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YouTube stars are being paid to sell academic cheating, a BBC investigation has found. More than 250 channels are promoting EduBirdie, based in Ukraine, which allows students to buy essays, rather than doing the work themselves. YouTube said it would help creators understand they cannot promote dishonest behaviour. The BBC Trending investigation uncovered more than 1,400 videos with a total of more than 700 million views containing EduBirdie adverts selling cheating to students and school pupils.

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.

The new Federal government-funded Education Integrity Unit will monitor academic misconduct at Australian Universities. Researchers report that between 6 and 10 per cent of students have cheated during their studies. The new academic Unit will address “emerging threats” to academic and research integrity, admission standards and information, student safety, foreign interference, cybersecurity, fraud, and corruption.

A systemic study by Frontiers in Education in 2014-2018 found that 15.7% of university students commit contact cheating. In total, this potentially represents 31 million people. Meanwhile, the number of blackmail cases has increased as well. Research in the UK shows that 31% of the essay mills use misleading advertising and the majority do not guarantee content that meets the passing grade. To tackle contract cheating a joint effort is needed from legislatures, students, and professors.

While the Academic Integrity Policy has not changed since the transition to remote learning at Rutgers faculty, departments have implemented new measures in an effort to prevent cheating. The Office of Student Conduct has created tutorial videos on completing work honestly, and on exams and major assignments, students should write and sign an honour pledge. The policy includes seven types of violations: plagiarism, cheating, and fabrication, facilitation of dishonesty, academic sabotage, violation of research or professional ethics and violations involving potentially criminal activity.

According to a new report, 11% of the assignments submitted by Australian university students were written by someone else. More than 95% of students who cheat in this way are never caught. A survey distributed to 4100 students at six universities found two types of contract cheating: paying someone else to write a paper or downloading it from a collection of pre-written assignments.

Kenya has a global online industry on ghostwriters helping foreigners to cheat. Many of the essay mills websites are based in the US and Eastern Europe, and the profile pictures of the writers to be hired are fake. They give the impression that the essay will be written by an academic in the West when in fact it is written by someone in Kenya, often a student or graduate there. While some countries are taking action to ban essay selling services, it is not yet clear how effective this will be in stopping a trade that crosses international borders so easily.

According to a report at the Thompson Rivers University, the number of academic integrity cases has doubled. They include 514 incidents of plagiarism, 342 incidents of cheating, 5 incidents of fabrication and 347 incidents of academic misconduct for 1,208 cases recorded from September 2019 to August 2020. 80 students have been subject to suspension by November 2020.

The “proliferation” of essay mills over the past 5 years has led to an increase in the number of plagiarism cases. Last year, 338 cases were reported by universities in the North, with the majority of cases at Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University. 1,000 essay mills companies are currently operating across the UK. Some are allegedly involved in exploiting graduates overseas where they are forced to work 12-hour shifts producing essays for as little as $1 an hour.