The government has announced a crackdown on “essay mill” websites that sell written-to-order essays.
Tens of thousands of students are believed to have bought essays online and submitted them to university tutors, a practice known as “contract plagiarism”.
Last week Jo Johnson, the universities minister, called for new guidance to be issued for the next academic year, including tough penalties for students who buy essays and strong warnings about the consequences.
We asked readers who have used, written or marked these essays, or know anyone who has, to tell us about their experiences. Here’s a selection of the responses.
The writer: I try not to think about how students use my work
I’ve been a writer for so-called essay-mill websites for many years.
Back when I was at university, people joked about using these sites but I didn’t know anyone who actually paid for such a service. After leaving university I got into freelance writing. One day I came across an advert for an essay-writing service that was recruiting. I applied and with a good degree and a master’s I was accepted. After I realised how easy it was (and how much better paid it was compared with other freelance work) I started applying to more companies. Now I work for a few different companies, writing roughly an essay a week. I do everything from short thousand-word pieces to full dissertations.
I try not to think about how students use my work. On all the websites I write for, there’s a disclaimer saying that the essays are not to be submitted by students. This is ignored. It helps that I work in the humanities, so the consequences of a student not being able to show their supposed knowledge are not likely to be severe. In fields where there could be serious ramifications, it’s much more of a moral conundrum for everyone involved.
Some students quite blatantly use these sites to cheat: to the point where I’ve been given dissertation feedback from a tutor and made changes accordingly. I’ve even got messages from pleased students who were happy to pass their course thanks to my help. It seems strange.
Brian, 29, Wales
The user: I felt quite guilty when I got my results
I used an essay-mill website once in my second year at university. I regret it now as I felt quite guilty about it when I got my results. It cost about £400 for a 2,000-word essay. The reason I used the site was because I didn’t understand the module, although I must admit I was partly to blame for that as I didn’t engage in lectures. The tutor didn’t really engage individually with students. The site emphasised doing your own research to gain understanding. Another factor was that I was up to my neck in essays and working commitments and only had a couple of days to produce an essay. If I had prioritised that particular essay, which I didn’t have enough knowledge in, I would have jeopardised the quality of my other essays.
These websites are pretty widespread. What I have noticed is that wealthier students coming from abroad tend to use them more. One student told me in his first year he used this site various times for many essays just because he could afford it and he “couldn’t be bothered” to do the work.
Dan, 24, London
The lecturer: In scientific subjects, it’s obvious
I am a lecturer and I’ve seen PhD students use these websites. International students are not taught to write essays in the way that most UK students are, so plagiarism is rife. It’s not enough to tell them not to plagiarise when they don’t fully understand what this means; and even if they do, they are not able to stop doing it. They write the key points that they want to say, and then send it to an essay-writing service to rewrite it for them. It’s obvious to the academic reading the work when this has been done. The essay-writing service doesn’t have a proper grasp of the scientific concepts, so the work makes no sense.
Sarah, 37, south-west England
The coder: It’s not just essays. There are websites that write code
It’s not just the essay mills that need observing here. These websites and individuals also offer to write code and do the write-ups for a fee. I used to hang around with a few students who weren’t short of a few pounds, and they’d get another person to write code/re-factor their own submission and do the write-up for them. The plagiarism-detection software doesn’t work well for code since so much can be quickly changed to make it look incredibly different.
Everyone knew of people offering to write a program for you. It was mainly students further along the course who had been asked to write the same code before.
I asked another student in the year above to see their submission once to get an idea of what the lecturer wanted. I just ran the program to get an idea, I didn’t look at code. The lecturer was being incredibly vague and didn’t have a lot of time for us, so I felt forced. But other students used them because they fell behind in lectures and didn’t have the background knowledge to continue at that level.
Andrew, 29, Midlands
The friend: The bought essays got very low marks
I haven’t used one of these sites but a friend did. We were on a challenging course and many members of our small class struggled. One student in particular was deemed to be asking too many questions of lecturers and was only receiving limited help. That’s why they resorted to using essay-mill websites.
Due to the course being highly technical (involving technologies that are rapidly evolving) the essays often contained incorrect information. It was either because the writer didn’t understand the course or used out-of-date information. The student in our class that used these sites fell foul of the latter – recycled outdated information – and got very low marks.
Lucien, 22, south-east England
The writer and user: Laziness is the main factor
I’ve both used and worked for essay-mill websites. When I worked for essay-mill websites it was to make some extra money. I found the work to be both easy and interesting. (I read and wrote about a wide range of topics related to my degree and master’s that I am interested in.) I probably wrote too well for some clients, especially those who didn’t have English as their first language. I think it would have been quite obvious to a tutor that they may not have written the piece of work.
Students use these sites for a number of reasons. It is laziness, lack of time, as a jump-off point to write an essay (eg by using the list of references to help kickstart their own work). Laziness is probably the main factor though. If you can pay someone £100 to get you a guaranteed 2:1, which means you can go out and party all weekend, then there are lots of people who will happily do so.
I bought an essay for this exact purpose (the only time I have ever bought an essay) and it was probably the worst piece of writing I have ever seen. It was not written by a native speaker, had almost no relevant information or references in it and was useless as a piece of work. I contacted the company to try to get a refund for my order (their website offers no-questions-asked refunds) and have been completely ignored. I won’t buy an essay ever again. Some people use them as aids to improve their writing. Or point them in the direction of useful authors, journals, sources of information etc.
Ed, 36 , London
- Some names have been changed
