Last updated: 10/04/08
Essay-site cheats harder to catch

Universities have warned that students using essay buying sites to cheat on assignments are proving harder to catch than other types of plagiarism.

Students are selling essays to companies who sell them on to other scholars who wish to cheat to obtain higher grades. Robert Clarke, a lecturer at Birmingham City University, has identified 4,000 sales on a small number of websites.

Unlike other copied work, he says it is hard for plagiarism software to detect.

“The difficulty is that it is original work - it’s just not the original work of the student handing in the assignment,” says Clarke, principal lecturer in the Department of Computing.

Unlike material copied from the internet or recycled work bought from ‘essay mills’, these are usually one-off essays, which he says are hard for universities to spot as cheats.

A recent workshop at the university into this so-called contract cheating heard from Tony Jenkins at the University of Leeds that academics were in an “arms race” with cheats - with cheating websites trying to keep ahead of efforts to detect them.

He warned the workshop that the cost of buying essays in this competitive marketplace was within reach of many students.

by Mark Wright