12th October 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We published a news article a few days ago about companies who charge students for essays which they pass off as their own. It seems to be a growing trend among undergraduates, which seems strange because surely they’d rather do the work themselves and save their money for the union bar. In any case, this isn’t a new phenomenon, and over the years our tutors have received a lot of requests like this.
Before setting up Blue Tutors, Peter Edwards was working as a tutor and two incidents of attempted ‘cheating’ clearly stand out for him. The first was when he was still at university and a friend of a friend asked for help with an online course. The premise was to meet the student for an hour each week to help him understand the work. The reality was that the student’s parent transferred the first ‘lesson’s’ money, and then Peter received an email with the student’s log in details and it turned out they expected him just to complete the online questions, which counted towards the student’s overall grade.
The second incident was a geography student who was struggling with a statistics module. After the first one hour lesson, Peter was thanked for his help, but told that the student didn’t really have any more time for lessons. This was worrying because the student would obviously do very badly without any improvement. Peter then received an email with the assignment the student was due to hand in and a request for it to be completed. At least this time the student had a lesson to start with and began with good intentions.
We hope, maybe in vain, that none of our tutors have ever completed work on a student’s behalf which counts towards their grade. However, we do think that the vast majority of times our tutors tell us about it, or we realise what a student wants when he/she makes the request. Many of our tutors begin working with us because they need to support themselves through a graduate course, or when they begin their working life, and they’re in a situation where a good offer to complete (easy for them) work is very tempting. What we always say is that the tutor will eventually regret doing that, even if it seems like a great idea at the time.
Th article on essay writing companies is calling for the government to take action, and it actually seems ridiculous that they haven’t done so already. We are wholeheartedly against anything like this, and always support and encourage our tutors to turn down these requests.