Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas
Cheating,
Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative
Profession Overseas
By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi Sept. 7, 2019
Tuition was due. The rent was, too. So Mary
Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At
first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on
commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk
at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.
Finally, a friend offered to help her break
into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing
school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain
and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.
“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you
have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”
Since federal prosecutors charged a group of rich parents and
coaches this year in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme, the advantages
that wealthy American students enjoy in college admissions have been
scrutinized. Less attention has been paid to the tricks some well-off students
use to skate by once they are enrolled.
Cheating in college is nothing new, but the
internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites —
with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that
allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American
homework assignments.
Although such businesses have existed for
more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites
have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back
guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast,
worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a
full-time job.
The essay-for-hire industry has expanded
significantly in developing countries with many English speakers, fast
internet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya,
India and Ukraine. A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya has over
50,000 members.
After a month of training, Ms. Mbugua began producing essays
about everything from whether humans should colonize space (“it is not worth
the struggle,” she wrote) to euthanasia (it amounts to taking “the place of
God,” she wrote). During her best month, she earned $320, more money than she
had ever made in her life. The New York Times is
identifying Ms. Mbugua by only part of her name because she feared that the
attention would prevent her from getting future work.
It is not clear how widely sites for paid-to-order essays,
known as “contract cheating” in higher education circles, are used. A
2005 study of students in
North America found that 7 percent of undergraduates admitted to turning in
papers written by someone else, while 3 percent admitted to obtaining essays
from essay mills. Cath Ellis, a leading researcher on the topic,
said millions of essays are ordered online every year worldwide.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Tricia Bertram
Gallant, director of the academic integrity office at the University of
California, San Diego. “If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every
accredited university into a diploma mill.”
When such websites first emerged over a
decade ago, they featured veiled references to tutoring and editing services,
said Dr. Bertram Gallant, who also is a board member of the International
Center for Academic Integrity, which has worked to highlight the danger of
contract cheating. Now the sites are blatant.
“You can relax knowing that our reliable,
expert writers will produce you a top quality and 100% plagiarism free essay
that is written just for you, while you take care of the more interesting
aspects of student life,” reads the pitch from Academized, which charges about
$15 a page for a college freshman’s essay due in two weeks and $42 a page for
an essay due in three hours.
“No matter what kind of academic paper you
need, it is simple and secure to hire an essay writer for a price you can
afford,” promises EssayShark.com. “Save more time for yourself.”
In an email, EssayShark’s public relations
department said the company did not consider its services to be cheating, and
that it warned students the essays are for “research and reference purposes
only” and are not to be passed off as a student’s own work.
“We do not condone, encourage or knowingly take part in
plagiarism or any other acts of academic fraud,” it said.
A representative for UvoCorp, another of the companies, said
its services were not meant to encourage cheating. “The idea behind our
product design is to help people understand and conform to
specific requirements they deal with, and our writers assist in
approaching this task in a proper way,” the representative said in an email.
“According to our policies, customers cannot further use any consultative
materials they receive from us as their own.”
Representatives for Academized and
Ace-MyHomework did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.
A major scandal involving
contract cheating in Australia caused university officials
there to try to crack down on the practice. A similar effort to confront the
industry has emerged in Britain, but not in the United States.
Contract cheating is illegal in 17 states,
but punishment tends to be light and enforcement rare. Experts
said that no federal law in the United States, or in Kenya, forbids the
purchase or sale of academic papers, although questions remain
about whether the industry complies with tax laws.
“Because American institutions haven’t been
whacked over the head like Australian schools were, it’s easier to pretend that
it’s not happening,” said Bill Loller, vice president of product management for
Turnitin, a company that develops software to detect
plagiarism. “But it’s absolutely happening.”
Mr. Loller said he had worked with some colleges that have
students who have never shown up for class or completed a single assignment. “They’ve
contracted it all out,” he said.
Contract cheating is harder to detect than
plagiarism because ghostwritten essays will not be flagged when compared with a
database of previously submitted essays; they are generally original works —
simply written by the wrong person. But this year, Turnitin rolled out a new
product called Authorship Investigate, which uses a host of clues — including
sentence patterns and a document’s metadata — to attempt to determine
if it was written by the student who turned it in.
Some of the websites operate like eBay,
with buyers and sellers bidding on specific assignments. Others operate like
Uber, pairing desperate students with available writers. Either way, the
identities and locations of both the writers and the students are masked from
view, as are the colleges the assignments are for.
Still, in some of the assignments that Ms.
Mbugua provided to The Times, names of colleges that the essays were meant for
became clear. One assignment asked students to write about a solution to a
community problem, and the essay Ms. Mbugua provided described difficulties
with parking around Arizona State University. “Students could always just
buck up and take the walk,” the paper said.
Bret Hovell, a spokesman for Arizona State
University, said the school was not able to determine whether the essay had
been turned in.
In Kenya, a country with a per capita annual income of about
$1,700, successful writers can earn as much as $2,000 a month, according to
Roynorris Ndiritu, who said he has thrived while writing academic essays for
others.
Roynorris Ndiritu, 28, who asked that only part of his name be
used because he feared retribution from others in the industry in Kenya,
graduated with a degree in civil engineering and still calls that his
“passion.” But after years of applying unsuccessfully for jobs, he said, he
began writing for others full time. He has earned enough to buy a car and
a piece of land, he said, but it has left him jaded about the promises he heard
when he was young about the opportunities that would come from studying hard in
college.
“You can even get the highest level of
education, and still, you might not get that job,” he said.
In interviews with people in Kenya who said
they had worked in contract cheating, many said they did not view the practice
as unethical.
As more foreign writers have joined the
industry, some sites have begun to advertise their American ties, in a strange
twist on globalization and outsourcing. One site lists “bringing jobs back
to America” as a key goal. American writers, who sometimes charge as much
as $30 per page, say that they offer higher-quality service, without British
spellings or idioms that might raise suspicion about an essay’s authorship.
Ms. Mbugua, the Kenyan university student,
worked for as little as $4 a page. She said she began carrying a notebook,
jotting down vocabulary words she encountered in movies and novels to make her
essays more valuable.
Ms. Mbugua, 25, lost her mother to diabetes
in 2001, when she was in the second grade. She vowed to excel in
school so that she would one day be able to support her younger brother
and sister.
A government loan and aunts and uncles
helped her pay for college. But she also worked, landing in an office
of 10 writers completing other people’s assignments, including those of
American students. The boss stayed up all night, bidding for
work on several sites, and then farmed it out in the morning.
“Any job that is difficult, they’re like,
‘Give it to Mary,’” she said.
There were low points. During summer
break, work slowed to a trickle. Once, she agonized so much over an American
history paper about how the Great Depression ended that she rejected the job at
the last minute, and had to pay an $18 fine.
But Ms. Mbugua said she loved learning, and sometimes wished
that she were the one enrolled in the American universities she was writing
papers for. Once, when she was asked to write an admissions essay for
a student in China who was applying to the Eli Broad College of Business at
Michigan State University, she said she dreamed of what it would be like to go
there herself.
Eventually, Ms. Mbugua said, she decided to
strike out on her own, and bought an account from an established writer with
UvoCorp. But UvoCorp forbids such transfers,
and Ms. Mbugua said the account she had purchased was shut down.
Now Ms. Mbugua finds herself at a
crossroads, unsure of what to do next. She graduated from her university in
2018 and has sent her résumé to dozens of employers. Lately she has been
selling kitchen utensils.
Ms. Mbugua said she never felt right about
the writing she did in the names of American students and others.
“I’ve always had somehow a guilty
conscience,” she said.
“People say the education system in the U.S., U.K. and
other countries is on a top notch,” she said. “I wouldn’t say those
students are better than us,” she said, later adding, “We have studied. We have
done the assignments.”
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 7,
2019, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Cheating Goes Global as U.S. Students Outsource College Papers.
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