4

You'd Be Shocked At What Students Are Willing To Pay

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Joe hit a snag when he realized that the initially randomly chosen price of $50 was all too affordable to these supposedly broke college students, and he was so flooded with orders that he couldn't keep up. "I decided to set a rate of $100 per thousand words, and have a policy to not accept any assignments less than that." See? Already he'd learned a semester's worth of lessons about supply and demand.

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3

The Paper Might Not Be Good, But It Doesn't Have To Be

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According to Joe, writing papers for other people's classes can actually be a lot more stressful than your own. "You get a bad grade on one of your papers, and you can just shrug it off and hope the grades are curved at the end of the semester," he explains. "But when you fuck up on someone else's paper after they paid you money to write it, you're gonna have one angry undergrad looking for a refund."

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On the other hand, Joe quickly learned that his customers weren't expecting expert-level analyses of Notes From The Underground. "Most of my customers were really only looking for passing grades," he says. He always stressed to customers that he could not guarantee an A, but they could rest assured he would get them at least a C. Anyone who's ever had to Frankenstein a book report out of CliffsNotes and bullshit knows that it's not actually that hard to slap together a mediocre paper, which raises the question of why anyone would pay 10 cents a word for it. Apparently any effort is too much effort when you really really don't wanna.

But even if you didn't have time to read Moby Dick between keg stands, you at least had the advantage of attending the occasional lecture. Often, Joe was diving in completely blind. In order to cobble together a barely passing knowledge of the subject at hand, he says, "I would look at [the professors'] rubrics because that's pretty much what they need for a passing grade. Sometimes I would just ask that person if they have any class notes or if they have any PowerPoints." From there, all it took was a quick trip to the library to skim a few articles on Google Scholar, because textbooks, Joe says, are even more of a ripoff than you think. "Most of the stuff, you can find online," he says.

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2

There Are Subtle Techniques For Making Sure Papers Look Authentic

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You might think Joe's business was booming because he wrote the best papers in town. But in fact, Joe was careful to make sure that nothing he wrote was too good, because that would actually be suspicious. See, the advantage of a service like Joe's is that you get a completely original paper that won't trip any plagiarism detection software your professor might use, which is always a risk if you decide, for example, to just copy and paste from Wikipedia or buy a paper off the Internet (which, yes, is an option, and no, we're not going to tell you where. Also, call your mother.).

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However, if you're the kind of lazy asshole who would pay someone to write your paper, you probably weren't putting in a ton of effort to begin with. If you suddenly turn in the kind of prose that brings a tear to your professor's eye, he or she's going to know something is up. That's why, Joe says, "A question that I asked every single one of my customers is if they've ever written for that particular professor before. If the answer is yes, then I will ask for anything they've written for that professor so that I can mimic the student's writing style."

Studying the customer's previous writing was nearly as important as studying what the hell he was even writing about: "One little trick that I would do to best camouflage my writing is to mimic the student's mistakes," Joe says. "Do they have a tendency to use run-on sentences? Do they split infinitives? One of my customers always messed up in-text citations (a thing that professors tend to be sticklers about), while another one of my customers didn't know how to use commas to save his life. He would have sentences that go, 'Today after class I smoked some weed crack and salvia.' Believe it or not, professors pick up on these types of things."

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1

Yes, Ultimately The Customers Are Only Cheating Themselves

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The most surprising thing that Joe learned doing this job was just how much he learned. In fact, he says, "I would say the knowledge I gained as a result of my entrepreneurial enterprise had a bigger and better impact on my life than the money I earned." This is due to having to give himself a crash course in the subject matter before beginning an assignment, only to immediately have to do it all over again. "My roommate's essay gave me a better understanding on why we're no longer on the gold standard. I ended up watching beautiful films by the masters of cinema such as Kurosawa, Fellini, and Truffaut for foreign film assignments. Writing philosophy papers gave me some insight into the works of Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Peter Singer, and that Plato was the dude's wrestling nickname (apparently his real name was Aristocles)."

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We'll be the first to tell you that in-depth knowledge of samurai films doesn't easily translate to a corner office, but if that's your only goal, why bother with college at all? Why not do what your grandpa is always going on about and work your way up from the mailroom, whatever that is? Joe says he "slowly came to the realization that maybe professors didn't assign essays to torture their students," and maybe universities don't require foofy liberal arts credits just because they're jealous of all that rock-hard science. What we're saying is that ultimately, his classmates were doing the equivalent of paying for a meal at an expensive restaurant, and then paying someone else to eat their food. Though we suppose this analogy breaks down when it's their parents who are footing the bill.

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Oh, and remember all those hard-partying frat guys who threw cash at Joe to make sure they didn't fail the classes they were too hungover to attend? If you were wondering, most of these kids -- at least, the ones Joe kept tabs on -- did graduate and get good jobs. Mostly, they went into business. There's no shortage of things that explains.

Manna pays a small army of smelly 12-year-olds to write her tweets for her; follow her at @Manna_Festo.

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