10th October 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Universities around the UK have called for a ban on essay writing services. Reported on the BBC, these companies, often referred to as essay mills, are not unlawful in they country, but have been banned in New Zealand and parts of the United States. Students can pay for a bespoke essay which can’t be identified as plagiarism in the way universities would usually check for cheating.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, but a recent survey said that, of students around the world, 15% admitted to cheating over the last four years, whereas that figure is 3.5% over a forty year period. The essay mills have cottoned on to the increased demand for paid essays, often selling themselves more like tutoring companies, and stating in the small print that people should not use their services for assessed work. However, many of their adverts are less clear about an aversion to cheating, and strongly suggest that students can get a first or 2:1 by paying for a essay.
Professor Shearer West from Nottingham university said that they do their best to help students to write their own essays, and strongly deter them from using any essay writing service. She wants students to realise how damaging it can be for their university life if they are caught passing off someone else’s work as their own. However, despite there being sophisticated software to expose plagiarised essays, Professor West says that the best way to tackle the essay mills is for the government to ban them.
An investigator paid £65 for an essay as part of his investigation into essay writing services. Dan Burns said that “the service was quite professional. It wasn’t some kind of dark website”. They offered essays for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and even whole dissertations. An extra service was available for you to actually speak with the person who wrote the essay. However, despite the service claiming essays would be a first or 2:1 standard, Dan’s lecturer, after a skim read, said it wouldn’t be awarded anything more than a 2:2, and closer reading showed that some of the grammar was very bad and awarding a 3rd would even be optimistic.