#BanEssayMills

I’ve posted before about a petition to government, askingfor legislation to ban essay mills. The petition is more than half-way towards its first target – enough signatures to require a government response.

Let’s rehearse the issues.

There are organisations – known as essay mills – which for a fee will write an essay or similar piece of work to whatever specification a student asks. Although they market themselves as revision aids, there is no doubt that they are aiming to encourage students to buy an essay which they can submit as part of their university assessment, instead of writing it themselves.

This is a bad thing. The student doesn’t learn, and is cheating. So for those of you keeping count, this is in fact two bad things. And it’s hard to stop.

Half-way there ...

It’s hard to stop because the bought essay may not show up as such in plagiarism detection software used by universities. In fact, essay mills typically guarantee that they will pass such software checks – why would they make this guarantee this if they were only revision aids?

So why the petition? A law won’t make plagiarism software any better. But it can make it possible to deal with the essay mills, not just the students who use them. At the moment, if a university suspects that a student has submitted an essay that they have bought, the only laws which could apply are those governing fraud. But to use this would involve university staff giving evidence against individual students, which is time consuming and unlikely to happen. (It’s important that students trust their academic tutors. Anything which reduces this trust is a bad thing. That’s one of the problems with Prevent, by the way.)

It’s also using heavy tactics. In my career I’ve had to deal with many hundreds of cases where students have cheated, and nearly always it was a student who didn’t understand what that what they’re doing was wrong (plagiarism is a difficult concept, and culturally dependent). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times where a cheating student was clearly being malevolent. So by all means punish students who cheat – and help them understand that what they have done is wrong – but we must remember that often they cheat through ignorance or desperation.

If there was a law banning the advertising of essay writing services, and the sale of essays through such services, it would be possible to remove the issue at source. Accounts by those who have used such services show that they are clearly seeking to entice students. There are also stories of students being blackmailed once they have used the essay writing service. And under the current legal framework, universities are powerless to deal with the essay mills themselves.

This is why we need a law. It isn’t enough to deal with individual students who cheat: they need to learn; and the problem of catching them is real. There isn’t an existing legal framework which will enable universities and sector bodies to deal with the essay mills themselves. It’s time for the government to lend a helping hand.

Here’s the link to the petition. Please sign it, please share the petition. Help to #BanEssayMills

Down with cheats!

There’s a petition open on the government petitions website which seeks to address a real problem for UK higher education.  In my view, anyone with an interest in quality and standards, the health of our sector, and student wellbeing, should consider signing it.

The petition ...

The petition – here it is – asks government to legislate to make it illegal to provide or advertise contract cheating services.  Contract cheating services offer to provide essays for students – written to the precise specification provided by the student, and often guaranteed ‘plagiarism free’.  The services claim to be an aid for students’ revision, but this strains credibility.  If all students needed for revision was a model answer, why would a plagiarism free guarantee be a particular selling point?

The truth is that these services are writing essays to order, which students can submit as their own coursework.  This is cheating, plain and simple, and is bad for the reputation of UK higher education, for the student experience and for academic standards.

The petition has been started by Iain Mansfield – you’ll find him on Twitter as @IGMansfield – a former civil servant who knows about higher education from a governmental angle.  I’ve dealt with a fair few examination irregularities during my career, and it is clear that when students are desperate, they can do silly things.  Remove the supply of contract written essays, and there’s one fewer way for students to make a serious mistake.

If the petition gets 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in Parliament, which is a starting point.  Similar laws have been passed in New Zealand, Ireland and many US states.  If they can do it, so can we.  And we should, in my view, do something about a real problem.

According to HESA there’s almost half a million people working in UK HE.  This gives us plenty of directly affected people who can help to make a difference.  Please spread the word, and sign the petition.

Copy that, Minister

Jo Johnson, Universities minister, has taken time from piloting the Higher Education and Research Bill through Parliament, to taking strong action – or at the very least issuing a strongly worded press release – enjoining universities and the QAA to do more to prevent plagiarism. Specifically, to take action against essay mills.

Properly cited lyrics, so it isn't plagiarism

This is an issue which has been bubbling around for a while. The government brought together stakeholders last summer to consider the problems; in August 2016 the QAA published a pretty thorough analysis of the issues and made recommendations about what could be done.

The problem is simple to describe. There is a concern that some students are buying essays written by others and passing them off as their own. This is plagiarism, and is cheating. It isn’t clear how many students are doing this, but a few businesses which supply such essays are obviously doing decent business, and by implication the number of students doing this is non-negligible.  The Telegraph cites 20,000.

The QAA recommend a three-pronged approach:

• Partnership working by the sector to tackle the problem
• The possibility of legislation, perhaps like that in New Zealand
• Using regulators to prevent essay mills from advertising.

Jo Johnson’s statement focuses on the first and third approaches: the sector should sort it out, by means of guidelines and tougher penalties for students; the QAA should also go after the essay mills’ advertising. Legislation isn’t ruled out as a possibility, but is definitely kicked into the long grass. And, gratifyingly for the minister, some proper outraged press coverage about those naughty students.

I’m torn as to the best approach on this.

Early in my career I handled cases of student cheating, and plagiarism was by far the most common ‘irregularity’. This was in the very early days of the internet; pre Turnitin, and spotting plagiarism was down to eagle-eyed markers. And it was often pretty obvious: passages copied from books without editing, meaning that ‘as I argued on page 34’ for instance, showed up as out of place in a 6 page essay. Often the source material was cited in the bibliography. Whilst there was no doubt that the work had been copied, and without proper attribution, it was difficult with examples like this to see it as a deliberate attempt to deceive, as opposed to a complete lack of understanding about what the essay was trying to test. Often coupled with poor self-organisation meaning that at the last minute the student panicked.

In such cases throwing the book at the student would have been wrong, and that was often the academic judgement. A clear fail for the essay; a requirement to resubmit; and work to help the student understands what the problem was: this was a good remedy.

In the case of a student submitting as their own an essay which they’ve bought online, it is harder to be so forgiving. There seems to be more agency involved in committing the exam irregularity. Buying an essay and passing it off really isn’t a failure to understand the practices of academic referencing; it’s a straightforward attempt to cheat. And on that argument, the minister is right. Sort it out, HE sector.

But legislation surely can’t be a bad thing to get on with. Even if the ‘crime’ is committed by the student who submits the purchased essay, there really isn’t an argument for leaving the essay providers untouched. The notion that these are bought for ‘research’ purposes is laughable. The idea that tailored exemplars are a good way to learn is not a strong one. (The use of model answers afterwards to help feed back to students on their performance is a different question.) And the New Zealand law, which empowers the higher education quality regulator to prosecute essay mills, does not look like a bad law.

Would it solve the problem entirely? No – essay mills may be based outside the UK, and beyond the scope of the law. Would it help to convey the message that the practice is wrong? Yes. Would it help to demonstrate that the UK takes academic standards seriously? Yes. Is there a convenient current parliamentary vehicle to achieve this? Unbelievably, yes there is.  The minister could do more to make this happen now.

There’s another angle here. A student who submits a plagiarised essay may get caught, and face a penalty, or may not. But what is absolutely certain is that they will not learn as much about the essay topic as a student who reads and writes and submits honestly, even if they fail or get a poor mark. The plagiariser knows less than the honest student. And this cost is borne throughout their life. To plagiarise is to fail.

If universities could convey this message better to students, we might be getting somewhere important.