Search Page

Contributors offer their thoughts on the universities watchdog calling for a crackdown on essay plagiarism sites. They offer various solutions to this increasingly common issue, including making the offer of such services illegal, reducing the number of assessment tasks students are required to complete, putting the focus on classroom exams rather than essays, and enabling teachers to have a more accurate knowledge of student’s capabilities so that they are able to spot work that is not of that student’s usual standard.

The Department of Education is planning to introduce laws to prosecute “essay mill” companies who offer to write students’ assignments in exchange for money. The move is a response to mounting concern over the practice which allows students to circumvent their college’s plagiarism detection systems. The use of these services is not easily detected as software used by universities only detects where students have copied from previously published academic texts. He said the new guidelines would be developed in consultation with providers, students and other relevant parties, and would be informed by recent UK research and experience.

For the first time, students caught cheating could be criminalised amid fears tens of thousands are buying dissertations from websites – a trend ministers say threatens the quality of British university degrees. Universities watchdog the Quality Assurance Agency said hundreds of “essay mills” are charging up to £6,750 for writing a PhD dissertation. Last year the agency published a report into the scale of the issue, which revealed essay services were available at a cost ranging from £15 to thousands of pounds, depending on essay length and complexity.

Britain’s universities are said to be in the midst of a “plagiarism epidemic” after an investigation by The Times newspaper revealed how almost 50,000 students were caught cheating in the last three years. The newspaper also found international students - from outside the European Union - to be the worst offenders, coming out as being more than four times as likely to cheat in exams and coursework, according to data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Last year, Times Higher Education reported allegations thatan emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, often hailed as the world’s greatest living sociologist, had included several unacknowledged passages in his 2013 book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? that were near-exact quotations from Wikipedia and other web resources.

1,382 students from two British universities have been investigated for cheating since 2010. Most of those cases are of plagiarism. Most plagiarized work came from media and film students, and the Informatics department – which includes computer sciences.