The young woman was desperate to get into university. She had chosen a science course, and felt it was grossly unfair that she would be judged on her ability to write essays which would go towards her Leaving Cert points. Writing was her only weak point. Plus, she had a social life!
As a veteran journalist, feeling the pinch of under-employment keenly due to newspaper cutbacks and an increasing reliance on cheap “intern” labour and lack of networking opportunities (holding Conservative views and being a cranky teetotaller hadn’t helped, either), I had recently re-launched my ghostwriting services. “My words; your voice” was my pitch.
But the clients I had envisaged were busy professionals looking for an experienced copywriter to “ghost” an advertorial or article they had researched. The nearest I would venture towards crossing the ethical boundary would be to write a newspaper column (I had enthusiastically written many a “leader” and even “Problem Page” item in Sunday and Daily newspapers, and a colleague had recently confessed that he used to write the horoscopes).
I sent the young woman away with some tips on writing an essay, a motivational talk and a promise to help with proofreading. The guilt-tripping started within hours; she wanted me to write the essay, not repeat what her teacher had told her. She applied emotional blackmail using mutual acquaintances; I was suddenly cast in the role of the selfish middle-aged professional, unwilling to help a young person the way others had helped me (there was little point in stating that nobody had ever written my essays for me). I responded by reminding them that essay-writing was a skill she would need in university too, and that, unlike the Leaving Cert, university qualifications were not awarded based on “accredited grades”; she would have to sit exams. She would be caught out, I warned, adding that I was sure the universities had a “blacklist” of cheating students.
There was no point in pointing out the ethical issues; they all knew it was cheating, and that cheats gained an unfair advantage over their honest peers. My would-be client and her grandmother rationalised it as an exercise in social justice: other students had received expensive grinds and help with their essays from family members, some had even availed of online copywriting services.
My conscience slightly conflicted (I genuinely felt her sense of injustice) and my curiosity piqued, I looked up these online services as a very naive student might. I did not need to look for long. A simple keyword-search (“Leaving Cert + essay”, “sociology + UCD”, “teaching + Marino” or “nursing” + “Waterford”) brought me IrelandAssignment.com, a site aimed at Irish students. But while the site’s Search-Enging Optimization (SEO) was impressive, the quality of the writing on its homepage left me in no doubt that only the most vulnerable students would avail of its “services”; it had clearly been written by people whose grasp of the English language suggested that they were using Google Translate.
The site’s introductory page eloquently shows just how gullible – or desperate – a student would need to be to avail of its writing services. Under the heading “Online Assignment Writing Services in Cheap [sic]”, it promised to “ensure plariarism free writing deliverables to students. you don’t have to worry when you are with Ireland Assignment Help”. Describing itself as ““the most reliable and trustworthy assignment writing help website”, and “Most Authentic [caps sic] writing company in Ireland from past 10 years with 98% positive reviews”, they claimed to employ “native Irish writers” (clearly not the ones who had written the intro) and to “offer highest quality assignment writing services which includes essays, assignments, dissertations, research papers, homeworks,projects, learner records and much more.”
They added that their “large pool of Irish academicians” had “extensive knowledge and command over their subject areas” including all subjects at FETAC and even university level. “We can write any Ireland college & university assignment as per given guideline… We have a policy to hire native Irish experts who hold degrees that are of either Master’s Level like MBA, or PhD level, or professional degrees like CPA, CFA, etc. Assignment helpers have done their education from renowned Ireland institutions, so they are well aware of all the requirements for preparing assignments and dissertations, and have the caliber [sic] to match quality up to that extend [sic], so students can always excel in their exams. We have a rigorous expert selection process established by our excellent HR team who have years of experience to select the best assignment writers with disered [sic] skills.”
The site’s most popular requests are for “Nursing Assignment Writing (FETAC), Law Assignment Help, Childcare Assignments (QQI & NFQ), Management & Marketing, Thesis / Dissertation Papers, Irish Homework Writing and Special Need Assistance (SNA)”.
It wasn’t the only such site, offering to provide degree-level essays on any topic for as little as €10 a pop. A cursory Google search throws up (pun fully intended) many such sites, most of them based outside Ireland. However, AssignmentHelp.com was the only such site I found that specifically targeted students in Ireland.
Anyone who advertised such services could be prosecuted under new legislation which has yet to be implemented, according to Grainne Mooney, Communications Manager of Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI), the regulator maintaining standards and accountability in higher and further education providers. In 2019, QQI set up the National Academic Integrity Network (NAIN), specifically to deal with commercial plagiarism services. NAIN brings together academics and student representatives from both the public and private education sectors to tackle the problem.
Ms Mooney told Gript: “We are aware of the operation of cheating services, both in Ireland and abroad, which are engaged in unethical and illegal activities. These cheating activities can have a detrimental impact on the integrity of the Irish education system and, at an individual student level, can result in penalties ranging from having a qualification downgraded or revoked to losing their place on a course. Individual institutions have responsibility for implementing their own policies on identifying, recording and penalising instances of students engaging in plagiarism and other forms of academic cheating.
“QQI has been empowered by recent legislation to prosecute those who enable academic cheating, either by impersonation or by providing, advertising or publishing cheating services. These categories can include individuals sitting an in-person test on behalf of another student; a website or ‘essay mill’ offering contract cheating services through the provision of bespoke assignments to a student which they then submit as their own work; or online platforms publishing or advertising assignments or exam answers in advance of exams. Implementation plans for these new legislative provisions are currently under development by QQI.”
QQI’s efforts to outlaw “contract cheating” puts Ireland way ahead of other western countries, where legislation has not yet been put in place. The UK’s counterpart to QQI, the Quality Assurance Agency’s Academic Advisory Group, has accepted that the problem is beyond their control for now. One of its members, Swansea University professor of legal studies Michael Draper, told the [Irish] University Times: “In the UK, there are around 26 companies, legitimately registered companies at Companies House, which supply essays”.
Clearly well aware that they are breaching ethical boundaries, IrelandAssignment even claimed to be able to be able to beat the anti-plagiarism detectors: “Ireland Assignment Help guarantees plagiarism free work [missing hyphen theirs]… We are aware of the consequences which students has [sic] to suffer in case of plagiarized work, so we always deliver the work after checking it on software’s [sic] like, Grammarly, Turnitin etc., to ensure quality deliverables [oh, dear!]. We do not tolerate any plagiarized activity; that is why Ireland Assignment Help is No. 1 paid writing services among students.”
Grammar, punctuation and spelling aside, even their lack of consistency in writing style (they frequently mix American and British English) would trigger the plagiarism-detecting software such as Turnitin which is used by online colleges such as the Open College, based in Dublin. This software is so sensitive that it can recognise patterns in a student’s writing style. It also checks online for blocks of plagiarised text.
While even bricks-and-mortar colleges are forced to rely on ethical standards being maintained in the relationships between tutors and students (it would be so easy for a tutor to write his favourite student’s essays), online colleges may find it easier to enforce standards. Reputable online colleges such as the Open College and the UK’s Open University are scrupulous about academic integrity, with the OU even basing students’ grades on their exam results rather than spreading the grade across work done throughout the term, including homework assignments (this has been the subject of much criticism from disgruntled OU students who got excellent grades for assignments but were not at their best during the exam). During the Lockdown, the Open College’s online exams were held live, and timed, with questions eliciting the students’ own opinions. Live oral tests and group assignments are another method colleges use to ensure integrity, but these would be of limited use in assessing individual students’ proficiency in writing reports. The gold-standard corruption-proof test is the old-school exam – but no one could be expected to research and write a thesis at one sitting.
I contacted the various universities and colleges whose names had come up in the SEO for the site. The University of Limerick’s Communications Officer, Alan Owens, pointed out: “This is a widespread issue across all sectors and all countries and is not just limited to UL students.
He added: “[UL] has a code of conduct for students and it is deemed a major offence within the code to breach the assessment regulations or to engage in any form of academic cheating. The use of third party services that facilitate learner cheating falls within the definition of academic cheating. Penalties for breaching the code of conduct include academic penalty, monetary penalty, suspension or expulsion.”
He said the University supported the QQI’s initiative to strengthen the law. “UL supports the statutory basis within the QQI Act related to the prosecution of those who facilitate learner cheating, including the advertisement, or publication of advertisements, of these services, by companies such as ‘essay mills’, or by individuals. Part of the NAIN remit is to maintain a list of sites like these and this list is used by UL’s ITD division to block these sites from being accessed through the UL network. In addition, the University works with its students to promote academic integrity and will continue to do this going forward.”
Maynooth University’s Head of Communications, Niamh Connolly, said: “Maynooth University considers plagiarism to be a serious academic misconduct, deserving of academic penalties. Any work which students produce should be their own work, and copying the work of others is a serious academic offence. We use effective plagiarism detection software for promoting academic integrity. The university library has a comprehensive guide on academic integrity, which we encourage all students to read. In this guide there is broad information on plagiarism and referencing.”
Dublin City University’s spokesperson said: “Contract cheating and essay mills strike at the very core of academic integrity. If students are found to have submitted work that is not their own, sanctions in place include a student having their marks for a particular assignment or course downgraded, having their degree withdrawn or the student being removed from their course.
“Dublin City University is acutely aware of the pressures that students are under to succeed, particularly over the past academic year where on-campus teaching and contact has been extremely limited. The university actively supports students who are struggling with their assignment workload to speak to their lecturers and tutors, to Student Support and Development or to the Students’ Union so that we can help them and they don’t feel the need to turn to these services in order to complete their work. Students can access extensive supports for students in completing assignments. These include a Writing Centre where students can access workshops and one-to-one sessions to provide advice on tackling their assignments.”
Other universities including Waterford Institute of Technology responded in the same vein
The various colleges declined to put us in touch with individual lecturers who might be willing to talk about this matter, with one spokesperson explaining: “We have small class sizes and I feel if a lecturer in X subject spoke to the media about how they had dealt with a past case, a student could feel identifiable, even if it wasn’t about that individual.”
Several university lecturers, however, have publicly aired their frustration about one of the factors facilitating the growth of essay mills: plummeting student literacy levels in recent years due to a “dumbing-down” culture, fuelled by various global cultural factors ranging from increased pressure on young people to acquire a university education to radical “diversity” quotas.
The worldwide phenomenon of “essay mills” worldwide has been a serious issue for universities since at least 2006, when the term “contract cheating” was coined. The Daily Telegraph reported in 2017 that more than 20,000 students had used the services of the UK’s two biggest essay mills.
The Conversation describes contract cheating as “big business” and cites 65 studies which, collectively, found that 31 million university students worldwide were were availing of essay-writing services. They quoted a survey of students in which 15.7 of participants admitted they had “outsourced” their written assignments and mentioned Australian studies which suggested that the practice was most prevalent among international students (presumably those who had migrated to Australia) and students for whom English was not the mother-tongue.
However, surveys of students in the US found that students who spoke English as a first-language but were risk-takers were just as likely to use essay mills as their more cautious counterparts from other linguistic backgrounds; the “risk-taker” personality type, ironically, placed them on an ethical par with those who were more vulnerable.
While personality, lack of academic ability, marketing tricks by the essay mills and pressure placed on students by economic circumstances or pushy parents have all been cited as reasons (if not excuses) for the prevalence of cheating, the elephant in the classroom is the systematic dumbing-down in schools and colleges worldwide. And it goes beyond illiteracy.
Among the few lecturers in Irish colleges to publicly express what many are undoubtedly thinking are UCD’s Paul Stokes, DCU’s Greg Foley and IT Tralee’s Brendan Guilfoyle. Dr Stokes recently vented his frustration with his final-year sociology students on Zoom, after they had made various complaints about him. “I don’t know how you ever got into UCD but we all know that, you know, you can’t read or write; a lot of you have difficulties still with reading and writing… after three years in college… difficulties reading an academic text. I mean, come on, you don’t belong here and I pity anybody who actually does want to employ you, they are going to be very disappointed.” also described UCD as “a joke university” and said he was “embarrassed for your generation.”
Foley and Guilfoyle were equally scathing in a 2019 Irish Times interview. Biotechnology associate professor Foley said: “Some of the stuff I was grading was the worst I’d ever seen… They were putting capital letters in the middle of sentences, commas where there should be full stops. It was almost as if they were word blind… There has been a dumbing down.” Maths lecturer Guilfoyle spoke of a “catastrophic collapse in numeracy”, pointing out: “We now do Junior Cert maths for the first semester; we have to ensure basic numeracy is there if they are to continue. We start at a low level, literally adding fractions, to get them to a level where they are comfortable.”
Guilfoyle said there was “a strong financial incentive for colleges to take on students on low points, regardless of how they perform” and that colleges were “incentivised – at all costs – to ensure students progress through college. In fact, some have faced the threat of financial penalties from education authorities due to poor student progression rates.”
The senior Irish academics’ complaints cannot be dismissed as isolated outbursts by temperamental perfectionists; hard facts and statistics back them up. Indeed, up to six per cent of Irish university graduates were classed as “functionally illiterate” in data published in 2019, which was cited by Dirk Van Damme of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Directorate for Education and Skills. Mr Van Damme lamented the “huge drop” in literacy standards in the former Island of Saints and Scholars. Britain was even worse, with seven per cent of their students winning the dubious honour.
While there is no suggestion that such students are more likely to cheat (indeed, it could be assumed that they are less likely to, since they are automatically given extra help with assignments), the lowering of standards has undoubtedly fostered university ambitions in other academically-challenged students – who cannot avail of the same help because they don’t fit the narrow DARE or HEAR criteria. These students find themselves falling between the proverbial stools: too “privileged” to quality for aid, not privileged enough to fund private grinds. While it is unethical, it is understandable that a slightly-below-average Leaving Cert student might feel justified in getting a “leg up” from a professional writer to compete against both the privileged and the underprivileged.
As “The Conversation” laments: “The growth in contract cheating speaks volumes about the modern view of education as a commodity.”