Ban the ‘essay mills’ that turn teens into cheaters
Would someone in government ban essay mills, please? What they do is immoral, if not illegal, and if the US and New Zealand can pull the plug on them, why can’t we?
Last year, a Swansea University study showed that one in seven recent graduates had paid someone else to do their work for them.
Now we learn, from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, that brazen students are logging into their university’s Wi-fi to look up these essay mills, which are a modern iteration of the dark, satanic variety. For fees ranging from £100 to £1,000 they will commission other graduates to research and write – i.e. rehash a previous version – of any coursework required.
In this extraordinary game of academic cat and mouse, universities are having to invest in plagiarism software to catch out students too lazy to do their own work and too stupid to judiciously change the odd verb.
That old rule of thumb – steal from the many and it’s research, steal from the few and it’s plagiarism – has long since been forgotten.
I’m genuinely baffled why any young person would even contemplate going to university if they weren’t prepared to learn, especially given the debts they accrue.
But it’s a corollary of too little choice for too many teenagers who would thrive in a different setting, such as an outstanding technical college or earn-as-you-learn apprenticeship. The Onward report into post-18 education published earlier this year decried how teens were being “sold a false promise” and ending up doing costly degrees that would never be paid off.
Britain suffers a productivity problem because hiring multiple low-skilled, low-paid workers to carry out a task is inherently inefficient. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2016 UK productivity was lower than the rest of the G7 by 16.3 per cent. As Brexit will likely reduce the influx of workers from the EU, we will need all hands to the proverbial tiller and a labour force with higher skills.
That means a quality education that ensures they can fill job vacancies and realise their potential. Tearing down essay mills would signal that intent.