Paperrater.com

It’s no secret that the academic writing help industry is booming. And the reasons for that are clear. Students are terribly busy; writing assignments all seem to come due at the same time (midterm; end-of-semester); burnout among students is common, and they can’t muster up motivation for coursework assignments; and finally, many students just don’t have the writing skills to produce essays and papers that will result in a decent grade or score.

At Top Essay Writing, we get it. But we also understand that lots of online writing help resources can be risky. If a student chooses to business with one that is a scam, he loses not just his money – he has nothing of value to submit to an instructor. It is our job to research and evaluate all academic writing assistance resources that range from legit, safe, reliable, and trustworthy agencies to those that are lack quality and constitute fraud.

With this in mind, we now turn to Paperrater.com.

Step 1: About Paperrater.com

First and foremost, Paperrater is not an academic writing company. It provides help to students after they have produced a piece of writing. And this help comes in the form of tools that are generated and operated by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. These tools are meant to help students with grammar, structure, vocabulary, avoidance of plagiarism, and more. Paper Rater states that its free option is used by many schools and classrooms, but, of course, can be used by individual students at all academic levels. Our review will delve into all that the company offers, customer reviews, testimonials, quality of services, and, finally, our verdict of its value to student writers.

Here is a short YouTube video showing how to use this service:

Step 2: Quality of Products and Services

Here is a listing of all products offered by Paperraters.com and comments on the quality. The list will include what comes as a part of the free services and those resources that are a part of the “upsell” subscription, for which there is a cost.

• Plagiarism Checker: This resource will provide an originality score when a document is uploaded into the system. The free option will point out potentially plagiarized content, having checked the document against huge amounts of the content found by Bing and Google. The paid alternative will not only identify potential plagiarism but will also provide a link to the original content in question. Here is an example from the PaperRater website: 

• Vocabulary Builder: This is a part of the paid option and operates like a thesaurus. The algorithm analyzes the level of vocabulary sophistication in the student’s text, and makes suggestions for raising that level if it should be. It will also provide how those vocabulary terms should be used in specific sentences in the text. 

• Grammar and Spelling Checker: Like many other free resources, this tool will take an uploaded text and check it for sentence structures, proper verb tense usage, and spelling. There is nothing unique about this tool, and no payment is required.

• Automated Proofreading: This is another part of the paid subscription service. According to Paper Rater, their algorithm will compare a student’s text with those of others at the same academic level and will identify such things as passive voice, vocabulary level appropriateness, variety of sentence types, and more. All of this is in addition to the grammar and spelling check in the free option. This could be valuable to ESL students whose command of English is not the best.

In terms of quality, we looked at student feedback we could find online. There was no discussion of this company on Reddit, so we went to other consumer review sites such as Trust Pilot. We found mixed reviews, especially related to the paid service option. Some complaints related to not finding smaller issues of plagiarized content, that were picked up by other plagiarism-detection tools. And some of the grammatical issues were not caught. 

We uploaded our own piece of writing into the free option and saw a few of the same issues that were pointed out by other customers. A couple of verb tense errors were not found; Misuse of some vocabulary words was likewise not found.

Step 3: Writers and Support

Obviously, there are no writers involved with Paperrater.com. All work is completed by machines.

In terms of customer support, students will be able to contact Paper Rater via email only. The support desk is open Monday-Friday until 5:30 pm, EST. One of the issues that some customers have pointed out is the slowness of responses when they have either complaints or technical problems using any of the tools. As well, there is no refund if service is disrupted because of technical or other issues.

Step 4: Prices

There is a link to prices at the top of the PaperRater home page. This page lists what is available for free and what enhancements occur with the paid subscription. The subscription cost is $14.95 a month, with a small discount if paid for a full year. Beyond that, we did not find that Paper Rater offers a promo code or coupon codes for first-time or loyal customers.

Step 5: Additional Features and Discounts

As we stated above, there are no discounts. The price is set and not flexible. 

Regarding additional features, we have found none that are noteworthy. The additional features for the premium subscription come with a higher cost. 

Our Verdict

Paperrater.com is registered with the BBB, and we did not find complaints there. There were, though, complaints posted in other places, and most related to missed errors or plagiarism that were not picked up. The company has an average reputation within the business, and we suspect this is because machines are still not perfect and cannot fully replace an expert human’s work.

In terms of pros & cons, we would say this. Pros: deadlines are not missed because the response is rapid; the tools are available 24/7, and ESL students may find the resources valuable. Cons: machines are not perfected, and customer service is not of high quality.

Overall, our rating of Paperrater.com is fair.