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The Ethics and Impact of Custom Essay Writing Services in Education

1. Introduction to Custom Essay Writing Services

Custom essay writing services have gained popularity in recent years. These services are provided by websites that employ professionals to write custom essays, term papers, or theses on a student’s behalf. It is against the terms and conditions of most academic establishments to purchase these papers, as they are then submitted as the student’s genuine work.

This essay provides an overview of the prevalence of custom essay writing services in educational settings, ethical arguments both for and against these services, and a discussion about the types of students who use these services.

Students use custom essay writing services because they struggle with their educational workload. These might be mature students with families or professional commitments; they might even be foreign students learning in an additional language. Essay writing services are not a new phenomenon. The idea of paying someone else to write one’s essay is an old one. The beginning of a millennium saw the first online custom essay writing sites, making the practice more visible and controversial. Sites vary in the services they provide, but validation of these services is often based around the quality of their staff, as well as the strictness of their guarantees. Estimates for sites of this nature range from a worldwide turnover of €22.3-108.1 billion. The number of websites offering writing services in the United Kingdom is estimated to be around 400. Despite the many investigations into essay writing services, there has been limited empirical study into the kinds of students using these services.

2. Ethical Considerations in Using Custom Essay Writing Services

Academic honesty is a cornerstone of education and the pursuit of knowledge. However, life and learning are complex and often involve multitasking. Present-day undergraduate education encourages students to engage in several extracurricular activities in addition to their academic pursuits. For an average graduate student, in addition to their studies, they must work part-time jobs to support themselves financially while also pursuing internship opportunities. Time does not always allow for students to give their best effort in one area, so as to allow time to be spent in other areas. This does not suggest that students engage these services only for time savings alone, but also to use a guide to sharpen their skills. With the use of these services, students will have enough time for self-study.

Using custom writing services at the undergraduate level for pay directly contradicts what education purports to try to achieve with developing practice-based learning environments where students develop experiences that will move them into professional roles where their expertise will make a difference for their clients. This also creates ethical dilemmas for the students because the student is expected to develop these skills and seek to reinforce these skills to aid in the learning process. Custom essay writing services are quite a new phenomenon in that they started popping up as an industry of their own (outside of scam essay mills) around 2010. This service is controversial, and legitimate websites only offer them as study aids. The primary target market is thought to be students who use their services during their high school, undergraduate, or master’s levels.

3. The Impact of Custom Essay Writing Services on Academic Integrity

Academic integrity in educational settings is associated with the value of a degree or certificate as hard evidence of a student’s work – of their learning process and the value added to their experiences. The service of custom writing or ghostwriting, given the student’s submission of work with their own name on it, could be seen as undermining the authenticity and the original contributions in academic work being evaluated. Students using custom-writing services are closely involved in the process of learning how to write academic papers at the collegiate level. This process of becoming a critical writer may be neutralized because these students are freeing up time to engage in other activities that would be taking the class time at the collegiate level. It is a challenge to inhibit the sort of time shortening that happens, in part, due to the use of custom essay writing services.

There has been much attention on some of the tactics these services offer, yet there has been insufficient consideration of research that concentrates on the consequences of their usage. The academic community and those who assume these degrees as a proxy for merit are left to assume the consequences of this lack of concern, thus risking neglect not only to the system but the institution as well. These methods have been widely used by students and are designed to produce the best result at the lowest cost of time and effort, because of their expectations of high earnings or future employment.

4. Regulating Custom Essay Writing Services in Education

There is no global regulatory framework that guides custom essay writing services. Further, at the time of our research, we could not find any regulation that targeted custom essay writing services in their entirety as a specific focus of regulation. Exemptions included those institutions which had inherent moral and legal obligations to regulate their internal affairs in the best interests of their students’ education.

Some potential regulatory approaches, used either alone or in combination with one another, we suggest include:

a. Impermissible contracts (to deliver services, tuition) between institutions and writing agencies b. Tor (The Onion Network) blacklisting c. Vary style requirements/markers, smaller class selection, and individualization d. Impose mandatory coursework components to be part of the final examination e. Co-opt and collaborate f. Education, (inter)national seminars, and research of custom essay fraud g. Common (or national) intelligence databases.

These specifications are not without their challenges, however. The following practical and ethical issues, for instance, are worth bearing in mind for these potential regulatory approaches. It would prove difficult for a legislative framework to define custom essay quality in legally meaningful terms. As required by fair competition, academic agencies should have the legal ability to operate and market their services. To comprehensively and globally develop intelligent design mimicking these regulatory suggestions and specifications in the section below would also be rather difficult. It would involve consideration of and qualification for a host of contextual and local issues, such as available academic staff, course sizes and structures, tuition fees, student clientele, learning modes, and the relative power of students and agents within the Australian higher education market. These and further such pragmatic and local contextual issues may be helped in part by alteration (as need be) of one or more of the institutional solutions specified in the bullets under the National Bureau. Consideration would also need to be given to the particular expression and application of these regulatory systems in professional and graduate coursework degrees and the learned professions (medicine, nursing, law, psychology, engineering, etc.), as distinct from undergraduate education.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations for Future Actions

In this paper, we have discussed the ethical issues in relation to custom essay writing services in education and have considered the potential impact of these services on educational outcomes. When discussing ethical issues, it may be easy to blame the services for offering ghostwritten essays and argue they should be regulated out of existence. However, the reality is rather more complicated. We need to balance concerns about limitation of supply, students’ self-interest, and the simple economic fact of finite teacher/tutor time to best undertake the educational process. Providing that regulatory, supplier, and student interest measures are in place, we believe institutions will be better placed to detect students who are engaging with these services and properly manage their academic development and support called for in this paper.

We recommend potentially collaborative approaches towards addressing these services. Specifically, it is here argued that critical in achieving the solution proposed is a robust partnership between institutional stakeholders, which is likely to attract greater national and international decision-maker awareness. Illicit connections between the providers and consumers of these services were also discussed, in terms of their links to political instability, and possible links to ‘third world’ poverty, and it is suggested that writers might be trapped in poverty and trade in essay writing as well as other forms of management. Finally, in looking for ways to address negatives, we discussed four potential strategies. First, the possible value of an essay bank and use of that sort of technology in helping students to show positive Turnitin results. Second, the feasibility of using time tardis software to try to stop plagiarism by catching a crucial percentage of dishonest students (some universities already do just that, using similar surveillance to focus in on certain content to catch infringers). Third, the possibility of the creation of a kite mark for trustworthy providers. The final potential strategy discussed was creating public inconvenience.