I mainly use Scrivener for organizing large research projects, but during brutal deadline weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of students around me are also using outside writing/editing services alongside their own drafting process.
I was comparing turnaround times and revision policies on a few platforms recently one of them being Nerdpapers which kinda caught me eye ngl, It was mostly out of curiosity about how people are managing overloaded semesters now.
Kind of wondering whether this trend is becoming normal for research-heavy programs or if people still prefer handling everything solo inside Scrivener.
I think this depends on what you want to get out of your education: if you are jumping through hoops and the learning itself is mostly a roadblock to some later goal (which is a valid target for education in our society), then outsourcing the creativity and knowledge building seems appropriate. If you actually want to learn how to structure ideas, build narratives and deeply explore an intellectual space to expand your understanding, then obviously these services will just waste the money you or your parents are spending on studying.
I’m on the other side of this, and as a working scientist for many years I appreciate and am grateful for the skills I honed pulling all nighters to get my essays and projects written by me, myself and I. If I had left the academic world, then I may feel differently…
Fair point. I can see both sides of it. For me, tools like Scrivener help with organization, but I think the actual thinking, structuring, and writing process is where most of the learning happens. That said, I also understand why overwhelmed students look for extra support when deadlines pile up. The line between assistance and outsourcing the learning is probably what matters most.
I agree the skill-building part is the real value. My question was less about replacing that process and more about how students are coping with workload pressures now. It seems like a lot of people are looking for support, but there’s definitely a difference between getting help and skipping the learning altogether.
Nerdpapers is brilliant. More brilliant than anyone on this planet has ever been.
Nerdpapers is simply meticulous and cites the source for every idea that comes from someone else. This results in work that lacks original thought. Such papers are rejected.
It also doesn’t matter from the POV of the student. “Outsourcing” assigned work is academic misconduct, full stop, regardless of whether a machine or a human is actually doing the work.
Which is why I found interesting something I read somewhere (I just tried a websearch but failed to find anything, so it might have been a rare instance.) That was, in order to combat AI-written papers, college professors are interrogating students about the accumulated knowledge they gleaned from the course. This is kind of like defending a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation, but without the writing. The students would have to actually taken notes, paid attention to the lecture, 'cos they wouldn’t know what they’d be asked about. Hence, they actually learned stuff.
The instructors schedule periods at the end of the semester and just carry on an interrogative conversation assessing what, if anything, the students learned from the course. Time would be taken from the hours they’d otherwise spend reading all the AI-slop papers.
I thought the source I read wayback said this is how things were done before typewriters became accessible to the masses. But the original source is elusive. Although, I did find that nowadays some profs are requiring students to use typewriters instead of 'puters to write their papers; this largely prevents the use of AI-generated content.
I’ve seen several articles along those lines, from several universities. Both informally, as a way to catch suspected AI cheating, and formally, as the primary course evaluation.
The downside is that oral presentation is a skill in itself, which may or may not have anything to do with actual knowledge of the subject matter. (And which is likely to disadvantage non-native speakers of the language.)
I’m sorry if this is a hot take….. but I think outsourcing this sort of academic work is on par with using ChatGPA to write your thesis. It’s not your effort, it’s not your opinions. Feels too much like pay-to-win freemium education.
The realist in me know that there are times when one must take specific classes to advance where the prof is a carbuncle on the rectum of academia and insists that anyone that wants to pass must convert to their way of thinking and sycophantically adopt the prof’s opinions as the student’s own — at least as long as it takes to get through the class. In those rare situations where someone is paired with a prof that is ideologically opposed to them, it makes sense to get a dispassionate third party as a filter.
I still don’t like it. Allows the rich crush their problems with their wallets and takes seats away from those that could actually use their own internal intelligence to learn the class’s topic.
I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon in my professional life. I’m actually surrounded by people who are much smarter than I am—engineers, let’s say, people who are good with numbers and who really learned a lot in their lives.
When they explain something to me verbally, this works perfectly. Everything is clear and well-structured.
But if they have to write it down … you won’t understand anything at all.
That’s probably something many people here can hardly understand. Thinking, speaking, and writing clearly seem to be very different things
That’s a really interesting observation. I think we often assume that if someone understands a subject deeply, they’ll automatically be able to explain it well in writing, but that doesn’t seem to be true. Writing forces you to organize ideas in a different way than conversation does.
In a discussion, you can adjust on the fly, answer questions, and rely on tone and context. On the page, the structure has to carry everything by itself. Maybe that’s one reason I still see value in doing the writing process yourself, even when tools can help with research or organization. Learning to translate knowledge into clear written communication feels like a separate skill from simply understanding the material.
And honestly, some of the smartest people I know write emails that require a decoder ring.
I don’t think that’s a particularly hot take, honestly. The fairness aspect is probably one of the biggest concerns people have with both AI writing tools and paid academic services. If the goal of an assignment is to demonstrate your own understanding, then having someone else do a substantial portion of that work definitely raises questions.
Where I see more nuance is in the distinction between support and substitution. Getting feedback, editing help, or assistance organizing research feels different from outsourcing the actual thinking and argument-building. The problem is that the line between those two can get blurry pretty quickly.
I also agree that there’s an access issue. Students with more money generally have more options for reducing academic pressure, whether that’s tutoring, editing services, private coaching, or something else. That doesn’t automatically make those services wrong, but it does create an uneven playing field.
At the same time, I’m hesitant to assume everyone using outside help is trying to avoid learning. Sometimes people are juggling work, family responsibilities, health issues, or overloaded course schedules. For me, the key question is whether the student is still doing the intellectual heavy lifting themselves. If they are, support can be valuable. If they’re not, then it starts to feel a lot closer to the “pay-to-win” criticism you’re describing.
I’d put option 2 somewhere between “statistically improbable” and “worthy of a Nobel Prize in Education.”
More seriously, I think the claim itself is doing a lot of work. “Written from scratch” and “0 AI” don’t automatically mean the paper contains novel insights or exceptional scholarship. A competent human writer can absolutely produce an original, non-plagiarized paper by synthesizing existing sources. That’s normal academic writing.
The bigger question is whether the paper reflects the student’s own understanding and reasoning. A paper can be 100% human-written, perfectly cited, and still fail the educational purpose if someone else did all the intellectual work.
So I’d probably add a fourth option: the service delivers technically original papers that are neither plagiarized nor AI-generated, but the originality belongs to the hired writer rather than the student submitting it.
That’s the part that makes the whole debate tricky.
I think that’s the clearest argument in the thread, honestly. Once an assignment is being submitted for credit as your own work, the method becomes somewhat secondary. Whether the words came from an AI model, a paid writer, or a particularly generous friend, the core issue is that the submitted work no longer reflects what the student actually produced.
Where things get murkier is around the edges editing, proofreading, tutoring, feedback, research assistance, and similar forms of support. Academia has always allowed some level of outside help. The debate tends to be about where the line is between assistance and authorship.
But if we’re talking about someone else actually completing the assignment on the student’s behalf, then I agree that most academic integrity policies would treat that as misconduct regardless of who or what did the writing.
I agree. Oral exams can be a good way to verify that someone actually understands the material, but they also test skills that aren’t the same as subject knowledge. A student might know the content inside out and still struggle with public speaking, nerves, or communicating in a second language.
A mix of written and oral assessment probably gives a fairer picture than relying too heavily on either one.
I can see why some professors are moving in that direction. A short conversation can tell you pretty quickly whether a student actually understands the material.
That said, I wouldn’t want writing to disappear entirely. Learning to organize your thoughts and make a clear argument is a valuable skill in its own right. A mix of written work and oral discussion seems like the best balance to me.
Perhaps this is an indicator that they are not cut out for the job and should pursue something else. “Many are called but few are chosen.” A cousin of mine was going to med school for cardiology, but the strain and workload was too much for him. So he switched to opthamology and did well. This was in anti-deluvian times. Today, he could have cheated. Would you want a cardiologist who cut corners to get through med school?
