How should a university deal with outsourced essay writing?

Question

My campus is full of flyers, typically attached to lightposts and so, advertising to write essays for money. There's plenty of such services offered on the internet as well. Presumably, many students make use of such service.

Clearly, it is unwise for students to make use of such services, and I suppose it violates regulations. How can a university deal with the issue of ghostwriting? That means: how to identify probable cases of ghostwriting; how to proof that ghostwriting took place; and how to sanction it? It seems considerably harder to tackle than plagiarism.

Answer 1

First, let me say that you should read the answers to my related question. One answer is quite clear that you should not even bother checking (the author of that answer did admit being uncomfortable with that answer...as I am).

This is a significant problem at my university. One way we try to address it is that we have students verbally answer a quick, random question about their assignment.

Good news: This does catch some students when they can only answer "uh, ah, ummm."

Bad news: Some students still use ghost writers and just memorize the paper so they can answer any question about it. If the assessment covers all the learning outcomes then it can still result in students learning.

One thing that I generally do is, throughout the semester, I keep track of the "quality level" I see each student is at. This takes several sessions and when classes are quite large there might not be enough interaction to support this strategy. However, if you do have this information, you can use it to compare to the overall quality of their written work. If they never know anything in class but they write "golden" work, then it is a warning sign.

It is important that it is just a warning sign because there are some students who write well but are not so great at in-class interaction. You always need to use your judgment.

As far as how we handle it, we consider using a ghost writer an identical offense to plagiarism with identical punishments.

Answer 2

• The infamous ghostwriter services for theses in humanities, law and similar in Germany are very careful as to how they advertise their services because otherwise they could be sued for assisting fraud and similar reasons. Something similar might apply to your legislation, but if nobody ever considered acting legally against these services, it is likely that at least some of them are legally attackable. In this case, a collective strike against these services may at least weed them out. Obviously, you need to speak to a lawyer with expertise on your legislation and such issues about this.

  If no such law exist and the problem is sufficiently serious in your country, universities could even lobby for a law against this. At the very least your university could ban the respective advertisements on its grounds. If these services are operated by graduates of your university, it may also be able to simply revoke their degrees, depending on your university’s statutes and, again, your legislation.

  While these services may reappear under a different guise, they may be more difficult to find, more expensive (due to the risks involved), more shady and similar and thus less attractive for students to use. Also, depending on your legislation, you may obtain information on students who used these services and punish them, which could have a strong deterring effect.

• You can increase controls as to whether students wrote the essays themselves, e.g., they have to be able to answer questions about them, and to increase the punishment if they didn’t.

• Your university can set up fake services and severely punish everybody who uses them. Again, this depends on your legislation and university’s statutes and you should definetely consult a lawyer about this.

Answer 3

I have a friend who works for one of these kind of companies and she gets a lot of mixed reactions when she tells people what she does. The companies that offer this say that they are providing examples and their work should not be submitted, therefore avoiding any legal responsibility themselves.

You definitely have to approach this problem by deterring the students.

For GCSEs in the UK, the government tried to reduce this kind of cheating by reducing the coursework components and having any coursework be completed under observation but that would be too difficult in university probably.

The following ideas at a university could be tried:

• Run stings where students are punished or pay for failing essays.
• They could run feedback sessions in the middle of coursework writing, where students can talk about their ideas and progress, perhaps keeping tabs on the coursework process could spot people who haven't written it themselves.
• Put posters up warning about the punishment if caught, a kind of "we are watching you".
• Ask for submission of drafts and/or notes.
• Finding some way of logging the research done for an essay might help. For example having to access your sources/scan them in from on campus (library or network) could be something that might prevent outsourcing essays.

Answer 4

Here is a suggestion (which might or might not be legal in your jurisdiction, and deemed acceptable or not by your administration; check before acting!).

Put up some of flyers yourself --- then refer any student who contacts you for appropriate disciplinary action.

Answer 5

Put some fliers up yourself. Again, state that the work provided is for reference only, and should not be submitted. When contacted, provide different previous years' papers.

When these papers are submitted, hit them with plagiarism violations.

To make this more ethical, warn the students at the start of the year that this would be happening. And of course, don't keep the money, but put it into a charity fund.

Of course, before deciding any course of action, consider consulting the ethics board at your institution.