buy the assignment online uk

buy the assignment online uk

The Ethics and Consequences of Buying Assignments Online in the UK

1. Introduction to the Issue

It is clear that there exist both academic and ethical issues with essay mill purchases. Therefore, the recent suggestion that the essay mill essay be marked may seem surprising. The purpose of this paper is to explore the ethics of third-party arbitration in such cases in further detail. In order to begin to address these issues, we start from the perspective of this practice as it currently stands in the UK. English law is taken as a case study but the arguments here generalise to broader jurisdictions. For a comprehensive overview of essay mills globally, we direct the reader’s attention to a range of international bibliography.

A growing number of students across the UK are purchasing third-party essays from so-called essay mills and turning in these black-market assignments as their own. This practice has been viewed with increasing concern, as is evidenced by the recent introduction of § 21, which saw the Department for Education in England call for legislative changes that would criminalise the operation or advertisement of essay mills, with offenders potentially facing fines or imprisonment. If essay mills were to be tackled, it is touted that wider benefits would be seen across the sector, from fewer students feeling it necessary to make use of these kinds of services to an overall improvement in the academic integrity of our universities. Indeed, in November 2021, Turnitin, a company that helps institutions prevent and handle academic dishonesty, published a global ‘behind the data’ report. This analysis found that not only are many students already turning away from essay writing services, but that those obligated to play on an unlevelled playing field feel significant emotional, health, and educational consequences.

2. Ethical Considerations of Buying Assignments Online

The students taking part in the present survey of contract cheating (involving submitting ghostwritten work) have, however, proven to have significant incomes, suggesting that they do engage in paid work. We would also emphasize that students could pay for their schooling through other, less costly forms of part-time work. Fewer people seem to believe that there is anything particularly wrong about hiring a tutor, and proofreaders are seen as helping their clients. The challenge from a fairness perspective has to do with what extent the requested permission to outsource ghostwriting is being used to overcome resistance, such as an applicant being told that their master’s thesis proposal has been approved but the work for the thesis is time-barred. Given that the pressure to engage in ghostwriting is high, whether this is widely known in tutors, professional and administrative staff as well as in students or not, it is possible to understand this from the perspective of an administrative staff trying to find a way to support a fresh face in town.

Here, we conducted a survey of 1,839 students, asking about their motivations for and experiences with buying assignments and other forms of so-called ‘ghostwriting’. As Table 1 suggests, these results showed that over 34% of students who bought assignments for a formal course never submitted the online work that was the basis of their purchase. Likewise, in almost all other cases, the same proportions for students who bought ‘whole’ essays, and for students who hired external sources to help them research, concluded that they never had the opportunity to actually submit the assignments they had purchased.

Given the typically harsh penalties levied against students caught cheating, in almost every country, such students represent a minority. The ethical dilemmas which such students face when getting someone else to do – or help with – their work extend well beyond these penalties, however. It seems that many students do feel both guilty and responsible for getting external academic help, and to date, we only know of one survey within the non-contracted cheating literature.

3. Impact on Academic Integrity and Quality of Education

As a result, both the process and the ends of course learning, such as critical thinking or problem-solving skills, are devalued. Buying essays online completely undermines the entire learning process. The steps are critical to how people acquire and internalize knowledge: encounter information, interrogate it, connect it to prior knowledge or experiences, evaluate it for value or veracity, use it in some way, and then receive and act on feedback from the instructor or from application so as to either refute or validate the work done. Buying essays, on the other hand, typically results in a product that is altogether disconnected from the actual learning objectives of the course. Students receive far more credit than the actual knowledge and skills that they have demonstrated and are then promoted to enroll in the next level.

Buying assignments online will significantly compromise academic integrity in two ways. Firstly, if universities have no means to verify that students undertook the assessment, it devalues the final degree award offered by the institution. And secondly, the practice of buying essays in itself subverts established systems of assessment. Several universities have online essay verification systems that grade essays based on certain salient elements including originality, grammar, and referencing, which helps to catch out students who have paid someone else to do their essay for them. But in contract cheating, companies are hired to write essays in a manner which, so long as nothing is directly plagiarized, cannot be automatically detected. The only certain way to catch the student is through appraisal of their personal performance in tutorial, which can generally only happen when a student is already suspected of cheating.

4. Legal Implications and Consequences

The typical consequence for students caught engaging in this work is expulsion from the degree programme or a serious hit on the final grade for the project. Since the student has committed no crime and has not hindered the academic process by using the work at home and not declaring it, then there is generally no legal action available for the affected institution. Buying or selling academic work is the site, the funder and the student’s own business and private contract. By engaging in an act of academic dishonesty, students are showing the university that they are not learning what is being taught and consequently gradable. Though academic services are being bought and sold, many of the acts committed in doing so are still illegal. It is only in the instance of whether they have declared their actions and not committed the actual selling which is also illegal. The university regulator in each case will act accordingly to the case at hand and may not involve police unless there is extreme evidence of crime.

Conducting business with a buying service is not illegal under UK law, though if the company is registered in the UK, they must be registered as a data handler with the Information Commissioner’s office under the Data Protection Act 1998. It would be difficult for law enforcement or exam boards to catch those running the writing services under the manager’s regime, as the managers will use cash-in-hand techniques to pay students to carry out the work. When the roles are reversed, and the work is hired out to students, it is much easier for these bodies to catch people. Essentially, academic work is bought by the student, who then signs their name to it and claims it to be their own before handing it in to be graded. The seller of the work is not responsible for what the buyer does with the paper or the associated consequences.

5. Strategies for Promoting Academic Integrity

Much descriptive work has started over the previous numerous years on the illegal purchase of written materials. Fazackerley interviewed over 50 British students of many different ages and learning activities who had purchased essays from providing solutions. A specific policy lens, particularly upbeat, documents related to anti-plagiarism which have, thus far, had limited concern with policies affecting sources. Yet this data characteristic presents a valuable opportunity to peer below the scales of anti-plagiarism practices and policies to investigate their use. Descriptors confirm a task and can be used to exhibit the normalcy of specific academic misdemeanour, partly formed by the availability of materials for a fee. Being anti-hazards.

In generating this paper, the section ‘Strategies for Promoting Academic Integrity’ will provide strategies that may be proactive in reducing the number of students who buy assignments online. Anti-plagiarism policies apply for the first time a snippet of text or a piece of work is shown, as indicated in the following sentence. The LED habitually runs blogs with similar texts from various sources that demonstrate higher similarity with that indicated below. Managed by a Digital Marketing Manager and an expert in competition and consumer legislation, the site’s editors will develop blogs and articles that encourage website consumers to address ethical questions. It is administered by DMC Clément Derrand, who co-created the site and appoints guest writers with guidance from the Managing Editor, Damien McCallig.