HARTFORD, Conn. -- Term papers have been sold online for years, but now students are able to find more for sale than ever, with companies offering to sell prospective students the personal essays most college applications require.

If a student needs a term paper, there is an endless supply available on the Web for every conceivable subject, so it's probably not too surprising that some companies have gotten into the business of selling "personalized" personal essays that are tailored to the questions asked on college applications.

Prices on the essays range from about $50 to several hundred and up.

While some students who spoke to Eyewitness News said they had no problems with their admission essays, others said they agonized over them.

"The essay is a vehicle that admissions offices are going to look at, a vehicle to find out more about the individual, to personalize the candidacy," said Brian Usher of the University of Connecticut's undergraduate admissions department.

Some of the companies selling essays online also offer the promise of "plagiarism-free" work.

"It's not a major concern of ours, because we take a student's application, that the information is honest and forthright and there's integrity in there," Usher said.

Channel 3 bought several of the online essays, and found them to be uniformly mediocre, but in search of a second opinion, we brought them to UConn officials.

"It's just regurgitating some information about the university, probably could pull this offline fairly easily in our catalogs," Usher said.

UConn admissions officials said that they process upwards of 20,000 applications each year, and that while they are aware of the essay-buying business, have yet to find it to be a problem.

"If we found an essay that just didn't match what is in the rest of the file, it might raise some antennas and concern, but to be quite honest, we haven't," Usher said. "It hasn't gotten to that point."