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According to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, there are over 1,000 essay mills in operation in UK universities. The government announced that offering essay-writing services to students for a fee will become a criminal offence under plans to tackle cheating. Universities welcomed this decision and introduced codes of conduct with severe penalties for submitting work that is not a student's own.

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 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.

According to an associate professor at the University of Calgary, the rate of academic misconduct during the pandemic rose from 38% to over 200%. Students who use the services of companies to write essays or complete assignments for them are often extorted. Companies continue to charge their credit cards, threatening to report them to their schools if they try to seek help.

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.

“Academic misconduct is a mega-problem rippling across the globe,” says a professor of education at Calgary. 1340 incidents of cheating were found at the University of Waterloo up to August 2020, an increase of 146% on the previous year, while at the University Calgary cheating had increased by 269%. According to the Quality Assurance Agency in the UK, COVID-19 had accelerated the growth of contract cheating with 904 essays mills providing ghost-written texts known to be operating.

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.

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.

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 Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities hearing board found 34 undergraduates and 27 graduate students to violate academic integrity guidelines. According to academic integrity experts, graduate students are more likely to make accidental citation mistakes, while undergraduates are more inclined to directly copy information from other sources or purchase essays to pass off as their own. Officials put undergraduates who fall below the 2.0 GPA threshold under academic probation, and graduate students cannot receive a degree with a GPA of less than 3.0.