Search Page

Strong demand for ghost-written academic papers in the lead-up to university graduation and revelations that people pay to have scholarly articles published are worrying critics who fear the billion-yen industry is making it harder than ever to evaluate graduates' abilities.

Police and education authorities are investigating allegations of mass cheating by international students at tertiary institutes throughout the country. The man who reported the issues alleged that he was contracted to write assignments for students at various universities who could not meet language standards.

Jakarta's Pramuka Street intersection is well known for its essay-production services, as Indonesian universities continue to be dogged by the problem of ghostwritten essays. By paying a sum, a student can graduate without making much effort writing the final-year dissertation.

A new Ministry of Education regulation to punish academic fraud has come into effect to clamp down on plagiarism and fabricating research data, as well as buying, selling or organizing trade in academic degree theses, including all forms of "ghostwriting" or buying of materials produced by essay mills.

Universities may attract penalty, including a freeze of grants, if its teachers are found to be guiding more than eight PhD students at any given point in time as part of a drive to plug lacunae in research. The University Grants Commission will ask all universities to have anti-plagiarism software to ensure that the thesis papers reflect genuine research. The step assumes significance against the backdrop of some agencies offering their services to research scholars to draft theses for them for a fee.

Several Sydney universities caught up in a cheating scandal that includes students using essay writing services say they are responding and cracking down on the new cheating method. The vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney said he would personally head a taskforce to investigate academic misconduct in the wake of new methods of cheating.

Macquarie University has revoked the degrees of two students and prevented a further 10 from graduating after an independent investigation revealed the students used an online ghost-writing service to complete their assignments. The Northern Sydney University is the latest institution to finalise its internal investigations into the MyMaster cheating racket, in which up to 1,000 students from 16 universities hired the online company MyMaster to write their assignments and sit for online tests.

At the helm of the company embroiled in a large-scale academic cheating scandal is a Chinese-born businesswoman. The enterprising 30-year-old has used her accounting degree to build a lucrative ghostwriting service, called MyMaster. This pitch has seen the MyMaster company turn over at least $160,000 during 2014 and return more than 900 fraudulent assignments to students prepared to hand over up to $1,000 for the work.

Cheating by students who use essay mills is “virtually undetectable”, according to a study that found that many ghost-written papers would receive good marks if they were submitted. An associate lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales, conducted an experiment in which she ordered essays from 13 ghostwriting websites and then had them graded by leading academics who believed that they were looking at genuine student submissions. The results were “alarming”, with the quality of purchased essays being “higher than expected”; The use of essay mills might therefore be “much, much higher” than previously thought.

A study conducted by students at Chulalongkorn University shows that large numbers of students are climbing the academic ladder not by hard work and smarts, but by cheating. Assignments were sold at a rate of 15 to 30 baht per page, depending on the subject matter and the urgency. Students could purchase multiples choice in advance or written exams.