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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 bradley13 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:10AM
AthanasiusKircher That's an excellent comment.
Some high-level European politicians have been embarrassed by retroactive checking of their dissertations - sometimes 30 years in the past. The cases I'm familiar with weren't ghost-writing, but rather extensive, unattributed copying. When your dissertation is basically a paraphrase of some obscure book, well... In any case, this is not a new problem.
It is also a problem that manifests very differently inside and outside of STEM. In STEM, we have to actually produce things. Experiments, simulations, models, programs, whatever. These then have to actually function. Maybe one could get away with lying about the results - that does happen - but even cursory checking by your advisor would uncover that kind of blatant fraud. I have seen students flog out their assignments on sites like upwork.com (i.e., paying some programmer somewhere to do their homework).
For non-STEM fields, students are expected to analyze and understand existing sources, and then contribute some original thought to the subject. This is a lot more vague: ghostwriting and plagiarism are a lot easier and harder to detect. I mean, what original thoughts are you going to bring to an analysis of medieval literature? Really? I know a retired guy who plans to supplement his retirement income by ghostwriting in areas like this - it's what he studied for years, after all, so it's all easy for him.
Dunno what you do about the problem. There's really nothing illegal about the services themselves. It's the students who sign that they did their own work. But if they're halfway careful, it's nearly impossible to catch them cheating.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.