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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @09:56PM
Makes you wonder about the career prospects in the field where the grade A students see this as their best option.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:10PM
First they come for the banks defrauding customers
Then they come for power companies dumping coal ash in drinking water
Now they're going after mom-and-pop industrialized plagarists.
Next thing you know, they'll be after my Swiping-Five-Bucks-While-You're-Not-Looking startup.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:14PM
SHEEIT! I knew I had a fiver. Damn you ikanreed!!!
Damn you to Facebook HELL!!!!!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:21PM
Don't leave me a 1 star review on fivr, I'll lose my contract!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:18PM
I mystified that someone who was managing a PhD student wouldn't pick up of fraud. People have a distinctive writing style, and your professor should know yours by the time you're writing your PhD dissertation...
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @11:25PM
I've graded many papers, unless there is some specific writing style that sticks out then you wouldn't likely tell the difference between decent paper A and B. The PhD thesis level? Their thesis is probably one of the only pieces of actual writing the professor has actually read! Anything else was probably too short to get a real in-depth feeling for the student's writing.
(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).
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:21PM
Cuba and North Korea would like to remind you that their students do not get access to the internet to cheat. You can trust their work, and they are used to accomplishing a lot from not much and with little support.
The US will only catch up in a few years, once the FCC has folded, and people can't afford their sub-megabit single provider anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:54PM
When you make degrees mandatory to get even the most basic jobs in order to participate in the international dick academic ratio dick measuring contest you should expect to be pushing people into the system en masse who're not going to cut it, but must cut it to get a job (that previously wouldn't have necessitated a degree).
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 21 2017, @11:04PM
Here we go again with sloppy definitions. Copying, plagiarism, ghostwriting, and stealing are all distinctly different activities. Propaganda equating copying with stealing has caused plenty of trouble. Now they want to put out propaganda equating ghostwriting to plagiarism. However reprehensible it may be to pay someone to ghostwrite your advanced degree, I do not agree with calling it plagiarism to do so. An essential component of plagiarism is that the perpetrator had no permission from the real authors to represent their work as his or her own, and in this case, the perp paid for permission. Plagiarism is always bad. Ghostwriting may or may not be bad.
The name calling is an attempt to further vilify the activity. What could the motive be? It's good to ask universities some hard questions about what it means to be educated. Having a PhD in a difficult scientific or engineering subject ghostwritten is just not going to work if the student doesn't know squat about the subject. The student has to defend the work in front of a committee of PhDs who do know their stuff, and they will quickly discover whether the student is a fraud trying to fool them with bull. The ghostwriting can only work if the student already knows enough about the subject to understand the ghostwriters' work.
In a soft subject, there's a greater possibility that a bullshit artist can con the professors. Happens now and again, and it is of course very embarrassing to the discipline and the university. I'm guessing they're the ones who are backing this effort, with venomous prejudice. Must have happened several times recently.
The line gets blurry. Where is the line between editing and ghostwriting? And, how much quoting is too much? When does that become plagiarism?
Another problem is the "lone wolf" kind of training that universities demand of graduate students. Grad students are expected to do all the work themselves, to prove that they can. But that is unrealistic outside of school, where collaboration is king. The first thing labs do to freshly minted PhDs that they hire straight out of school is knock out that attitude of jealously guarding the secrets of the universe from thieves and plagiarists. The lab expects sharing of knowledge, knowing that the whole lab will be more productive that way. They're trying to produce research, not demonstrate that applicants are qualified and deserving of advanced degrees.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:11AM
An essential component of plagiarism is that the perpetrator had no permission from the real authors to represent their work as his or her own, and in this case, the perp paid for permission.
Actually, no. That's NOT how plagiarism is necessarily defined. It's true that plagiarism often is talked about as "stealing," which would imply taking something without permission. But that's not a REQUIRED component. The term is also more broadly defined as "passing off another's work as your own," and that's frequently how it's defined in university honor codes and such. So, regardless of your own definition of plagiarism, universities generally require students to submit their own "original work" and some even require signed statements to that effect. I could direct you to any number of sources about the standards for "plagiarism" that are common in academia.
However reprehensible it may be to pay someone to ghostwrite your advanced degree
I suspect this is a relatively rare request, for some of the reasons you mention. I suspect that most of these "essay cheat" sites are primarily writing shorter papers for miscellaneous requirements that will be less exposed to formal inquiry than a dissertation defense.
The line gets blurry.
Not really.
Where is the line between editing and ghostwriting?
Well, in the publishing world, some ghostwriters are basically editors, just with slightly more responsibility than your typical copyeditor. Other ghostwriters basically research and write most of a book themselves.
In any case, I don't think the line is that unclear when it comes to something like a dissertation. It's supposed to be the student's work, which means it is primarily the result of their own thoughts, etc. If a hired editor is basically doing "clean-up" like an academic advisor or someone like that might also do, that seems acceptable. But the summary seems to be talking about people who write a text wholesale, which is an entirely different thing.
And, how much quoting is too much? When does that become plagiarism?
Quoting is distinct from plagiarism. Plagiarism, again, by definition involves passing off someone else's work AS YOUR OWN. That means no attribution, or an unclear attribution that doesn't make clear how extensive your quoting/borrowing of material is. If you put stuff in quotation marks and put your source, you are NOT plagiarizing. Of course, if you try to submit a dissertation that's just a strung-together set of long quotations, I doubt that will be acceptable most places., since your "original contribution" to research won't be demonstrated.
Another problem is the "lone wolf" kind of training that universities demand of graduate students. Grad students are expected to do all the work themselves, to prove that they can. But that is unrealistic outside of school, where collaboration is king.
I don't know about this -- I've seen plenty of labs where grad students collaborated with each other and/or a supervising faculty member for research and publications. In many fields and places, it's the norm. But yes, most places also do require that at some point you write up your own research summary by yourself to demonstrate that you (by yourself) actually know how and have the ability to do so. Is that really so unreasonable if you are to be awarded an advanced degree?
(Score: 2, Funny) by anubi on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:47AM
One of my college professors used to jokingly remark:
Stealing from ONE source is called "plagiarism". Don't do it.
Stealing from MANY sources is called "research". That's what we are looking for!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @11:10PM
What about the students caught using them? I say if they get caught cheating not only should they fail the class, they should also get all credits wiped from their record and expelled without a refund of their tuition, and if they rode to college with a grant or scholarship they have to pay it back. Might as well charge them with a crime also, as they'll just continue to cheat throughout life. Yes, I have no tears for cheaters.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:23AM
Considering how poor internet security is, I'm starting a business blackmailing students who got their diplomas by using those sites.
That might be double-blackmail if the sites themselves realize they could easily get extra income. it's not like students will go public and risk their diplomas...
And I concur that the students should lose all their post-high-school diplomas if caught (schools do keep copies of thesis). No need for further punishment, since that's already a lifetime of sucky jobs ahead.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:05AM
Failure of imagination, a poor sign for a successful entrepreneur; why restrict your market segment to only those "who got their diplomas by using those sites"?
Presently (or in the very near future) only the suspicion cast on a student should be enough to hinder or terminate her/his career.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @12:29AM
They should also be forced to immediately pay back any loans, scholarships, etc. that were used to help perpetrate their fraud. And they should be banned from using transgender washrooms for five years.
(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!".