There are two major problems that the internet has brought into focus for academia. The first is plagiarism. Luckily, there are tools today (such as TurnItIn) to flag up instances of copying. The second issue is websites selling essay writing services. This is far harder to track down, but the government recently took advice from academics that such websites should be banned.
What is an Essay Writing Service?
It’s far harder to track down than plagiarism, but essay writing services are websites where students go to pay people to write essays for them. The person writing may be another student, a graduate, or even an academic. But more often than not, they are simply writers (sometimes non-native English speakers) without expertise in that subject. Their level of expertise or grasp of the English is not the issue though. The matter of concern is that students are not turning in their own work and are not being given the correct assessment of their abilities.
Cost can be anything between a few hundred pounds and a few thousand. As with anything, you get what you pay for and the best options charge the most.
Calls for Banning
Prof Philip Newton at Swansea University’s medical school carried out a study earlier this year. He collected data from self-reported surveys voluntarily taken by students. The surveys were the result of accumulated data from several countries. Prof Newton’s findings demonstrated that as many as 1/7 students in higher education around the world had paid for another person to write their assignments with most having admitted to using an essay writing service. Globally, this is around 31 million students. There was no specific data for British students.
He believes the government could and should do more to eliminate this type of cheating and is concerned that deregulations following Brexit could make it easy for such sites to become established in the UK when many other countries are looking at ways of banning them. New Zealand has already banned such services and several other countries are expected to follow suit over the next year or two.
Not a Secret Service
Faculty at many universities have pointed to the open and brazen way in which these services advertise. You would think that they operate in secret, but this is not the case. Increasingly, fliers and leaflets are appearing on campus and distributed freely to students. There is also evidence suggesting that people working for such sites actively trawl through social media pages and groups, cold-calling students and offering essay writing services.
Part of the study published by Prof Newton called for the government to fund a study to examine the extent to which this is going on in UK universities.