15% of students admit to buying essays. What can universities do about it?
Posted in Governance and administration on October 18th, 2018 by steve
“New research on plagiarism at university has revealed students are surprisingly unconcerned about a practice known as ‘contract cheating’. The term ‘contract cheating’ was coined in 2006, and describes students paying for completed assessments. At that time, concerns over the outsourcing of assessments were in their infancy, but today, contract cheating is big business …” (more)
[Jedidiah Evans, The Conversation, 18 October]
“A campaign to outlaw essay mills in the UK has been running for a few months and 17 October marks the international day of action against contract cheating …” (
“Richard Bruton, Minister for Education and Skills, has identified a problem that few others considered as such: ‘unfair’ essay mills, whereby students buy their written academic work online. Leaving aside the fact that there is little evidence – either anecdotally or seriously – to indicate that essay mills are indeed a problem large enough to distort student outcomes, this seems like yet another example of the government diverting our attention away from more important concerns …” (
