The history of academic cheating is as long as the history of schools and universities themselves.
In ancient China, even the threat of the death penalty for cheating was not enough to put young scholars off trying any tactics that they could think of to get an advantage in the all-important civil service exams.
In the modern world, cheating at school or university is a lot less risky and also much easier. Google “essay writing services”, and you’ll get 3.7 million hits back in less than half a second.
Behind those hits are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies and individuals around the world offering to take the stress out of school or university by writing your essays for you.
Given the ease of accessing such services, it is no surprise that they are increasingly popular with stressed students who are struggling with the demands of their courses.
But just how common is so-called “contract cheating” becoming? In 2018, Professor Phil Newton of Swansea University set out to answer that question.
He went through forty years of surveys of students internationally to see how many of them admitted to getting someone else to write an essay for them. The results sent shockwaves through the academic community.
In the years 1978 to 2014, just under one in twenty students would admit to cheating like that. But in the years between 2014 and 2018, that number shot up to more than one in seven.
Doing the maths, Professor Newton calculated that around 31 million students around the world (including hundreds of thousands in the UK) were getting someone else to write at least one essay for them each year.
In the five years since that study was completed, the situation seems to have got worse. Much worse according to Dr Thomas Lancaster of Imperial College London, the academic who coined the phrase “contract cheating” in the first place.
Dr Lancaster claims that the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift of education online have driven even more students to turn to the internet in search of essay writing services.
At the same time, the rise of sophisticated plagiarism detection software has made it much harder for students to just directly copy someone else’s essay.
But contract cheating gets around that by hiring someone else to produce an original piece of work, which can be almost guaranteed to pass the plagiarism detectors with flying colours.
According to research by Channel 4, students in the UK using essay writing services have a less than 1% chance of being found out by their university.
The scale of the problem is clear. But it is not clear what can be done about it. So, we take a deep dive into this murky industry: identifying the different types of essay writing services and looking at the legal and ethical issues around using them.
We also look at the arguments in defence of essay writing services and highlight the solutions that could help prevent students from needing to use them in the first place.
Understanding essay writing services
Essay writing is a thriving industry that comes in a wide variety of different forms. The basic principle is that a student pays a company or an individual to write an essay for them.
At one end of the scale are huge companies like Write My Essay, which offer highly professional essays (which they can then submit as their own work).
At the other end are individual freelancers, who can be found on websites such as Upwork and Fiverr, who will create bespoke essays for their clients.
Such websites have rules forbidding academic cheating, but they don’t appear to be enforced, with job adverts requesting essay writing services regularly posted on the platforms.
In between the very big companies and the individual freelancers are the many so-called “essay mills”, that specialise in churning out original content for students.
The companies normally have websites that are more or less frank about what they are doing. Some claim to be offering simply “educational support” by providing a sample essay that should inspire a student rather than giving them something that they can just pretend is their own work.
Essay writing services vary enormously in price, but research by Dr Thomas Lancaster has shown that sourcing essays direct from individual writers can be very affordable for students.
The average price for a 2,000-word essay is just over $11, with most of the writers providing such services coming from Kenya, Pakistan and Nigeria. Further research by the same author found that students on Twitter are willing to pay up to $66 for a 2,000-word essay.
Are essay writing services illegal?
Hiring someone to write an essay for you might be cheating but does that actually make it illegal? The answer to that question varies depending on which country you are in.
In many places, including most US states, using an essay writing service is actually perfectly legal. The reason for that is that such services only claim to be providing students with sample essays so present themselves as simply online tutors.
However, governments are coming under increasing pressure from universities to use the law to clamp down on the problem, and an increasing number have responded by making such services illegal.
New Zealand was one of the pioneers in such legislation, leading the way in legislating against essay mills. Other places that have already done the same include Australia, Ireland and several US states.
In April 2022, the UK government followed suit. Now it is illegal to either provide or use essay writing services in the UK. As of June 2023, no actual criminal charges have been brought against anyone under the new legislation.
Perhaps recognising the difficulty in enforcing this law, the British government has written to internet search engines and service providers asking them to “do everything in your power to prevent the advertising of these unscrupulous practices”. Nevertheless, a simple search on google.co.uk will return thousands of hits for various companies.
Even in those countries that have not yet banned essay writing services, submitting someone else’s work as your own is certainly a breach of university and college policies.
So, while students in most US states might not face criminal charges for using such a service, they are very likely to find themselves facing serious penalties from their institution. Such penalties could go as far as seeing them kicked off their course.
Still, given the difficulties in detecting content that has been written by a third party for a student to submit, that’s a risk that many are prepared to take.
Research has shown that up to 50% of students would consider cheating as long as they were confident that they could get away with it.
Ethical Aspects
Regardless of whether essay writing services are legal in a particular country, serious questions remain about the ethics of getting someone else to do your work for you.
After all, degrees are awarded on the basis of a student’s intelligence and ability to work hard and give them privileged access to jobs and other opportunities as a result. So, surely, it’s wrong to steal an advantage over your more honest peers by just paying someone to do the work for you?
Another ethical consideration is that if students are cheating to gain qualifications does that mean that they might get a job that they are not really qualified for?
And how much more serious do those ethical questions become if, for example, someone is qualifying as a doctor on the basis of work that someone else did for them? In such cases, academic cheating can have serious real-world consequences in terms of impacting patient safety.
Essay writing companies have also been accused of preying on vulnerable students and encouraging dependency on their services.
By doing so, they prevent those students from developing the knowledge and critical thinking skills that are supposed to be the whole point of education. Other concerns have been raised about the fact that essay writing services expose students to the risk of blackmail.
In defence of essay writing services
Nevertheless, despite all the legal and ethical charges levied against them, essay writing services do have their defenders.
Some see them as essential services for stressed out students who are unable to cope with the pressure of having to submit too many assignments, especially when they are using them for subjects that they do not intend to major in.
Others have argued that in the real world after university, people will always collaborate with others and commission them to do work, so why shouldn’t they do the same during their academic careers?
Some commentators have stated that modern students have been brought up in a sharing economy with unlimited access to the resources they need online, so why shouldn’t they use essay writing services too?
Other arguments have focused on the struggles of students who are non-native speakers of English.
Many foreign speakers travel to English-speaking countries to complete their education and use essay writing services to overcome the stresses and difficulties of studying in a foreign language and to put themselves on the same playing field as their peers.
Other students find themselves forced to study in English even when in their own country, which can again prompt them to try to level the playing field by turning to essay writing services.
The basic thrust of many of the arguments that defend such services is that they are filling gaps that the university itself should be filling.
If universities provided proper support, less students would need to turn to essay writing services in the first place.
Prevention and solutions
So, what can be done to prevent the rise of essay writing services? As the arguments in defence of such services suggest, universities can do more to support students, especially those who are not native speakers or who have learning difficulties.
More academic and pastoral support could reduce students’ reliance on contract cheating. For example, overstressed students should be encouraged to speak with their tutors to request the extra time that they might need to complete assignments, which would prevent them from turning to essay writing services in the days before their deadline.
There are also technical solutions emerging that might prevent students from using such services.
As Dr Lancaster has explained, such technology works by “identifying how we all write. We’ve all got a unique style and it shows in how complex our language is, the words we use too much, indicators like that. If you suddenly then hand in something written with a different writing style, that’s suspicious.”
Finally, more might need to be done to explain to students the importance of not using such services and the ethical issues involved in their use.
As Dr Grant Klinkum of New Zealand’s Qualifications Authority, has said, “Some of our values, based on some Renaissance idea of the value and importance of intellectual endeavour and so on, may not be shared by increasing numbers of students… This is not about immoral students. This is about varied values.”
Conclusion
As we have seen, essay writing services are thriving, despite increasing attempts to clamp down on them through legislation.
Despite all the ethical issues surrounding their use, desperate students will turn to them, especially because there is little chance of them getting caught.
What do you think? Should more be done to prevent students from using essay writing services and to crack down harder on those who do?
Or should we focus on the positive sides of such services and see them as just another aspect of modern education that helps students to learn and develop? Whatever your answers to those questions, it seems certain that essay writing services are here to stay, and some students will continue to use them for as long as they can get away with it.
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