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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 looorg on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:15AM
This isn't just about or at the PhD level, but with that in mind one would think you should be able to pick out a paper written by your own PhD students. You can do it a lot sooner, at least you should be able to do very educated guesses that are better then just pure guesswork. A lot of it might depend on the subject you teach, with classes or subjects that require a lot of actual writing you'll learn sooner. Classes that mostly requires you till fill out questionnaires, do computations or forms with multiple-choice answers and similar doesn't give away as much information so it takes a lot longer.
But you usually learn to identify them during the first year or so. It takes a while mostly due to to the work they do at the start is mostly about explaining fundamental concepts and the basics of the subject so there isn't much room for their own thoughts and ideas. But as the classes progress so do they and the more they write the easier it becomes to spot and pick them out. At first you figure out the students that will fail and drop the class, those are the once that are easiest to spot. Then you learn to pick out the good students, the once that care and know the subject. The problem is usually the once in between cause they are just so average. You also quite quickly learn to spot the bad cheaters, the once that didn't bother actually reading the books - at best they just flipped thru the pages until they came upon what looked like the answer, the once that just copy paste stuff from Wikipedia or the first things that come up on Google when your search for specific phrases. Their style is usually very weird since there isn't actually one style but usually many different styles just mixed together. Overall and in the end you usually wont remember what they actually wrote, mostly due to it being horribly dull to read answers to the same question over and over again, but you learn to recognize their styles.
I recall asking the people that taught me since at the time they tried the concept of anonymous papers as an experiment, due to some students having complained about grade discrimination. For every paper you wrote you got a number, a new number every time, the person that graded them just saw the number and the number and the real name was brought together again when the grades was added into the system by admin staff. Nobody liked the system, lots of extra work for everyone involved with no actual effect or change in the end. They knew who wrote which paper anyway - style, topics, content, punctuation, common phrases etc. I recall one professor picking my paper out of a stack of papers when I came by his office in another matter and telling me I did good - he later became my thesis adviser. So perhaps he just knew my style, but my own experience tells me I can pick out more people and work then just the once written by my favorite student(s).