<p>Theoretically, what the readers of the essays look for in an essay is reasoning and critical thinking. What you know has little to do with it. If you state a false statistic that supports the prompt and question, it will not help your argument or essay score much (theoretically) because it does not display your reasoning skills. So making things up won’t help your grade much, if at all (let alone in an unfair way). So it is fine to do it. Unfortunately, by my impression graders don’t seem to look at your critical thinking as much anymore. They seem to give higher scores on the basis of length.</p>