How We Test Essay Writing Services and Rate Them

Lack of time is a curse for every student. Piles of assignments keep increasing in number, professors get more demanding by the day, and personal matters take the energy that could have gone into research. You probably recognize yourself in this description. Don’t worry, you are not alone — statistics say that the majority of students look for academic help at least once.

The problem is that their choice is too uncertain. Millions of writing platforms market themselves aggressively, claiming to be the best and offering what they call the lowest prices. Reality is different: it’s difficult to find an experienced company that knows what it’s doing and doesn’t overcharge you or steal your data. So how to tell them apart? How to make a good choice and hire writers who won’t let you down? This is where we come in! TopWritersReview score allows people to find lists with reliable academic companies quickly. A few minutes on our website, and you have every chance to find your long-term academic helper!

What TopWritersReview Score Is and What It Does

TopWritersReview is a recommendation-centric resource. Our goal is to help connect students with the best essay writing services in the market. By reading our reviews, you’ll be able to see which companies don’t deserve your attention and which ones you can count on. More than that, you’ll have an opportunity to find writers capable of meeting your specific needs. Some students prioritize low prices, while others care about quality more. For someone, deadlines don’t matter, but others want a company to complete their order in a couple of hours.

We cover all these nuances, meaning that our visitors enjoy a wide choice of options. With us, they make informed decisions: they hire a company while knowing exactly what they might expect from it. Even better, we offer comprehensive guides that’ll teach you how to evaluate essay writing services quickly and how to make the right choice by yourself! This will come in handy if you encounter agencies we haven’t reviewed yet.

How It Works: Methodology We Use for Testing Essay Writing Services

To provide accurate info about academic writing services, we composed a methodology that all our reviewers, researchers, and editors follow as they do their work. This keeps our evaluations fair and consistent no matter how many different teams are performing them. There are three key factors that lie at the heart of this methodology, and they include the paper quality, the value you receive for the money you pay, as well as the overall experience. When writing a review, we pay the closest attention to these aspects. They bring the biggest numbers of points to a company — even if it is imperfect in other areas, it won’t reduce its chances as long as it shows excellent performance in the three sectors we mentioned.

Our evaluation process is simple yet efficient. It is based on mystery shopping, meaning that we test companies by pretending to be their target clients. In most cases, we present ourselves as students who need help with homework. Our teams hire writers to craft essays, applications, dissertations, and other academic projects. This gives us personal experience, and in turn, we share only objective facts. We do not engage in baseless speculations, we post info that we verified on our own. Paper quality is the most important element, so it is worth 50% of our score. It must be well-written, academic, plagiarism free, and full of research plus original analysis. Now, let’s see what other nuances play a role in our tests.

Calculating Value-for-Money Index: 25% of Total Score

To determine if the money students pay is worth the results, TopWritersReview considers several factors. We look at the service range, prices, discounts, freebies, as well as deadlines and terms. They all carry a unique number of points: the more of them a company earns, the better score it gets. The overall value of an agency is worth 25 points out of 100. This is what this calculation looks like:

  • Deadline & terms: 3 points
  • Prices: 7 points
  • Discounts: 4 points
  • Freebies: 5 points
  • Service options: 6 points

Gathering all 25 points in this category means students get their money’s worth. If the score is small — for instance, if a platform has no free features, charges high rates, and rejects short deadlines, the value is going to be low.

Deadline & Terms

The companies’ terms often determine how satisfied a client is going to be. You must know how quickly a writer will complete your order, if your requests will be respected, and if an agency is going to respect your privacy. We make certain that these conditions are met—if they aren’t, the score of a company drops dramatically. The area of specialty is also important. Some sites specialize in specific projects like high-school homework or dissertations; others are more flexible, so they cover all educational levels. We favor the latter because they can assist a bigger number of students.

One other relevant nuance is deadlines. Whenever TopWritersReview is performing an assessment, we look at the longest and shortest available deadlines to get a sense of how quickly a company could work. Sometimes agencies accept projects with a 1-hour deadline, but this happens rarely. Most agencies complete orders in three or six hours. The longest deadlines reach up to a month.

Average Price for Essay Help

The price for essays has to be justified. Yes, this work requires experts, but there is no need to overcharge clients either. Our team determines whether a company under review asks for a low, normal, or high price by comparing it against the overall cost of this service in the academic market. To derive it, we look at how much an essay with the shortest plus the longest deadline is worth at a random agency. This allows us to get the average price, and we repeat this process again and again. Our sample includes 40 different companies in total. After comparing how much they all charge for the same paper, we get an average number that we can base our evaluations on. Affordable agencies score more points than those that prefer to rip their clients off.

Discounts & Loyalty Programs

Discounts and various loyalty programs help attract and hold students’ attention. They ensure that placing an essay won’t make clients go broke — on the contrary, they might benefit if they decide to place an order. Most professional essay writing services provide a discount to all first-time customers. Some expand this list by offering seasonal and holiday discounts, and more experienced agencies also set up special programs that help retain students. After your first order, you start gaining points: the more papers you buy, the bigger discount you receive. Such platforms tend to earn clients’ favor.

Availability of Free Features

Students always have budget concerns. Unfortunately, even if essay writing is cheap, some cannot afford it, and if they do, they try to save up as much as possible. That’s why free extras stand out, and we value them so much. Revisions, plagiarism reports, formatting, and lists with references must be already included in the price you see. If they cost extra, this is a bad sign. The best companies also have tools for visitors. When browsing their platform, you should be able to read hundreds of free paper samples and use a plagiarism checker or conclusion maker without buying anything. These companies receive higher scores.

Additional Services

The presence of additional essay writing services enhances clients’ experience. It’s great when you have a chance to order a summary or draft and use printable sources or writer’s notes that explain what they did and how. Sometimes people ask their expert to use simple English because they do not know this language well, and they don’t want to try deciphering their paper by consulting with a dictionary after every other word. The more options like this are present, the better — students can customize their orders down to the smallest details.

Overall Experience of Using a Writing Service: 25% of Total Score

Another 25% goes to the general experience of a client or reviewer with a certain essay writing service. Obviously, a platform has to be convenient and user-friendly. Good design plus layout always contribute to a positive first impression. Other factors that play a key role here include safety and availability of payment methods, communication, support, as well as privacy and security. They could enhance or ruin your experience.

  • Payment methods: 4 points
  • Communication: 8 points
  • Support: 8 points
  • Privacy: 5 points

This is the system of our scores. Take a closer look at it below.

Payment Methods

People like variety. The more payment methods are available, the better, but naturally, they all must be safe. Writing websites should support standard credit card options like Visa or MasterCard. They are tried and safe; numerous students use them worldwide. But not everyone wants to use their credit card. The inclusion of digital platforms like PayPal enhances convenience for such individuals, which is why agencies that have these options receive a higher score.

Communication with Your Writer

Even the best essay writing service is going to score badly if it has serious problems with communication. Clients must be able to speak with their writers whenever they need. Some sites don’t have this option at all. Instead, they prefer to have communication through third parties like customer support representatives. This is not ideal. Having an intermediary means having to wait for an answer constantly. Being able to communicate with a writer directly is a superior option.
Professional writing services allow their clients to drop messages for a writer directly. Thanks to this, students have an opportunity to discuss details with a person who’s going to work on their order. They can talk about important details, share ideas, or ask questions. An open communication channel increases the chances of client satisfaction.

Customer Support

Another channel of communication must exist between visitors or clients and operators. Its importance lies in its wide-scale availability. Plenty of people might be visiting a company’s platform for the first time. Not all of them will decide to order an essay, but many might be tempted or interested enough to ask a few questions. This is why customer support service is essential: these people address your concerns and give you the answers you need without expecting you to buy anything. They just want to help, it’s the basics of their job. Students tend to ask them about discounts, their orders, and ways of buying their paper — these questions are particularly common when the website has incomplete info.

Good essay writing services have good notification systems, and their operators reply in less than thirty seconds. They must also work 24/7, with no exceptions — clients of such companies usually come from different states, countries, or even continents. You should feel comfortable with these folks; they must never push you or snap at you, not even if you ask the same questions repeatedly.

Security & Privacy

Another crucial factor concerns privacy. While asking for help with writing an essay is technically legal in most locations, it is still a murky area. No student ever wants someone from their surroundings to learn that they bought an essay from a company. Protecting your data and guaranteeing your privacy is a must for academic writing services, and our team verifies if this rule is respected during our reviews.

Students must feel safe when interacting with a platform. By mimicking their experience, we read privacy policies attentively; we check how payment methods work if essay services collect more info than acceptable, and we look into what third parties might gain access to your data. This is a sensitive subject, and we respond to it in kind. We award points to services that understand how important it is to make their clients feel safe, and we diminish the score for agencies that apply odd or vague confidentiality standards.