So, recently I was scrolling down through the participants’ submissions in the Free TON Positioning Essay contest section that is still on voting and noticed a suspicious (to me) submission on the number #40.
You may wonder, what’s wrong with it? Well, in the description of the contest and more importantly in the evaluation criteria, it clearly says: “Must be in your own words. Don’t just copy the text or paraphrase it. Write it using your own vision, using the positioning document as simply a foundation.”
So, I think, we all probably knew that such contest will have a huge number of hired freelancers doing their best to provide a somewhat original rewriting work for their own cut, we all knew we won’t get away from that because it’s just not possible and of course, it’s not just freelancers who probably don’t have a clue what are they writing about. Because, who wouldn’t want to just use their rewriting skills in order to create an essay on the provided topic, to get these… fresh, juicy tokens?
Anyway, I thought that if it says “Must be in your own words, don’t copy the text or paraphrase” - jurors would take this into account but it seems that they don’t. At least for this #40 submission. I have decided to try doing a comparison between submission #40 and the original document so that I would be sure that I wasn’t just imagining things after not getting enough sleep.
Link to the comparison in the original resolution, just in case
Now, I don’t really want to look like a picky human being, but to me it certainly looks like a rewriting. It’s not just the same points provided in the text, it’s exactly the same references and more than that.
And what jurors said about that? No one noticed.
I understand that I’m probably wrong though. I would be glad to hear everyone else’s opinion on this case so that we can at least know if there’s a problem or not. Thanks for your attention.