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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 Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:42AM
There are a lot of colleges and universities. So many students writing essays. The average student has less and less chance of actually writing anything original. (Top students have a better chance, of course, I'm talking about average students here.) At best, the average student is just going to regurgitate old material, with a slightly different flavor and smell. And, the average student knows that his mediocre submission is going to be lost in the mountain of medicrity that has come before his own. This is the student's one chance to stand out from the sea of medicrity around him. If the student wants to gamble on a paid paper, more power to him. It's not like he actually owes future employers a real expertise in his chosen field.
Student loan money spent on paid essays may be money well spent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:19AM
I have had as much as leadership types tell me the difference between working-class people and the people who manage them is the management types do not "do" stuff, rather they "get things done" through other people.
"Cheating" was not looked on the same way, as doing this was just another tool that got the job done at the least expenditure of time and effort.
Why use inefficient methods? Costly!
Kinda reminds me of the old joke going through college... the engineering grads exclaimed "We Got Jobs! We Got Jobs!", while the College of Business grads yelled back: "Working for Us! Working for Us!".