How We Review Brands at EssayRating

Not sure you can trust our reviews when you’re looking for an academic help platform, AI writing tool, or a tutoring website? Let us give you a peek behind the curtain as to how we review every platform – and what makes our evaluations a valuable resource in your decision-making process.

Our General Approach

To write an exhaustive and balanced review, we rely on three cornerstones in our research.

First-Hand Experience
We place orders for essays (without revealing that the order is for a review, of course), tinker with AI tools, or take on the role of a learner on tutoring websites. We also reach out to customer support ourselves to see it in action. The largest chunk of our review is based on this first-hand experience.

Online Reputation
Even if our experience was great, we know it’s not a given that all customers can say the same about theirs. So, we check out reviews on independent platforms (Sitejabber, Review.io, ResellerRatings, Trustpilot) and social media (e.g., Reddit) and factor them in during our assessment.

Fine Print
The devil is in the details, as they say. We read the Terms and Conditions and other policies to ensure the claims elsewhere on the website are truthful and you won’t get ambushed by surprise fees or a non-existent money-back guarantee.

How We Review Essay Writing Platforms

What happens when we decide to review this or that essay writing service? Here’s all the work that our reviewers put in to write each review:

  1. We begin with browsing the website, tinkering with the calculator if there is one, and reading the fine print (Terms & Conditions, Revision Policy, Refund Policy, Privacy Policy, etc.). We can usually identify some red flags at this stage (e.g., discrepancies between the refund claims on the website and in the policy documents).
  2. We look into available reviews from other customers to gauge what potential issues we should look out for. This step also informs one of our scores.
  3. We try to reach out to customer support before placing an order, usually with a question about the available payment methods or how to choose a writer.
  4. We create an account with a single-use email address to place an order for an essay; it can be a five-page one for a college class or a three-page one for high school. If the platform charges extra for ‘top writers’ or equivalent, we stick to the ‘basic writer’ option. At this stage, we pay attention to the ease of placing the order, writer selection and responsiveness (if applicable), and potential surprise fees.
  5. We receive our essay, assess its quality, and double-check its originality and human-written content score (more on it below). We also request revisions if the essay warrants them – and, of course, we pay attention to whether we get our order on time.

Our Assessment Criteria

Based on our first-hand experience and research, we rate every essay writing service on a scale from 0 to 5 across six criteria: price, quality, features, support, ease of use, and reputation. The overall score for each service is the average of the six criteria-specific scores.

Price

To rate a service’s pricing, we assess:

  • Rates. This is the core question: How much will your paper cost you? We compare rates based on the selected academic level, urgency, and discipline. It’s a plus when a service charges the lowest rates within five to seven days, as opposed to ten, 14, or even 20.
  • Free service and extra fees. If the service charges additional fees for originality reports or top writers, it’ll negatively impact the score. We believe that a service should provide formatting, originality and AI reports, and unlimited revisions at no extra cost.
  • Available discounts and promo codes. If you can save a buck using a promo code for first-time customers or by ordering multiple pages, we’ll count that as a plus for the service’s score.
  • Refund policy. We read the policy itself to see under which conditions you can claim a refund and how much you should expect to get back if you do. The more comprehensive and generous the refund policy is, the better.

Quality

Is the paper worth the money? To answer this question, we have to assess the paper quality. To do so, we take a look at the essay we receive from the service.
Here’s our checklist for determining whether the essay is indeed top-notch:

  • Content. A good paper breaks the subject down in detail, with extra points awarded to the service if the writer takes a fresh perspective on the essay’s topic. If we provide some ideas or a general outline for an essay, we expect the writer to build on those, of course.
  • Structure. An essay should adhere to the standard paper structure unless stated otherwise in our guidelines. That means an introduction with a thesis statement, three to five main body paragraphs with topic sentences and evidence, and a conclusion.
  • Sources. All sources mentioned in the order form should be used, while additional citations should come from reliable, reputable sources. All cited research must be peer-reviewed, and the number of sources used should match the number of requested sources.
  • Formatting. We expect the essay to be properly formatted, which involves the correct margins, font, type size, page numbering, title and reference pages (if needed), and indentation for the selected citation style.
  • Adherence to the guidelines. Nothing should contradict our initial guidelines, be it formatting or the use of specific sources.
  • Writing style. The tone of voice should match the expected writing style. For example, an expository economics essay would have to be rather formal and objective, as opposed to a creative writing assignment for an English class.
  • Correctness. We check the essay for typos, spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes, and other errors. Needless to say, a good essay should be error-free.
  • Delivery. We take into account whether the essay was sent to us in advance, on time, or late.
  • Originality and human-written content. The essay must be at least 90% original; we conduct two separate checks on each essay. It should also contain no AI-generated content; we check for it, as well.

Features

This evaluation criterion concerns the available range of services on any given platform. To rate it, we take into account the covered:

  • Service types (custom writing, proofreading, editing, rewriting, calculations, problem-solving, etc.)
  • Paper types (essays, lab reports, term papers, etc.)
  • Subjects (English, nursing, philosophy, law, etc.)
  • Academic levels (high school, college, Master’s, PhD)

Support

This is the score we give for the quality of customer support. When testing it ourselves, we pay attention to:

  • Available support channels (phone support, email, live chat)
  • Response time at different times of day (especially late in the evening) and on weekdays vs weekends
  • Response quality, i.e., whether the agent was polite, respectful, and friendly and whether they gave a thorough answer to our query

Ease of Use

To evaluate the service’s ease of use, we analyze our whole customer journey, including:

  • Information availability: Does the website present all the information about its services you may need?
  • User-friendliness: Is it easy to navigate the platform and place an order?
  • Order form: Is it comprehensive and easy to understand?
  • Available payment methods: Are all common payment methods covered? Is there PayPal and Venmo support?

Reputation

This assessment criterion is fairly straightforward: we take into account the service’s reviews on independent platforms like Sitejabber, Reviews.io, and ResellerRatings. We also browse social media platforms like Reddit to see some less structured feedback from existing customers.

In Conclusion

While this is the standard breakdown of our reviewing process and scoring rules, sometimes, we have to tweak it a bit to match the offerings of a specific website.

For example, a tutoring website may essentially offer pre-recorded MOOCs to its users. So, we wouldn’t be able to test one-on-one lessons or custom answers to questions. Instead, we’d focus on thoroughly evaluating those online courses.

Our reviews are based on a combination of personal experience and customer feedback from independent sources. Even when we’re presented with a somewhat unusual AI writing tool or tutoring website, we strive to walk a mile in the customer’s shoes – and give you a detailed account of our experience. We are committed to providing clear and balanced insights into the services we review. To achieve this, we carefully consider a range of perspectives, including including customer feedback from independent platforms.