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Universities catch less than one per cent of ‘bought in’ essays, own records suggest

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By Georgina Lee

Across the country, university students are submitting final pieces of coursework to complete their degrees.

While the majority are acting in good faith, student surveys find that one in six privately admit to buying in essays — suggesting hundreds of thousands engage in so-called “contract cheating” each year.

But it seems universities have failed to comprehend the sheer scale of the problem.

FactCheck can exclusively reveal that about half the universities that responded to our freedom of information request were unable to put a figure on how many contract cheating cases they’d found last year.

And the 58 institutions that could provide stats only reported catching around 300 contract cheats between them. Most were students from outside the EU.

How many contract cheats were caught last year?

Nearly every university in the UK uses some form of anti-plagiarism software, which scans electronic versions of a student’s work to see if they have dishonestly copied from online sources or other publications.

“Contract cheating” is when students buy or commission others, often companies known as “essay mills”, to write bespoke essays or coursework for them because this original work won’t be flagged by such software.

Only 58 out of the 99 universities that responded to our query were able to tell us how many contract cheats they’d caught last year. A further 66 institutions didn’t respond at all.

Some gave an exact number, others quoted a range of figures (e.g. “fewer than five”) to avoid identifying individuals. Taking these ranges into account, the 58 institutions reported a combined total of between 278 and 316 cases of contract cheating in 2017-18. That’s an average of five or six cases per institution.

The University of Bedfordshire has the dubious honour of topping this list, finding 59 cases of “work produced by a third party” last year. As well as “bought in” essays, they told us this could also include cases where friends or family had provided so much help with an assignment that it was no longer the student’s own work.

A spokesperson for the University told FactCheck: “At Bedfordshire we put a lot of work into stamping out student submission of work produced by a third party. We regularly raise the awareness of academic staff so they are alert to the potential for cheating, and we are transparent and rigorous in our response to it.

“To keep the matter in perspective, in 2017-18 there were only 59 cases identified at the University, a hugely small percentage of the total number of essays submitted that year.”

The University of Westminster came in second place (28 cases), followed by Oxford Brookes and Sheffield Hallam (24 each), Sussex (23) and Middlesex (20).

What does this tell us about these institutions? It could be that they are hotbeds for contract cheating. But all the evidence we have suggests this is unlikely.

As we’ll see later, one in six students in the UK confess to contract cheating — which is why it’s so striking to hear from some universities that they don’t hold records of any such cases.

And as we’ve already discovered, the majority of universities either didn’t reply to our request for information, or couldn’t provide us with any figures on the number of contract cheating cases they’ve detected.

The most plausible explanation for Bedfordshire, Westminster, et.al. coming top of this list is that these institutions are simply better at spotting this type of behaviour, and/or better at centralising their records of it, than other UK universities.

Bedfordshire told us that they “carry out an early assessment of students to assess their writing style and ability” so that if suspicions are raised later, they are better placed to gauge if a piece of work is the student’s own.

One university, Brunel, told us “it is very difficult to determine if a student has ‘bought in’ coursework unless they admit it.” Asked about the number of cases, they said “no students have admitted ‘buying in’ coursework during the period of interest.”

Some universities said that contract cheating is recorded in individual departments’ files, rather than in a university-wide database. So it’s possible they are catching more cases of contract cheating than their central records show.

But unless institutions document and centralise records on this phenomenon, we are forced to rely on imperfect snapshots.

Most contract cheating cases in our sample involve international students

International students — those from overseas who are not EU nationals — were involved in 58 to 73 per cent of contract cheating cases reported by universities in our sample.

To put those findings in context, non-EU international students make up about 14 per cent of all students at UK universities.

The tip of the iceberg?

There’s no way of knowing for certain exactly how many people are buying in essays to complete their university degrees.

In 2018, Professor Phil Newton of Swansea University, reviewed 71 student surveys on the topic of cheating, going back to 1978.

The studies he looked at from 2014 onwards found that on average, one in every six students (15.7 per cent) say they have bought or commissioned work from a third party.

If that’s accurate, it suggests about 370,000 of the UK’s 2.3 million students have engaged in contract cheating at some point in their studies. Across our 165 universities, that would work out at an average of 2,200 cases per institution.

Compare that to the figures universities reported to us: in our sample, the average university detected between five and six cases of contract cheating last year. Extrapolating across all higher education institutions, we can (very roughly) estimate that UK universities caught a combined 915 contract cheats in 2017-18.

Some said they hadn’t recorded any such cases at all. And the University of St Andrew’s went further: it’s not that they don’t have records of a case, they told us they “can confirm there have been no instances of contract cheating this academic year”.

There are limits to the cheating surveys. Professor Newton points out that people who agree to take part in surveys “are more likely to be older, female, well-educated and from a higher socioeconomic background” – characteristics he says are “in complete contrast to the factors associated with an increased likelihood of engaging in cheating”.

He also notes that in some studies, there was no guarantee of anonymity for the students taking part.

All of this suggests that the already-high levels of contract cheating reported in such surveys could even understate the true extent of the problem.

What are universities doing about it?

We asked each university to tell us whether they have “policies in place to identify students who are ‘buying in’ bespoke essays, assignments and other coursework from outside”.

Of the 98 institutions that answered our request, 47 per cent could not point to a rule explicitly forbidding the practice (we verified this by checking university rulebooks for phrases like “purchased essays”, “essay mills” and “ghosting”).

However, many of those without a specific policy told us that cases of this kind would be covered by their existing rules on academic misconduct.

One university told us that they use guidelines from the higher education watchdog, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), to spot and investigate possible contract cheating.

The QAA says “one of the most effective ways of detecting cheating is familiarity with a student’s normal output (their writing style and standard of work, for example).” When examiners suspect an essay has been bought in, the QAA also suggests carrying out a “viva assessment”, where students are interviewed in person to establish whether they authored the work themselves.

Responding to our query about how they identify contract cheating, seven institutions — Aston, Aberdeen, Liverpool Hope, the London Business School, the Open University, the University of Bristol, and the University of Chichester — told us that they use software services like Turnitin to detect plagiarism.

But that doesn’t quite answer our question.

The version of Turnitin that is currently used by 98 per cent of UK universities can tell whether an essay or sections of it have been lifted from online sources or other published work. It cannot detect whether an assignment has been bought in. This is the very reason students approach so-called “essay mills” in the first place.

So we were surprised when one institution, Canterbury Christ Church University, went further, telling us: “the University uses the software Turnitin to identify potential cases of bought essays.”

We thought perhaps they were referring to a new Turnitin programme launched in March 2019, “Authorship Investigate”, which is designed to help manage contract cheating cases. The software uses “forensic linguistic analysis” to see if a given piece of work is consistent with the student’s previous writing.

But the university told us that although they “have had discussions with Turnitin and intend to use their new ‘Authorship Investigate’ tool”, they had not yet deployed the software.

And even if they had, Turnitin told FactCheck that Authorship Investigate is not a way of flagging up potential cases of contract cheating where there is no prior suspicion of foul play — it’s a tool that can provide evidence to help investigators work out whether someone who is already suspected of buying in an essay has done so.

The onus remains on universities, and academics and examiners, to raise suspicions in the first place.

Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

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"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.