if your submitting an essay is not itself an act of academic fraud, it certainly enables such behavior in others and sends the wrong message to the outside world." She requested students ignore e-mail solicitations they have received, and to retract essays they may have already submitted.
McInnis said she has not heard of other websites that solicit admissions applications, though she is aware of ones that solicit notes from students and audio lecture recordings of faculty members, which "moves beyond an ethical issue to a legal issue."
In an interview with Xconomy, an online business and technology magazine, Rory O'Connor, creator of The Essay Exchange, said he has worked to prevent plagiarism by providing admissions offices with copies of the essays on the website, allowing them to cross-reference them against new essays. He added that he also is planning to submit the site's essays to Turnitin.com, a website which allows teachers to better detect plagiarism.
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