How internet essay mill websites portray the student experience of higher education

Abstract Higher education is under mounting pressure to confront student practices of assignment outsourcing to internet services. The scale and buoyancy of this ‘essay mill’ industry has now been well documented, including its various marketing techniques for urging students to purchase bespoke academic work. However, the inherently suspect nature of such services demands that they adopt a particularly shrewd and empathic rhetoric to win custom from website visitors. In this paper, we investigate how such rhetoric currently constructs a critical version of the student's higher education experience. We present a thematic analysis of promotional text and images as found on a large sample of essay mill sites. Findings reveal how these sites promulgate a hostile and negative attitude towards higher educational practice. Yet these findings may also indicate where the higher education sector needs to reflect on its practice, not least in order to resist the toxic messages of essay mills.

[1]  Harvey Mellar,et al.  Addressing cheating in e-assessment using student authentication and authorship checking systems: teachers’ perspectives , 2018 .

[2]  Lei Li,et al.  Does it Really Matter? Using Virtual Office Hours to Enhance Student-Faculty Interaction , 2009, J. Inf. Syst. Educ..

[3]  I. Bateman,et al.  Contract Cheating & the Market in Essays , 2015 .

[4]  Alexander Amigud.  Cheaters on Twitter: an analysis of engagement approaches of contract cheating services , 2020, Studies in Higher Education.

[5]  P. Ashworth,et al.  Guilty in whose eyes? University students' perceptions of cheating and plagiarism in academic work and assessment , 1997 .

[6]  Erika A. Patall,et al.  The role of choice provision in academic dishonesty , 2015 .

[8]  Arthur Coren,et al.  Turning a Blind Eye: Faculty Who Ignore Student Cheating , 2011 .

[9]  Alexander Amigud,et al.  246 reasons to cheat: An analysis of students' reasons for seeking to outsource academic work , 2019, Comput. Educ..

[10]  S. Allais.  A critical perspective on large class teaching: the political economy of massification and the sociology of knowledge , 2014 .

[11]  Christine Pearson Casanave,et al.  Writing Games: Multicultural Case Studies of Academic Literacy Practices in Higher Education , 2002 .

[12]  Darby Dickerson.  Facilitated Plagiarism: The Saga of Term-Paper Mills, and the Failure of Legislation and Litigation to Control Them , 2007 .

[13]  David Taylor,et al.  Confusion about collusion: working together and academic integrity , 2011 .

[14]  Popi Sotiriadou,et al.  The role of authentic assessment to preserve academic integrity and promote skill development and employability , 2019, Studies in Higher Education.

[15]  Robert Clarke,et al.  Commercial aspects of contract cheating , 2013, ITiCSE '13.

[16]  Joseph Clare,et al.  Can we detect contract cheating using existing assessment data? Applying crime prevention theory to an academic integrity issue , 2017 .

[17]  C. Slade,et al.  ‘Just turn to us’: the persuasive features of contract cheating websites , 2018 .

[18]  P. Newton,et al.  Staff views on commercial contract cheating in higher education: a survey study in Australia and the UK , 2019, Higher Education.

[19]  Philip M. Newton,et al.  How Common Is Commercial Contract Cheating in Higher Education and Is It Increasing? A Systematic Review , 2018, Front. Educ..

[20]  Thanasis Daradoumis,et al.  Using learning analytics for preserving academic integrity , 2017 .

[21]  R. Trevelyan,et al.  Using patchwork texts in assessment: clarifying and categorising choices in their use , 2012 .

[22]  S. Clegg,et al.  ‘I've had to swallow my pride’: help seeking and self‐esteem , 2006 .

[23]  L. Adam,et al.  ‘It’s not fair’: policy discourses and students’ understandings of plagiarism in a New Zealand university , 2016, Higher Education.

[24]  Robert Clarke,et al.  The Phenomena of Contract Cheating , 2008 .

[25]  John T. E. Richardson,et al.  Coursework versus examinations in end-of-module assessment: a literature review , 2015 .

[27]  S. Roper,et al.  Contract cheating in UK higher education: A covert investigation of essay mills , 2018 .

[28]  Susan Bloxham,et al.  Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design , 2018 .

[29]  Jennifer Nelson,et al.  THE ESSAY INDUSTRY , 2014 .

[30]  Timothy Paul Cronan,et al.  Academic Integrity: Information Systems Education Perspective , 2016, J. Inf. Syst. Educ..

[31]  A Short Guide to Oral Assessment , 2010 .

[32]  Siân E. Jones,et al.  The student-as-consumer approach in higher education and its effects on academic performance , 2017 .

[33]  C. Namrata Mahender,et al.  A Review on Plagiarism Detection Tools , 2015 .

[34]  Naomi E. Winstone,et al.  Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education , 2019 .

[35]  Karen Handley,et al.  From copying to learning: using exemplars to engage students with assessment criteria and feedback , 2011 .

[36]  Rowena Harper,et al.  Contract cheating: a survey of Australian university students , 2019 .

[37]  C. Crook,et al.  The social anatomy of ‘collusion’ , 2019, British Educational Research Journal.

[38]  H. Kelman.  Compliance, identification, and internalization three processes of attitude change , 1958 .

[39]  T. Bretag.  Contract cheating will erode trust in science , 2019, Nature.

[40]  D. Lawson,et al.  The evolution of mathematics support: a literature review , 2019, International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology.

[41]  P. Black,et al.  Meanings and Consequences: a basis for distinguishing formative and summative functions of assessment? , 1996 .

[42]  Eric M. Beasley.  Students Reported for Cheating Explain What They Think Would Have Stopped Them , 2014 .

[43]  T. Lancaster,et al.  Contract Cheating: The Outsourcing of Assessed Student Work , 2015 .

[44]  T. B. Gallant.  Academic integrity in the twenty-first century : a teaching and learning imperative , 2008 .

[45]  S. Sivasubramaniam,et al.  A close encounter with ghost-writers: an initial exploration study on background, strategies and attitudes of independent essay providers , 2016 .

[46]  G. Tyson,et al.  Who has read the policy on plagiarism? Unpacking students' understanding of plagiarism , 2014 .

[47]  V. Braun,et al.  Using thematic analysis in psychology , 2006 .

[48]  Lisa M. Lines.  Ghostwriters guaranteeing grades? The quality of online ghostwriting services available to tertiary students in Australia , 2016 .

[49]  L. P. Stavisky.  Term Paper "Mills," Academic Plagiarism, and State Regulation , 1973 .