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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

There's a more fundamental flaw, something that you wouldn't have uncovered by interviews....

1. For the money to get someone to review your paper, you can get someone to write it for you. http://www.bestwritingservice.com/ has essays for ten dollars a page. If you're willing to pay someone 20 bucks to review your essay, you're willing to pay 50 to write it.

2. Most universities have writing centers where people will review your papers for free. These places are oddly underused. The people who would go don't need them, and the people who don't know don't realize they do.

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Re your point one: This service wasn't for help with what an American would call term papers. It was for help with exams, which you have to write yourself (unless you hire someone to impersonate you, which I'm sure is not unheard of in big classes but is certainly riskier).

You're right, I misread that. At that point, why not just go to the professor or TA during office hours? Maybe other Universities work differently, but each class had office hours where I went to school, and most students didn't take advantage of that. And who writes out example exam questions anyway?

So yes, I stand corrected, Customer development would have uncovered those problems.

Personally I had my best exam results when I did exactly that, I wrote as much as I could for each historical exam question. I would research from book, lecture notes etc.

However, I wouldn't pay for this service when my lecturers and teaching assistants would do this for free and as they were the ones setting the exams I would prefer their advice than that of an unknown person.

>And who writes out example exam questions anyway?

As a maths/physics student (though I did various other courses too) I pored over past papers, in part as an indicator of the papers to come (though they always caught one out) and in part for practice at recapitulating proofs and writing answers under time pressure. I certainly didn't spend the course working toward the exam but it would be silly not to attempt past papers on a course that has run unchanged for previous years.

Most of our papers had example answers with them though.

The set of people willing to pay for a paper and the set of people wanting to have _their_ paper reviewed are probably (hopefully?) disjoint.

As such I'm not sure it is too useful to compare the prices.

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