Inside the essay mills doing students’ work for them
As plans to stamp out cheating are announced, Guy Kelly investigates just how the industry operates
Any student will be familiar with the feeling: that creeping horror as you realise, yes, that 10,000-word essay you’ve known about for months is actually due next week. And, no, you still haven’t written a single word.
For most, the natural response involves a carousel of self-loathing, extension requests, and Red Bull-fuelled all-nighters. For an increasing number of others, though, all it means is spending £50 to get a professional to do it for them.
“We know this practice of using formal ‘essay mills’ goes on, and we need to try to educate staff and students to appreciate the consequences of using them,” says Gareth Crossman, head of policy and public affairs at the universities watchdog, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), which has just announced a plan to stamp them out. “In a way, it doesn’t matter how widespread it is, but it’s the fact it goes on at all that we must address. It’s about the integrity of our universities.”
Incidentally, it is widespread, and getting worse. It is estimated that the “professional essay writing industry” – services offering to quickly complete any assignment, to any standard, for a fee – is now worth over £100million, providing completed assignments to tens of thousands of students at UK universities every year. And where once it was mainly international students looking for work with a better standard of English, it’s a growing trend among stressed native speakers too. Essaywriter.co.uk, one of the largest companies, told the Telegraph it had seen UK customers increase by a fifth over the last two years.
This week, the first major steps were taken to halt the essay mills’ grind, in the form of new guidelines produced by the QAA. Commissioned by Jo Johnson MP, the universities minister, and distributed to all UK universities, they recommend using software that can pick up on shifts in tone and style, a ban on essay mills advertising near to campuses, and an encouragement of whistle-blowing among staff and students.
Johnson called it an “unacceptable and pernicious” practice, while universities will generally expel anyone they catch – though given the essays aren’t plagiarised, identifying a paid-for piece of work isn’t easy. Using an essay mill, on the other hand, very much is.
Type “essay writing service” into Google and more than 34 million pages come up: different companies, each boasting similar services. Once clicked, too, many operate identically: a chat window pops up, asking if you need any help, and sympathetic lures, often in curiously poor English, cover the page. “Are you too busy? Are you not in the mood? Does this particular assignment bore you?” asks one site, soothingly. “If that’s the case, then you need online essay help.”
Generally, work ordered is given to one of thousands of freelance writers, most of whom have a specialist subject. One site, UK Essays, boasts “3,500 writers, all of whom are qualified to degree-level at a minimum, and many of whom are teachers, lecturers and professionals”.
To place an order, a student gives the details of their assignment, the number of pages and deadline, and then waits for a quote. For consistency, some will let you choose your required grade – a basic undergraduate essay in English literature from the cheaper sites at
2:1 level will set you back around £30 – but others know you will simply want the best possible, and can charge thousands. They’re getting smarter, too. To counter QAA guidelines, some sites now ask for samples of previous work, to inspire the copy artist further.
Alarmingly, no subject is off limits – something Johnson said could “endanger lives”. On one site I visit, a chat helper tells me student nurses are some of their most reliable customers. Searching for a quote on another, meanwhile, I find I could request a 30,000-word Phd-level dissertation for my imaginary medical degree. If I need it in a fortnight, that’ll be £36,950. Or to put it another way, a junior doctor’s salary for a year and a half.
According to Daniel Dennehy, chief operating officer of UK Essays – which advises students to merely draw on the model answers, rather than submit them – the practice is no different from home-tutoring, meaning for students looking for extra support, a ban on all essay mills regardless of their practice would make their lives more difficult.
“Why not utilise the expertise of graduates and professionals across the UK to help you succeed? Most universities do not offer any such provision, but this is the essence of our service: we simply help students who need additional guidance by connecting them with qualified academics,” he says.
“We are aware that services like ours can be viewed as controversial [but] our proposed solution to this issue is regulation of the industry. If demand is not slowing down, the most logical way to proceed is to consider how we can minimise the potential damage of this demand while ensuring that the key aim – to help students who need it – is not compromised.”
Until then, the temptation remains.