The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) reports that the pandemic has demonstrated how innovative and adaptable essay mills marketing could be” by advertising discounts and “suggesting they could fill a gap resulting from a lack of supervision, or even offering essay writing to help students stay safe”. According to QAA, universities must look at how to prevent or catch cheating in the physically distanced assessment.

A report revealed that hundreds of university students had been disciplined or expelled for making sexually explicit, homophobic or racist comments on social media. In order to improve online safety for staff and students, Universities UK has published guidance for its members on how to tackle harassment including cyberstalking, trolling and sexting.

The number of students caught cheating at the UK’s top universities has shot up by a third in three years, with experts warning that institutions are ignoring the problem. A senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London and one of the UK’s leading experts on essay cheating, said: “A growing number of young people also feel more pressure than ever before, often turning to cheating to help them get through their degrees. It’s also easier to access websites that offer paid-to-order essays”.

US public universities recorded about five cases of alleged cheating for every 100 foreign students, and only one for every 100 domestic students, in the 2014-15 academic year. In the United Kingdom students from overseas – from outside the European Union – are more than four times as likely to cheat. Many of these cheating students come from countries with endemic corruption or with significantly different academic cultures and standards. Universities should acknowledge this problem and allocate all necessary resources to mitigate academic misconduct involving students.

Most students are happy to work hard, try their best and accept the consequences. But there are a host of commercial essay writers who are prepared to help those who can't be bothered. Universities have responded to the threat by trying to change the way they assess students. Increasingly students are being asked to orally present their work in front of a seminar group, or to answer questions from lecturers.

Many of the UK’s leading universities are refusing to spell out just how they are spending their students’ £9,000 (US$13,600) a year tuition fees. The influential think-tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute, invited a range of institutions to explain how they were spending the money - but the majority, including almost all the of the country’s most select universities, declined to reply.