College Cheating, A Global Business
Tuition was due. The rent was, too. So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went in search of a job. First she tried selling insurance policies. Then she sat at the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.
Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.
“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”
Since prosecutors in the United States charged a group of rich parents and coaches this year in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme, the advantages that wealthy American students enjoy in college admissions have been scrutinized. Less attention has been paid to the tricks some students use once they are enrolled.
Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites — with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete homework assignments.
Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.
The essay-for-hire industry has expanded significantly in developing countries with many English speakers, fast internet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya, India and Ukraine. A Facebook group for
academic writers in Kenya has over 50,000 members.
After a month of training, Ms. Mbugua began producing essays about everything from whether humans should colonize space (“it is not worth the struggle,” she wrote) to euthanasia (it amounts to taking “the place of God,” she wrote). During her best month, she earned $320, more money than she had ever made in her life. The New York Times is identifying Ms. Mbugua by only part of her name.
A 2005 study of students in North America found that 7 percent of undergraduates admitted to turning in papers written by someone else, while 3 percent admitted to obtaining essays from online platforms. Cath Ellis, a researcher on the topic, said millions of essays are ordered online every year worldwide.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic integrity office at the University of California, San Diego. “If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every accredited university into a diploma mill.”
When such websites first emerged over a decade ago, they featured veiled references to tutoring and editing services, said Dr. Bertram Gallant, who also is a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity. Now the sites are blatant.
“You can relax knowing that our reliable, expert writers will produce you a top quality and 100% plagiarism free essay that is written just for you,” reads the pitch from Academized, which charges about $15 a page for a college freshman’s essay due in two weeks and $42 a page for an essay due in three hours.
“No matter what kind of academic paper you need, it is simple and secure to hire an essay writer for a price you can afford,” promises EssayShark.com. “Save more time for yourself.”
In an email, EssayShark said the company did not consider its services to be cheating, and that it warned students the essays are for “research and reference purposes only” and are not to be passed off as a student’s own work.
Representatives for Academized and Ace-MyHomework did not comment.
A major scandal involving contract cheating in Australia caused university officials there to try to crack down on the practice. A similar effort has emerged in Britain.
Experts said that no federal law in America, or in Kenya, forbids the purchase or sale of academic papers.
Bill Loller, vice president of product management for Turnitin, a company that develops software to detect plagiarism, said some colleges have students who have never completed a single assignment. “They’ve contracted it all out,” he said.
Contract cheating is harder to detect than plagiarism because ghostwritten essays will not be flagged when compared with a database of previously submitted essays; they are generally original works.
But this year, Turnitin has a new product called Authorship Investigate, which uses a host of clues — including sentence patterns and a document’s metadata — to attempt to determine if a paper was written by the student.
Some of the websites operate like eBay, with buyers and sellers bidding on specific assignments. Others operate like Uber, pairing desperate students with available writers. Either way, the identities and locations of both the writers and the students are masked from view, as are the colleges the assignments are for.
In Kenya, a country with a per capita annual income of about $1,700, writers can earn as much as $2,000 a month, according to Roynorris Ndiritu, 28, who said he has thrived writing essays.
Many people in Kenya said they did not view the practice as unethical.
In a strange twist on globalization and outsourcing, some sites have begun to advertise their American ties, as more foreign writers have joined the industry. One site lists “bringing jobs back to America” as a key goal. American writers, who charge as much as $30 per page, say that they offer higher-quality service, without British spellings or idioms that might raise suspicion about an essay’s authorship.
Ms. Mbugua, 25, finds herself at a crossroads. She graduated in 2018 and has sent her résumé to dozens of employers. Lately she has been selling kitchen utensils.
Ms. Mbugua said she never felt right about the work.
“People say the education system in the U.S., U.K. and other countries is on a top notch,” she said. “I wouldn’t say those students are better than us,” she said, later adding, “We have studied. We have done the assignments.”