The universities watchdog is being asked to pursue websites advertising essay-writing services for students. Universities Minister Jo Johnson said he wanted "tough action" against the spread of plagiarism and the commercial industry it has spawned. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) said hundreds of "essay mills" were charging up to £6,750 for writing a PhD dissertation. Mr Johnson said it could "undermine" the reputation of degrees from the UK.
[...] There were about 17,000 cases a year of "academic offences", it said, but there was no breakdown of how many of these involved students who had used essay writing services. Essay-writing websites often carry disclaimers suggesting the essays being sold should be used only as examples and not passed off as students' own work.
[...] Dame Julia Goodfellow, president of Universities UK, said: "Universities have severe penalties for students found to be submitting work that is not their own. "Such academic misconduct is a breach of an institution's disciplinary regulations and can result in students, in serious cases, being expelled from the university." This has been a longstanding problem - and a decade ago Google announced that it would stop running adverts from essay writing services, but such businesses can still be found through online searches.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday February 21 2017, @11:08PM
Ehm,... you mean lazy fucking bastard students? Styles can be forged and and not always easy to recognize, especially if it is not the author's native language.
Only one of the problems is that it is much easier now to make a forgery, to plagiarize or take other shortcuts. A very important factor is that the (higher) degrees, once only for the really clever, are now a must have for casual employment. That makes the pressure to succeed at any cost very high on all sides. The inflation of the degrees should not be underestimated.