Figuring Out If StudyPool Is Real or Fake:
Our Objective Take

If you come across StudyPool on the web, two questions pop up immediately: what is StudyPool, and does it even have something to do with essay writing? The website offers help with study questions from verified tutors. So, are the tutors going to ask you questions that will push you in the right direction or what?

Inevitably, the lack of clarity about what the service offers and the slew of bad reviews from both customers and tutors (more on that later) sparked our interest. So, we started an investigation.

While the concept of the service is rather interesting, our investigation helped us understand where the negative comments are coming from.

When you check the customers’ testimonials on the StudyPool website, everything seems great. The service helped students with various subjects, from understanding medical concepts to crafting a perfect business plan for a marketing class. This can already give you an idea that StudyPool is more of an online learning platform rather than a straightforward essay writing service. The service allows you to video chat with online tutors ‒ a great concept!

However, when you check StudyPool.com reviews on other sites, you might figure out that the concept is great only on paper. Out of 347 reviews on SiteJabber, 102 give the service one star. Some of the worst academic helpers that we investigated had between 30 and 40 one-star reviews. And the negative reviews are coming not only from former customers of the platform but former tutors as well. That begs the question, is StudyPool legit?

So, what is the reason behind the slew of negative comments? In this article, we will focus on the essay writing aspect of the service, but we’ll touch upon several other issues that we faced while investigating StudyPool.

As we’ve already said, the concept is great on paper. StudyPool claims to provide help with a plethora of disciplines, from history and literature to business and computer science. But the phrase greeting you upon entering the site, the one about getting help with questions from tutors, begs the question, “Is StudyPool genuine?”

The question becomes more legitimate when you try to click on at least something on the website. Want to check out something on math? Unclickable. Want to see what the service has to offer in terms of writing? Unclickable.

StudyPool offers some documents that you can seemingly check out for free. Yet, you can only see the first page for free. To check out the rest, you need to create an account.

Almost every other Study Pool review complains about the customer support team being either rude or unresponsive. Yet, to check it out, you need to subscribe to the service first.

Is signing up easy? There are three options: you can either sign up by creating an original account or via Google or Facebook. Mind that you need to enter your name. You can pick any; the only thing that matters is that it should be longer than four letters. And you need to enter the name of your school or university. Put Harvard or Oxford, the service doesn’t really care. After that, you can ask a question.

Things don’t get clearer when you create an account. If you need an essay and expect to find any submission form, you won’t find it anywhere. Gladly, after becoming a user, you can finally communicate with the customer support team. Open up the live chat, and you get a notification that the support team will contact you within four minutes after your message is sent.

We asked if it’s possible to order an essay. The answer arrived within two minutes. It was an instruction with links on how to post your question so you’d be assigned a tutor.

It looks more like a chatbot rather than a real person. The reply after asking whether Tracy was a real person or a bot proved the latter. Otherwise, Tracy is extremely rude as a customer support agent.

Seems like Study Pool reviews about the customer support team were quite honest. The team is not responsive because, apparently, there are some questions that bots don’t know how to answer. Or they are just extremely rude people. 

Anyway, similar to the situation described in the EssayShark review, customer support wasn’t that helpful.

Well, let’s follow Tracy’s instructions, and hopefully, the tutors are people. As of now, the question of what makes StudyPool.com legit is becoming more and more valid.

Before we get to writers, we need to understand how to use StudyPool.

So, you go to the Q&A page and start crafting your “question.” There, you need to pick the subject, in our case ‒ writing. Then, you choose discipline, in our case ‒ film. There, you need to provide as many details as you can on your “question.” Then, you need to select what you’re working on, say, “project,” indicate you need a “sample draft,” and set the deadline. Finally, you start calculating the budget.

So, after settling on the budget, the auto-matching system will match you with a writer suitable for your essay. We’ve placed an order for an essay on how social conditions in France and Francophone countries caused the arrival of a cinematic wave known as the New French Extremity.

The service offered several writers, and we checked the profile of one of them. All of a sudden, the service obtrusively started sending notifications to pick the tutor. We agreed on the suggested tutor, and they started working on our essay. Three days later, the paper was delivered to us, proving the negative StudyPool.com reviews right.

So, how much does StudyPool cost? That depends on what you need your paper for. If you need help with a high school-level assignment, the price is $15 per hour, which equals per page. Help with college papers will cost you $20 per hour. Help with Master’s or Ph.D. papers will cost you $25 and $30 per hour, respectively.

Yet, you can always customize the budget. And when you decide to customize it, a funny thing happens. If you end up with a sum of $100 or more, you get a notification that the price is high, and it’s unlikely that tutors would offer lower bids. If you end up with an amount of less than $100, you need to checkmark the notification that you are aware that the quality of the work will reflect the price. Mind that StudyPool payment is processed when you’re matched with the tutor.

There’s no information about discounts on the website, but if you google StudyPool discounts, you can find promo codes in the 20%-50% range on various sites.

The service has a rather clear refund policy. You can request your money back within 14 days if you’re not satisfied with the results of an order. To be more precise, you can claim a refund if the paper doesn’t correspond to the initial instructions and/or contains plagiarized material.

There’s no exact StudyPool revision policy. We were unable to find any information on whether we were entitled to the revision or not. That’s why we discussed it with the author in advance.

Does StudyPool cost money when it comes to revisions? Honestly, we don’t know. In our case, the author did it for free. And it was a wise move, as otherwise, we had all the reasons to request a refund.

On the surface level, our paper seemed okay, but as we started reading it, we were appalled. The information on what is New French Extremity was basically taken from Wikipedia. Then, it copied several other articles (more on that in the plagiarism section). And, finally, it didn’t really expand on the social conditions that gave birth to the said cinematic tendency.

The revised version was a bit better. At least, it was rewritten so that you don’t guess what papers served as sources for an essay without reading them before. However, the author once again failed to shed light on the political conditions that led to the creation of the New French Extremity. We requested to revise the paper once again, and the author simply canceled the order, which is another reason for getting a refund.

So, how does StudyPool work in terms of deadlines? The minimum deadline is one hour. However, when you select it, you get a notification that there might not be a lot of tutors willing to bid for such an urgent order. Things are slightly better when you opt for a deadline of more than three hours. The maximum deadline is thirty days.

We really cannot complain regarding deadlines. First of all, the deadline doesn’t affect the price that you set. However, it can affect the prices offered by the authors or tutors, or whatever you want to call them. Secondly, we may be upset by the paper, but it was delivered on time.

We requested it to be ready in three days, and it was ready in three days. We like this tendency of timely submissions, confirmed by our team in these Expert Writing reviews and GeeklyHub reviews. And we hope it lasts.

However, regarding the end results, it would’ve been better if the author had taken more time to provide us with a more appealing paper. However, we agreed with the condition that our price could affect the quality of the essay.

Is StudyPool real or fake when it comes to plagiarism? After running the paper through several plagiarism checkers, we got results ranging from 15% to 19% of plagiarized content. It copied words and sentences from two articles on the New French Extremity at academia.edu. And it even copied a sample from 123HelpMe on the said cinematic tradition. As you already know, it led us to request revisions.

The revised paper was slightly better. Apparently, the author did run the paper through checkers themselves and successfully rewrote several sentences. The rewritten essay contained between 7% and 9% of plagiarized content, depending on the plagiarism checker.

Yes, it’s better, but it is something that the author should’ve done in the first place. Yet, StudyPool doesn’t promise unique papers and admits that the end product may contain plagiarism.

So, where do we even start: an obtuse website that provides you with little to no information, rude customer support agents... or careless chatbots? Before subscribing, the service states that it has more than 30 million documents on various subjects. Yet, upon creating the account, the number of the documents shrinks to 20 million. Users get poorly written papers that contain plagiarism.

Yet, the StudyPool refund provided a satisfying ending to the story. Oh, and the service more or less sticks to deadlines.

Look through Speedy Paper reviews and MySuperGeek reviews as well to find out which platform has a better balance of benefits and downsides.

*Screenshots used for review and criticism purposes fall under the 'fair use' doctrine of the United States Copyright Law.