Expert: Essay Mills are "Organised Crime"

Plus, "The Score" releases a new show. Plus, U.K. ban on contract cheating services is almost ready.

Issue 113

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U.K. Moves Closer to a Ban

The U.K. this week announced it was just one step removed from legislation that would make essay mills criminal enterprises in England and parts of Wales. There are two related stories. One in The Guardian and another in Times Higher Ed (THE).

On the legislation (see Issue 61), THE reports that the ban on essay mills:

is awaiting royal assent having cleared all parliamentary hurdles

As noted previously, the most important piece of this legislation is that it proports to ban not just selling academic material but advertising it for sale, the lifeblood of cheating providers.

New Zealand and Australia have enacted similar bans and reported positive results including having successfully shut down some providers and convinced social media platforms to block their ads.

And while the legislation would be a major advance in academic integrity policy, the U.K. government is already advising not to expect many prosecutions under the law. A leading regulator told THE:

we don’t anticipate many prosecutions in practice

Instead, the leaders say, the laws are aimed at culture change, removing the idea that purchasing academic material is fine, normal, common and perfectly legal.

There’s no question that will help. A literal ban will be a disincentive and potentially aid in any consequences schools themselves undertake. The same government official quoted above also told The Guardian,

Essentially, students will know that if they use an essay mill they will be engaging with a criminal entity

Also, the press coverage seems to use “contract cheating” and “essay mills” interchangeably, when they are not. All essay mills are contract cheating providers. Not all contract cheating providers sell essays. You could, in theory, ban essay mills while allowing many contract cheating sellers to do business as usual.

This is important because it gets to the issue of whether the U.K./England ban will include contract cheating companies such as Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet and StuDocu - outfits that don’t sell custom writing specifically but do sell cheating.

Based on what I’ve read of the ban, it likely does include them. According to press reports, using quotation marks, the ban would make it illegal to:

“provide, arrange or advertise…cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at any institution in England providing post-16 education, including universities”

Cheating services. So, not just essays - right? I guess we will see.

But again, the major move here, should anyone want to enforce it, is the ban on ads. Once the laws are official, just a few letters to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and the other players could to do the trick. The cheating companies may not care if they’re breaking the law, but the ad platforms just may.

Experts Say Essay Mills are “Organised Crime” and Discuss Their Marketing Tactics

In the dawn of the ban on contract cheating services and advertising in the U.K., there was a forum this week on essay mills - a setting in which one expert called essay writing services “organised crime” and opined on their escalating marketing tactics.

Coverage in The Guardian largely quotes Michael Draper, a dean at Swansea University in Wales, who said,

Increasing commercial pressures of the type that we normally find from supermarkets are impacting on students. So a lot of these sites provide, for example, buy-one-get-one-free or loyalty schemes, or in some cases, I’ve seen cashback.

The Guardian also says:

When students try to withdraw, they can become the victims of blackmail, targeted by fake legal letters. The conference was told this was “organised crime”, with reports that some essay material is provided by authors in sub-Saharan Africa who are also open to exploitation.

True.

The Guardian also wrote:

The conference was told that collusion, where students work together to complete an assessment that should be taken independently, has become a serious problem in the past couple of years, particularly with the shift of assessment online

Also true.

Finally, Draper said this about the scope of the problem in the U.K.,

The last count I think there were over a thousand sites on one comparison site, with more arriving each month. That is a huge number.

It is a huge number and huge problem.

Good for leaders in the U.K. for acknowledging it, discussing it and trying to actually do something about it. In the United States, all three are literally foreign concepts.

“The Score” Interviews Jennifer Wright of UCF

“The Score,” the outstanding podcast on academic integrity hosted by veteran education writer Kathryn Baron, has released a new episode.

The new one features a lengthy, in-depth interview with Jennifer Wright, Program Manager of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity, at the University of Central Florida. Like the other shows - maybe save the first one - it’s well worth a listen.

Wright is a front-line practitioner of academic integrity at a very large public school and I’ll share just two bits of her “The Score” interview so hopefully you’ll drop by and listen.

On our friends at Chegg and elsewhere, Wright says,

those of us in academic integrity lands, we really have a very, I do and I know many of my colleagues do, have a very visceral reaction to Chegg and to other websites who their sole mission is to convince students that their sites are safe and good and helpful and nothing could happen. Nothing could happen if you use us. That's not true.

And, in a part I personally love, Wright talks about her interactions with professors who report their students for academic misconduct. She says that sometimes the professors want assurances that the cases won’t ruin students’ careers or end their studies - to which, Wright said,

I always say back to them, “I understand that. You had nothing to do with it. This was the student's choice to do what they did. You could have been standing behind them in their residential hall, over their shoulder and saying, 'Don't do it. Don't do it.' If the student wants to do it bad enough, they're going to do it. You don't have anything to do with this."  

Exactly, times a thousand.

Student misconduct has nearly nothing to do with teaching or the teacher. It’s noble and good that some instructors want to shield their students from upsized consequences. But the triggering event, the spark, is entirely on the side of the student and we have to get better at disconnecting the cheating from the teaching.

Anyway, go check it out.