essay mills uk illegal

This blog post was published under the 2015-2024 Conservative Administration

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/04/28/essay-mills-are-now-illegal-skills-minister-calls-on-internet-service-providers-to-crack-down-on-advertising/

Essay mills are now illegal - Skills Minister calls on internet service platforms to crack down on advertising

Skills Minister Alex Burghart has written to internet service platforms to make sure they know that essay mills - which facilitate cheating by helping academic writing, often by appearing to be legitimate - have been made illegal and to call on their support in making sure they can no longer advertise online. Here you can read that letter.

The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill has become law. Through this act, the Government has legislated for landmark reforms that will transform post-16 education and skills, including criminalising essay mills.

As you may know, Essay Mills are online platforms that facilitate contract cheating. Contract cheating happens when a third party completes work for a student which is passed off by the student as their own work. Many essay mill companies use marketing techniques which indicate they are offering ‘legitimate’ academic writing support for students. Reports also indicate that some essay mills seek to blackmail students who use these services. It is right that we have legislated against these insidious crimes.

It is now a criminal offence to provide or arrange for another person to provide contract cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at a post-16 institution or sixth form in England, enrolled at a higher education provider in England and any other person over compulsory school age who has been entered for a regulated qualification at a place in England.

Similarly, it is now an offence for a person to make arrangements for an advertisement in which that person offers, or is described as being available or competent, to provide or arrange for another person to provide a cheating service. Importantly, the offence centres around the act of advertising to students, and for the offence to be committed it does not need to be seen by its target demographic.

There is now a strengthened, collaborative effort across the sector to tackle essay mills and we want you to be part of this campaign. Platforms such as yourself play an integral role in helping us to make the most effective use of the legislation; marketing and advertising are the lifeblood of any successful industry. We are aware that high numbers of essay mills have used your platform to promote their services to students in the past, paying for advertising to promote their companies. Essay mills are now illegal entities, and you should not carry their advertising. It is no longer a moral question; you will be facilitating an illegal activity. I ask you to do everything in your power to prevent the advertising these unscrupulous practices.

Removing essay mill access to online marketing will seriously hamper their efforts to target vulnerable students and I implore you to do so following the introduction of this legislation. We must now all work together to capitalise on it.

I hope that in writing to you today I have underlined the urgency of this issue and the important role that companies like yours play in stamping out essay mills once and for all and am sure I can be confident in your support.

Thank you for your support with this important matter.

Tags: cheating , essay mills , internet service platforms

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Essay mills to be banned under plans to reform post-16 education

Unscrupulous ‘essay mills’ to be criminalised as part of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill

Services offering to provide students with essays for money, known as essay mills, are to be made illegal under plans announced by the government today (5 October).

The government intends to make it a criminal offence to provide, arrange or advertise these cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at any institution in England providing post-16 education including universities.

The move is one of a number of measures being introduced to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill , to transform the skills and training landscape and help level up opportunities across the country.

The law will also be changed to give equality to technical education in careers advice in schools, so all pupils understand the wide range of career routes and training available to them, such as apprenticeships, T Levels or traineeships, not just a traditional academic route.

Minister for Skills Alex Burghart said:

Essay mills are completely unethical and profit by undermining the hard work most students do. We are taking steps to ban these cheating services. We have also announced a new measure to make sure all young people receive broader careers guidance so everyone can get the advice that’s right for them.

Banning essay mills will help to safeguard the academic integrity and standards of post-16 and higher education in England and protect students from falling prey to the deceptive marketing techniques of contract cheating services.

This follows a number of steps already taken to tackle unscrupulous essay mills, including government working alongside the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, Universities UK and the National Union of Students to produce guidance for institutions on how to combat the threat of contract cheating and guidance for students to make them better aware of the consequences, sending a clear message that these services are not legitimate.

Additional measures being introduced to the Bill include enabling sixth form colleges with a religious faith designation to become a 16-19 Academy, boosting diversity in 16-19 academies and allowing more faith school providers to open 16-19 academies with a religious character.

The Bill, which will enter its report stage in the House of Lord on 12 October, underpins the government’s transformation of post-16 education and skills as set out in the Skills for Jobs White Paper . The reforms outlined in the Bill will help to create more routes into skilled employment in sectors the economy needs such as engineering, digital, clean energy and manufacturing, so more people can secure well-paid jobs in their local areas, levelling up the nation and supporting communities to thrive.

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Important notice: Essay writing services now illegal in the UK

Following a government reform, it is now illegal to use and/or provide contract cheating services.

On Thursday 28 April 2022, the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill became law, making it a criminal offence to engage in paid cheating services, often known as essay mills.

Essay mills offer students in Post-16 education plagiarism free essays and assignments in exchange for money.

The government has listened to calls for legislation and intervened to criminalise the provision of, and advertising of, cheating services. This aims to minimise the number of these essay mills in operation and to enhance activity already taking place to detect, deter and address incidents of cheating.

In a letter to Higher Education (HE) providers , Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Skills, Alex Burghart MP said: “Cheating of any kind is unacceptable. It not only threatens to undermine the reputation of our world-class higher education sector, but also devalues the hard work of those who succeed on their own merit.”

The university takes academic offences very seriously. Submitting work that is not your own can lead to expulsion.

We want to ensure that all DMU students are following academic regulations, which we outline  here .

The Centre for Learning and Study Support (CLaSS) team work with undergraduate, postgraduate and research students at DMU to provide support and guidance on a range of areas, such as planning assignments, how to approach critical analysis and how to improve your research and referencing.

You can access the CLaSS services here .

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Chris Cook , Bethan Staton and Max Harlow in London and Andres Schipani in Nairobi

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Governments across the world are fighting a global network of so-called “essay mills”, businesses that help the world’s rising population of university students to cheat their way through their studies.

A list shared among British and Australian officials, seen by the Financial Times, contains the names of 2,000 websites offering what officials and academics studying the phenomenon call “contract cheating” services.

The governments of Australia, South Africa, Ireland and 17 US states have taken some action, and England is to introduce legislation to ban these companies from operating or advertising in the country. However, contracting to write essays for students to submit for academic qualifications is currently lawful in most countries, including the UK.

The businesses’ main activity is ghostwriting assignments — often including coursework or open-book exams that contribute directly to student degree results. Students studying in a second language are a particular target. While academic software is effective at spotting plagiarism, it struggles with the essay-writing sector’s bespoke work.

To investigate the mills, the FT arranged for essays to be bought from three websites. The companies were asked to write a short essay on the history of UK education — ostensibly to help a Cambridge university student write a weekly assignment, an exercise that does not count for a final grade.

Peter Mandler, a Cambridge professor who teaches the history of UK education to undergraduates and is author of The Crisis of the Meritocracy , a core text on the topic, agreed to mark them.

The FT selected mills from a list provided by UK officials and academics that they said were of particular concern because of their scale and prominence. The first was Peachy Essay, which Gareth Crossman, a senior official at the Quality Assurance Agency, a public body responsible for academic integrity in the UK, told the FT was “one of the largest scale essay mills”. 

Its ownership and staffing is opaque. Peachy Essay says it was founded by students studying at University College London in 2007. However, it is incorporated in the US state of Wyoming, which does not require companies to list shareholders or officers. It takes payment in US dollars.

After making inquiries, the FT was called by someone using a US telephone number who would only give his name as “Kevin”. Kevin declined to answer our questions about his identity and the structure of the company.

Several details — such as describing himself to the FT as the company’s founder — suggested he was a man with several online profiles under the name “Kevin McCabe”. This person lists himself as an “experienced academic writer, dissertation and research paper consultant, university lecturer and blogger based in London”. However Kevin declined to confirm the link and asked the FT not to contact him further.

The McCabe profile on LinkedIn lists a PhD in “business, management, marketing and related support services” from Oxford university — a qualification that institution does not offer.

Two of Kevin McCabe’s profiles also feature a photograph which is, in fact, that of an Irish writer called Dominic Haugh. Haugh confirmed the photo was of him, was used without his consent and said he would take action to get it removed. He told the FT: “I’m not running an essay mill. I’m a history teacher in County Clare”.

Kevin did say he would meet FT journalists to prove he was in London, but only if we would wait until mid-November.

When commissioning the essay, the FT was promised that the author would be “Patrick”, an academic from a British university. But the FT sent Peachy Essay a link to a page with an embedded tracking script which could reveal the location of the person opening it. The link was only opened in Kenya. Peachy Essay denied that the essay was written there. But it was possible, they said, that their staff were there on holiday.

The second commission was from EduBirdie, another prominent essay mill. It made no promises about the location of its authors — saying they were from “around the world”. The company lists its main address in Bulgaria. The link we sent it was also opened in Kenya. The company declined to respond to our queries. Their only apparent response was to delete evidence of our purchase from the user account.

Kenya has emerged as a core hub of global contract cheating. The practice is not illegal there and it has a large pool of English-speaking graduates. One writer, a 23-year-old engineering undergraduate at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, told the FT that he supplied essays for students in Europe, the UK, US, China and Japan. “It’s majorly because of economic necessity. But it’s also coupled with the desire to know more, to study things,” he said.

The student said that an essay writing service pays him “roughly Ks250 [per page] (£1.64). The maximum I’ve been paid was Ks500 per page (£3.30)”. Edubirdie charged the FT £199 for the service, while Peachy charged £146 — equivalent to around £28 and £21 per page respectively.

Maurice Amutabi, a professor at the Technical University of Kenya and vice-president of the Kenya Studies and Scholars’ Association (KESSA), said the industry “fosters dishonesty, it creates a lack of scholarship”.

He said changes in higher education may enable more cheating: “Online classes tend to have almost 60 per cent in terms of submission of assignments online, and I think this has also created room for manipulation leading to these individuals for hire.”

Both essays bought by the FT were poor. The Edubirdie essay begins: “The history of the UK dates back many years ago”, while the Peachy Essay effort veers into Indian history in the last paragraph.

Mandler said “none of these is really a passing result, though [the Peachy Essay] . . . might come close, since there is evidence that the author has read (and sort of understood) at least one book that is actually on the subject”. 

The third essay commissioned by the FT was from UK Essays, a more expensive service priced at £244. Officials stated the company was a concern because of its very high profile: it is UK-incorporated and open about its work.

The essay the FT commissioned

Course: British Economic and Social History since 1880

Essay question: How And Why Has State Education Been Divided Along Class Lines?

Cost for 1,750 words:

Peachy Essay

UK Essays said it provides “model answers” for students to work off, and does not facilitate cheating. Daniel Dennehy, the company’s chief operating officer, told the FT: “We do not deem ourselves to be an essay mill. Our job is to work with the client to ensure the model answer they receive will help them learn and understand the subject matter in greater detail.”

Dennehy had previously told the FT that the company makes efforts to check whether students plan to use its essays to cheat — and blocks them if they do. However, when the FT bought an essay, a reporter was required to indicate they would abide by the company’s “fair use” policy, but faced no other scrutiny.

UK Essays said they tried to telephone the FT prior to our purchase and added that “our staff member would have spoken about the fair use policy” if we had revealed an intention to cheat.

The essay was better than the other two and received a mark of 62 — equivalent to a low upper-second class pass. (In 2020, 82 per cent of UK degrees were upper second or better.) This was within the range of grades that the FT had paid for. Mandler said that it was the best of the three but “doesn’t make much sense . . . it’s not very historical and not based on very much reading”. 

He added: “I marked these [three essays] permissively — as though they were weekly exercises to help students as they learn. If a student turned essays of this quality in for an actual assessment, they would fail.” 

Governments and higher education institutions are increasingly worried by the use of essay mills. Michelle Donelan, the minister for higher and further education in England, said: “It is completely unacceptable that companies are actively facilitating cheating and dishonest behaviour.”

UK universities have campaigned for a UK-wide ban: in 2018, 40 vice-chancellors wrote to the UK’s education secretary saying that essay cheating “is particularly hard to detect” and there is a need for “legislative backing . . . to shut down these operations”.

Thomas Lancaster, an academic at London’s Imperial College who studies the phenomenon, said the sector has “ballooned” since the mid-2000s. He estimated that “billions of pounds . . . are going through these firms every year”. In the UK, he estimates that between 5 and 10 per cent of students will use them at least once.

The UK’s National Union of Students said that essay mills “prey on students’ vulnerabilities and insecurities”. The companies often present themselves as having been set up by students or recent graduates, but regulators believe that parts of the industry are linked to organised crime.

Crossman, of the Quality Assurance Agency, said: “We are increasingly hearing of situations where students are being blackmailed after they have used an essay mill.” 

In 2018, the University of Coventry’s student union revealed that some of its members had been blackmailed for £5,000 by an essay-writing service that threatened to tell the university they had been cheating. Crossman said there is also evidence of potential “targeted identity theft” by mills.

Fighting contract cheating is very complex. In Australia it is now an offence “to provide or advertise academic cheating services relating to the delivery of higher education”. But of the 2,061 companies on the list, compiled by Teqsa, the Australian higher education regulator, only 105 have blocked themselves from Australia.

Last month, Teqsa used the newly toughened law for the first time to force internet service providers to block access to an Indian-domiciled site. Regulators, however, face an uphill task. Of the names on the list, the FT has identified 136 which have already been abandoned: mills often drop old names to escape legal action or poor reputations.

Crossman told the FT: “Targeting individual essay mills is like playing a game of whack-a-mole.”

Letter in response to this article:

The criminality of essay mills is hurting universities / From David Boughey, Professor of International Business History, University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, Devon, UK

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Internet firms told to remove adverts as England bans essay mills

‘essay mills are now illegal entities, and you should not carry their advertising,’ says minister’s letter to sector.

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The Westminster government has written to internet search providers asking them to remove advertising for essay mills after legislation making contract cheating illegal became law.

With the Skills and Post-16 Education Act receiving royal assent, it is now illegal in England to  offer to complete assignments or examinations for financial gain to students enrolled at a higher education provider, or to make arrangements to advertise such services.

In a letter published as the legislation passed its final hurdle , skills minister Alex Burghart tells internet service providers that “high numbers” of essay mills advertised online, with many using marketing “which indicate they are offering ‘legitimate’ academic writing support for students”.

Removing essay mill access to online advertising would “seriously hamper their efforts to target vulnerable students”, the minister writes.

“Essay mills are now illegal entities, and you should not carry their advertising. It is no longer a moral question; you will be facilitating an illegal activity. I ask you to do everything in your power to prevent the advertising of these unscrupulous practices,” the letter says.

The passing of the legislation brings England into line with other sectors that have outlawed contract cheating , including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and several US states.

Experts have indicated that they do not expect significant numbers of prosecutions under the new law , since many essay mills are based overseas and it can be hard to trace their operators. In Australia, where legislation has been in place since 2020, there has been only  one court injunction against a foreign essay mill  to date.

However, academics have suggested that the legislation’s real role will be in sending a clear message that paying for help with assignments is illegal, helping to change student attitudes.

There have been calls for the UK’s devolved nations to follow suit with similar legislation against contract cheating .

Tom Yates, director of corporate affairs at the Quality Assurance Agency, which has campaigned for the UK to take action to protect academic standards, said that the new law was “an important step forward in the campaign against essay mills”.

“It will mean that universities and colleges can make clear to their students that using an essay mill means engaging with a criminal entity. QAA will continue to work closely with higher education and other institutions and with the Department for Education to address the threat posed by these unscrupulous businesses,” Mr Yates said.

“We will also continue our discussions with the other UK governments – we hope to see a similar ban applied in the other UK nations in due course. Criminalisation of essay mills is just one part of a broader sector-wide effort to protect and promote the academic integrity of UK higher education, and this work becomes ever more important as technology grows more sophisticated .”

The passing of the Skills and Post-16 Education Act also clears the way for the creation of a  lifelong loan entitlement , which would allow adults to borrow funding for the equivalent of four years of post-18 education over their lifetime. Under the plans – currently being consulted on – people could use the money to study a single module or build up a full degree over time.

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