I'm nervous about submitting a essay for review..........Answered
Can I really trust this essay peer review? Please be honest/objective
- Would the essay show up on websites that detect plagiarism? I don't want to be accused of plagiarism just because I submitted my essay somewhere online
- How likely is it that someone would steal my work? I know it's personal so they can't honestly plagiarize stories....but people like that aren't honest in the first place, and I want to know the approximate risk
-Kind-of along those lines, does the copy and paste feature work when someone is doing a peer review? If not I'd suggest that as an option to tighten security.
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2 answers
CollegeVine's peer review platform is designed to maximize the privacy of reviewers. Search engines and plagiarism detection software cannot pick up on any essay submissions to the site, and all of the essays submitted for peer review are kept private.
The chances of someone stealing your work are slim, since peer essays are displayed in a format that prevents text copying. Even if someone did go through the effort of manually typing out all the words of your essay, they would at best give themselves an essay which does not fit in with the rest of their application and is not written with their authentic voice. Admissions officers can spot stolen content from a mile away!
If you would like to avoid any chance of plagiarism happening, I would recommend requesting a paid review from me or any of our other professional reviewers. When one of us receives essays, we see no personal information about the author and can only view the essays in our CollegeVine portal. Once we have submitted our review, we immediately lose access to the essay.
Hope this helps!
The essay review is the best free option there is on the internet. Reviewers can not copy and paste your essays however like anything on digital media, one can always take a screen grab picture and manually transcribe your work. Unfortunately, that is the case no matter where you submit your review to.
If you are are that concerned about security, I would opt in for the Paid review because those reviewers are personally vetted by CollegeVine and are under contract as professional reviewers.
As a rule of thumb, if you are an excellent writer and have taken AP English Lit and AP English Lang and are the editor in chief of your school newspaper, you are probably not going to get a lot of useful feedback from the peer review because you are writing at a much higher level than your peers. Does this make sense? I mean if you are a high achieving HS student applying to top colleges, you are not going to walk into the school cafeteria and ask random people to review your college essays. You are most likely going to ask your best friends who are at the same level as you to chime in and give a few tips or you are going to ask a parent or mentor.
So if you are an average or below average writer, the Free CV review is a great place to start because you are not producing award winning prose or expository essays to begin with and you can use all the help you can get.
After reviewing over 50 essays myself, I would say that 50% of submissions either need a lot of work and on the poor quality side, the next 30% are good first or second drafts that just need some re configuring or have flow, grammar or punctuation issues. And 15% are very good requiring only a little bit of work. Less than 5% of the essays I've reviewed were at my level where I could not find too many things wrong. So take that with a grain of salt.
((As a side note for reviewers reading this, my experience is that the better essay you get to review the higher the probability that your feedback to tweak it better will be rewarded with 5 stars. People who are poor writers or insist on writing some whacky essay tend to be very defensive to criticism so be aware that sometimes it's better to let the 60 min. review period time out because no matter what you say ((unless you say that was "the best essay")), you are going to get a bad rating even if you are spot on with what's wrong))
If you have invested some time and written something pretty good by all accounts of your friends and family, then go for a paid review.
Good luck.
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