is buying essays illegal

Millions of students are buying 'plagiarism-free' essays for as little as $13 — and it's nearly impossible for teachers to prove

• An estimated one in six students is buying school assignments from "essay mills" that claim to offer original, "plagiarism-free" essays, term papers, dissertations, and more for payments of as little as $13 per page.
• "We write your papers, you get top grades!" Extra Essay advertises on its website.

Lawmakers in the US and globally have recently started cracking down on contract-cheating services as their usage has proliferated.

• "There's a whole economy around this. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on contract cheating," Bill Loller, the vice president of product management for the cheating-detection service Turnitin, said.
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Millions of students are paying companies to complete their school work in a widespread epidemic known as contract cheating that has a potentially far greater reach than the recent US college-admissions scandal .

The companies that provide work for purchase are widely referred to as "essay mills." They claim to offer original, "plagiarism-free" essays, term papers, dissertations, speeches, and other assignments for payments of as little as $13 per page.

"We write your papers, you get top grades!" one of the companies, Extra Essay, advertises on its website.

Pay for Essay's website says: " No one will find out about you using our service. The whole world will think you write all assignments by yourself!"

The rise of contract cheating is a growing global phenomenon, with research suggesting that as many as one in six students — or an estimated 31 million — has engaged in the practice.

And it's more difficult to detect than plagiarism, which has become relatively easy to identify through the use of software programs such as Turnitin.

"There's a whole economy around this," said Bill Loller, the vice president of product management for Turnitin, which provides cheating-detection services to more than 18,000 institutions globally. "Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on contract cheating."

Ads for the services are showing up where students spend a lot of time: on YouTube , WhatsApp , LinkedIn, and other social-media and messaging apps. 

Some services offer to match customers' writing style, in an implicit — and sometimes explicit — promise to avoid detection.

"We offer the option to live chat with the chosen author who will make sure to take care of all your individual needs," Essay Service says on its website. "Now you can work directly with the paper writer to make sure that every given requirement is fulfilled while also mimicking your personal writing style!"

Costs range from under $20 for a single-page assignment to hundreds of dollars for longer assignments due on short deadlines. 

BuyEssays.net, for example, charges $13 per page for an assignment with a two-week deadline, or $39 per page for an assignment due in four hours.  

New Zealand and several US states have implemented laws banning them. Similar legislation is being considered in Australia and Ireland.

University leaders in the UK last year urged the education secretary to make essay mills illegal, and the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled in January that Oxbridge Essays, which says it has sold more than 70,000 essays, posted misleading claims on its website that its services are risk-free for students.

Detection is difficult, but proving cheating is harder

It's harder for teachers to detect contract cheating than other forms of cheating, such as plagiarism.

So Turnitin has updated its software to help identify signs that students purchased their assignments. 

The software detects inconsistencies in students' writing, such as the sudden appearance of Oxford commas or double spaces after periods in cases where students had previously used single spaces.

The software also analyzes the education level of the writing — from high-school level to the postgraduate one — and reads documents' metadata, which can reveal clues about unusual editing activity.

Loller said this is an effective strategy for identifying problematic essays. But there's a much bigger problem than detection, which is proving that a student actually cheated.

"There's all these little clues that point to contract cheating," Loller said. "But actually taking that to a conclusion and saying in some kind of quasi-judicial process that 'Hey, you cheated. And we know it.' That's very hard to do."

So, in some ways, contract cheating carries little risk. And if left unchecked, it could put the millions of students who complete their own schoolwork at a disadvantage.

Watch: Almost 80% of the textbook industry is dominated by 5 publishing companies that make books so expensive most students skip buying them

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How Students May Be Cheating Their Way Through College

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing at the nation's colleges and universities about a burgeoning online market, where students can buy ghost-written essays. Schools are trying new tools to catch it.

Contract Cheating: Colleges Crack Down On Ghostwritten Essays

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

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As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

15% of students admit to buying essays. What can universities do about it?

Sessional Academic in English, Australian Catholic University

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Jedidiah Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Australian Catholic University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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New research on plagiarism at university has revealed students are surprisingly unconcerned about a practice known as “contract cheating”.

The term “contract cheating” was coined in 2006 , and describes students paying for completed assessments. At that time, concerns over the outsourcing of assessments were in their infancy, but today, contract cheating is big business.

In 2017 alone, the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported more than 20,000 students had bought professionally written essays from the country’s two largest essay-writing services.

According to a 2018 study , as many as 31 million university students worldwide are paying third parties to complete their assessments. This staggering figure was drawn by reviewing 65 studies on contract cheating. Since 2014, as many as 15.7% of surveyed students admitted to outsourcing their assignments and essays.

The growth in contract cheating speaks volumes about the modern view of education as a commodity.

Read more: Buying essays: how to make sure assessment is authentic

Who’s cheating?

A recent survey , led by the University of South Australia, found international students demonstrated proportionately higher cheating behaviours. So did students who spoke a language other than English at home.

In 2013, a large online survey on academic honesty at six Australian universities found international students were significantly less aware of academic integrity processes, and much less confident about how to avoid academic integrity breaches.

A 2015 study of US student demand for commercially produced assignments found students with English as their first language who liked taking risks were about as likely to buy an assessment as students who were reluctant risk-takers, but who spoke English as a second language.

It’s no surprise that students whom we aggressively court for their higher fees and who are working in a less familiar language environment are turning to these services at higher rates.

A recent study on contract cheating in Australia concluded that the over-representation of non-native English speaking students in cheating surveys is linked to the failure of universities to provide support for language and learning development. Students are tasked with completing assessments for which they lack the basic English language skills.

What’s being done about it?

Widely used plagiarism-detection companies, such as Turnitin , can detect similarities to material that already exists. But essay-writing companies loudly promote the fact their product is original.

In February this year, Turnitin announced plans to crack down on contract cheating. Its proposed solution , authorship investigation, hopes to automate a process familiar to any human marker: detecting major shifts in individual students’ writing style that may point to help from a third party.

But despite these technological advancements, students who are turning to such services have reasons far more complicated than laziness or disregard for personal responsibility.

Read more: Universities run as businesses can't pursue genuine learning

Is it worth it?

Despite the moral panic over grades for cash, there’s some evidence to suggest students turning to essay mill services are not getting what they pay for. A 2014 mystery shopping exercise in the UK revealed the astonishingly low standard of commissioned work produced by essay mills. Of all the essays purchased, none received the requested grade, and many fell dramatically short of expected academic standards.

Rather than buying top grades, desperate students are being exploited by companies that take advantage of the very shortcomings (lower literacy and an ignorance of plagiarism protocols) students are hoping to mitigate.

One less obvious aspect of contract cheating that can’t be fixed by intelligent software is the predatory nature of essay mill companies. According to a 2017 study on cheating websites, commercial providers rely on persuasive marketing techniques. They often repackage an unethical choice in the guise of professional help for students who are weighed down by a demanding workload.

How can we discourage it?

In recent years, several scholars have explored the legality of contract cheating, along with the possibilities of defining a new offence under criminal law of providing or advertising contract cheating.

In 2011, for example, a law was introduced in New Zealand that makes it a criminal offence to provide or advertise cheating services. Yet the criminalisation of such services leads inevitably to the prosecution of cheating students, something the legal system has so far been reluctant to do.

But even discounting the possibility of legal action, plagiarism has hefty consequences for university students under misconduct policies, including revoking course credits, expulsion, and a permanent record of cheating.

Redesigning assessments is the primary way to tackle the growing problem of contract cheating. Recent suggestions focus on the development of authentic assessments: tasks that more closely mirror the real-world demands students will face after they graduate from university.

Rather than simply completing an essay, for example, a history student might be tasked with interviewing a local non-profit organisation, and producing a podcast episode.

Teachers who use authentic assessments hope to reduce cheating by tying learning to student’s hopes for their futures, but one obvious benefit is the difficulty of cheating in such individualised tasks. One key problem for overhauling assessment design is the troubling proliferation of casual labour in universities. The development of assessments is rarely, if ever, accounted for in casual teaching rates.

Turnitin works to reduce students’ work into patterns and algorithms, weeding out supposed cheats and frauds. But a more considered response must take into account the complex reasons students turn to these services in the first place.

Understanding why students are willing to pay for assessments might also illuminate a problem at the heart of tertiary education – one that is related to our present repackaging of knowledge as a resource to be bought, rather than an ennobling pursuit that is worthy of all the energy, time, and attention teachers and students can devote to it.

Read more: Assessment design won’t stop cheating, but our relationships with students might

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Risks Associated with Buying Essays Online: And How to Avoid Them

buying essays online risks

Buying essays online refers to paying for pre-written academic papers and submitting them as one’s original work. However, it is now a growing trend among students seeking to ease their academic workload or improve their grades.

While it may offer short-term benefits, students need to be aware of the significant risks associated with this practice. 

Even so, these risks include plagiarism, poor quality work, and the possibility of being scammed by fraudulent websites. It is vital l to address these risks and find ways to avoid them, as they can have severe consequences, such as academic penalties, legal issues, and damage to one’s reputation.

In this article, I will examine the risks associated with buying essays online and provide tips on avoiding them.

 Risks of Buying Essays Online  

1. Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty

When students buy essays from online sources, there is a risk that the work may have been copied or stolen from another source.

Such can lead to serious consequences, including failing grades, academic probation, or even expulsion.

Most importantly, students should avoid these risks, such as working with reputable writing services or taking the time to research and write their essays.

2. Poor Quality and Lack of Originality

When buying essays online, students face a risk of receiving poor-quality work that lacks originality. Also, some online services may not have qualified writers, leading to poorly researched, poorly written essays and lacking originality. 

Beyond that, this can result in a lower grade or even rejection of the essay and, ultimately, a waste of time and cash for the student. Perform thorough research and vet any online essay writing service before purchasing to ensure the quality and originality of the work.

3. Legal and Ethical Concerns

Buying essays online can raise legal and ethical concerns, especially if the content is copied from copyrighted sources or the student submits the essay as their own work. Such careless acts could lead to academic penalties, legal action, and damage to the student’s reputation. 

Additionally, some essay writing services may not be transparent about their business practices, further complicating the ethical considerations of buying essays online. Students need to be aware of the legal and ethical implications of using such services before making any purchase decisions.

4. Compromised Privacy and Data Security

When purchasing essays online, there is a risk that the privacy and security of personal information could be compromised.

Notably, some websites may not have secure payment methods or protect user data adequately, leaving individuals vulnerable to cyberattacks, fraud, or identity theft. 

Additionally, if a student is caught purchasing essays, it could negatively impact their academic reputation and future career prospects.

Therefore, it is essential to ensure that any website chosen for purchasing essays has proper security protocols, such as SSL encryption and two-factor authentication, to safeguard sensitive information.

5. Financial Risks

Scammers may demand high payments upfront, promise top-quality papers, and fail to deliver.

Also, some may even steal sensitive financial information from unsuspecting customers, leading to identity theft and other financial crimes. 

Plus, students caught buying essays may face fines or other financial penalties and harm to their academic and professional reputations.

Therefore, exercising caution and carefully researching any online writing service is vital before making a financial commitment.

6. Reputation Damage

Buying essays online can also pose a risk to one’s reputation, especially if the purchased essay is discovered to be plagiarized or of poor quality. More importantly, this can result in negative consequences, such as failing grades or even suspension or expulsion. 

Employers and graduate schools often look into applicants’ academic records, and a history of academic dishonesty can harm one’s chances of being accepted for a job or further education.

Consequences for Personal Growth and Learning

• Inhibits academic and intellectual growth : By purchasing essays, students miss out on the opportunity to nurture critical thinking and writing skills necessary for academic and personal growth. They become dependent on the work of others and fail to develop essential skills.
• Hinders character development : Purchasing essays online promotes cheating and academic dishonesty, which can negatively affect a student’s character. It can erode their moral and ethical values and diminish their integrity and self-respect.

Ways to Mitigate Risks 

Conducting thorough research.

It is important to conduct thorough research to mitigate the risks associated with buying essays online. Such actions include:

• Looking for reliable and reputable essay writing services.
• Reading reviews and feedback from other customers.
• Checking the writers’ credentials.

This can help ensure that the essay purchased is high-quality and original.

Choosing Reputable Sources

You can choose reputable and trusted sources by researching and selecting websites or companies that have a proven track record of providing high-quality and original content.

Choosing reputable sources can help ensure that the essay you purchase is legitimate and meets your academic standards.

Verifying the Credentials of Writers

You can verify writers’ credentials by checking their educational background, experience, and qualifications to ensure they can produce quality work.

Also, choose reputable websites with a rigorous screening process for their writers. The intention is to minimize the risk of receiving poor-quality work or falling victim to scams.

Reviewing Samples and Testimonials

Reviewing samples and testimonials of the writing service or writer can give an idea of the quality and originality of their work. 

Ensuring that the samples and testimonials are legitimate and not fabricated is important. Additionally, it can be helpful to seek recommendations from trusted sources, such as peers or academic advisors.

Using Plagiarism Detection Tools

Using plagiarism detection tools helps check the paper’s originality and authenticity before submission. Some of the popular plagiarism checkers include Turnitin, Grammarly, and Copyscape.

They analyze the content and compare it against a database of other academic papers, online sources, and publications to detect any signs of plagiarism or unoriginal content.

Clarifying Terms and Conditions

Carefully review the terms and conditions of the website or service provider. Such measures help you understand their policies on plagiarism, refunds, and revisions.

Even so, clarify any questions or concerns before placing an order. This can help ensure that you are fully aware of the risks and responsibilities involved in the process.

Protecting Personal Information

Choosing a reliable and trustworthy service provider to protect personal information is important. Carefully read the privacy policy and terms of service to ensure that the provider has appropriate data protection measures. 

Using a pseudonym or a separate email address can further protect personal information. It is also advisable to avoid sharing sensitive information such as credit card details unless necessary and verified to be secure.

Avoiding Pre-Written Essays

It is best to avoid pre-written essays and opt for custom-written ones to avoid the risk of plagiarism and poor quality. Custom-written essays are specifically tailored to your needs and requirements, reducing the risk of getting caught for academic dishonesty. 

Custom-written essays are often of higher quality and contain original content. While pre-written essays may seem like a quick and easy solution, they can be risky and negatively affect your academic career.

Seeking Feedback and Revisions

Seek feedback and revisions to ensure that the work meets the required standards. Better yet, this will help to identify any errors or issues with the paper and ensure that the writer delivers the necessary changes to make it satisfactory.

Reputable writing services will often offer free revisions as part of their service, so it is crucial to choose a reliable source.

Conclusion 

It is crucial to be aware of the risks associated with buying essays online and to take steps to mitigate them.

Making informed decisions by conducting thorough research, verifying credentials and using plagiarism detection tools can help prevent academic dishonesty and plagiarism.

Uphold academic integrity by avoiding pre-written essays and seeking feedback and revisions. By taking these measures, students can ensure they receive quality work and avoid the potential consequences of plagiarism and compromised privacy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can i get caught buying essays online.

Yes, it is possible to get caught buying essays online. Many academic institutions use plagiarism detection software to identify academic dishonesty leading to serious consequences.

Is it legal to buy essays online?

It is not illegal to buy essays online; however, it is generally discouraged by educational institutions as it is considered a form of academic dishonesty.

How can I protect my personal information when buying essays online?

Using a reputable and secure website, you can protect your personal information when buying essays online. Also, avoid sharing sensitive information, using a VPN, and checking the website’s privacy policy and terms of service before purchasing.

Can I request revisions for purchased essays?

Most reputable essay writing services offer free revisions to ensure customer satisfaction. Also, reviewing the company’s revision policy before placing an order is important to understand the time frame and any limitations or conditions for requesting revisions.

Are there any alternatives to buying essays online?

Yes, there are several alternatives to buying essays online, including seeking help from tutors, professors, or peers; utilizing writing centers or workshops; and improving one’s writing skills through practice and self-study.

Prioritize academic integrity and avoid plagiarism, which can have severe consequences.

Josh Jasen or JJ as we fondly call him, is a senior academic editor at Grade Bees in charge of the writing department. When not managing complex essays and academic writing tasks, Josh is busy advising students on how to pass assignments. In his spare time, he loves playing football or walking with his dog around the park.

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​Is it Plagiarism to Pay Someone to Write for Me?

Don't i own that work.

Paying someone to write your paper, whether it’s a fellow student or an essay mill, is a form of plagiarism and is usually considered one of the most serious by teachers and administrators alike.

That’s because a teacher doesn’t just assign a paper to have you produce one, the goal of the assignment is to showcase your understanding of the subject, your ability to communicate that information and how well you analyze and draw conclusions from it.

In short, essays are designed to test your skills as a student and, if you simply pay someone else to write that paper, it is impossible for your teacher to evaluate your understanding or your progress.

Despite this, many still claim that since the use was “allowed” by the original author that it is ethically acceptable. After all, it’s a case of “victimless” plagiarism.

But even if we ignore the issues about what the goals of the assignment are and how cheating on such an assignment hurts you as a student, there are other victims to be considered.

First, by turning in a paper you paid for, you are lying to your teacher. When you place your name on top of your paper or on the cover sheet, you are saying that everything in that paper, unless specifically cited, is your work.

If you pay someone to write the paper, that is clearly untrue.

Second, other students in the class did the work and are earning a grade based on their efforts. They chose not to pay someone to write their paper, either out of ethical concerns or fear of punishment, and are at a disadvantage to someone who simply paid for their paper.

But while buying an essay is definitely a form of cheating, it’s very likely that you won’t end up owning the essay that you “bought”.

The reason for that is because, under copyright law, buying a work doesn’t necessarily transfer copyright into it, much like how buying a DVD doesn’t make you the owner of the film.

Copyright in a work, whether it is a paper, song or film, resides with the author of the work . Unless that work is by an employee of a company or the author has signed a contract ( which must be in writing ), the copyright in the work stays with the author.

Since just buying an essay doesn’t make the author an employee, you don’t own the work unless you have a contract transferring copyright in it. While the person has agreed to let you use, it’s still, legally, their work.

As such, they can turn the paper in themselves, sell it to other students, post it online or do nearly anything they want with it.

Buying a paper does not make it your work, neither for the assignment it’s submitted for nor in the eyes of the law.

When it comes to buying essays, your best bet is to save your money and do the work yourself.

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Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas

Credit... Illustration by The New York Times

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By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi

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.

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How to avoid plagiarism when buying an essay online.

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Working with an essay writing service can save you time as a student juggling a full workload. It can also assist you in the learning process. But for students who decide to buy essays online, plagiarism can be a huge concern. For instance, how can you be certain the paper you receive is original and not plagiarized? How can you rest assured that purchasing an essay online is safe?

These are all valid and important questions. This post will clarify how to be sure you receive a plagiarism-free paper, what you need to know to stay safe when you buy essay papers online, and how to use them to enhance your education experience.

How to Buy Essay Papers that are Plagiarism-Free

If you are thinking about purchasing an essay online but are concerned about plagiarism, use these 6 steps as a guide to find and buy essay papers that are plagiarism-free, online.

1) Buy essay papers from a top-tier writing service

There are a few different benefits of working with top-rated essay writing service when you buy essay papers which can help you avoid plagiarism. Use these benefits as a checklist to qualify an essay service while you are searching. If the service does not include these features, consider continuing your search.

• 1. Plagiarism-checked, original content. Nothing is more critical than being confident you are safe from plagiarized content. Top services will provide 100% custom-created, original writing. To ensure writing is original, and that a writer didn’t accidentally write something too similar to content published elsewhere, most top services run drafts through plagiarism-checking software before delivering them. Plagiarism is considered a serious offense which is why top writing services, such as Ultius, actually prohibit their writers from plagiarizing.
• 2. Direct communications with your writer. Being able to communicate with your writer can help put your mind at ease if you are wanting to make sure your paper is top-quality, original writing. A top essay service will allow you to message your writer directly to make sure instructions are clear and your writer is comfortable researching and writing about your topic from scratch.
• 3. Round-the-clock customer service. A high quality writing service will have customer service agents available 24/7 by phone and email. If you are concerned about the originality of your draft or have questions about plagiarism, contact the writing service’s customer service department.
• 4. Higher quality drafts. Investing in professional services, as opposed to free online writing assistance, is completely worth it when it comes to your education. Top-rated writing services, like Ultius, hire and train only select, world-class writers who pass a rigorous hiring process. This means when you buy term papers from a top service, you will be connected with a writer that understands the severity of plagiarism and is also well-trained and efficient when it comes to creating high-level, original content matching your instructions.

2) Cite your sources correctly

As the saying goes, give credit where credit is due. One of the most important keys to avoiding plagiarism is to make sure sources are correctly cited. When you buy essay papers from a professional service, they will be correctly formatted and cited according to the citation style you selected in your order. Each citation style will require sources to be cited differently. Here is what you must know about citing, no matter what style you are using:

• Paraphrased writing, ideas that are not yours, but are taken from another source and re-worded, must be cited using either an in-text citation, footnote or endnote, depending on the citation style.
• Writing that is someone else’s, words that match other content verbatim, must be indicated with quotation marks and cited according to a particular style which may require in-text citations, footnotes, or endnotes.

If you have questions about how to properly cite a source, a high-quality writing service can assist with that as well.

3) Communicate with your writer

When you buy essay papers online, be sure the service you use allows you to communicate directly with your writer through a messaging platform. As we mentioned, this can be a tremendous help to students wanting to make sure their writer understands all instructions. Also, messaging with your writer allows you to get a feel for the writer’s knowledge and comfort level with the topic.

Also, when you work with a writer you trust, you are likely to receive a paper that meets or exceeds your expectations. Plus, when there is excellent communication between the writer and you as a client, the writer is likely to be even more invested in the work they are doing and provide a high level of service because they understand your specific needs and concerns. If you are wondering how to find and make sure the writer you work with is a true professional, check out this post about finding and working with professional essay writers .

4) Avoid free services

It can be very tempting to request free papers from online writing sites, especially when you are on a tight budget and a million options seem to populate a simple Google search. But unfortunately, many free writing services actually reuse and recycle content which is considered plagiarism. On the contrary, if you buy essay papers from a professional service, the investment you make goes toward compensating a skilled writer for their time and expertise in researching, citing, writing, and formatting original content.

5) Ask questions

If in doubt, ask questions. If your questions are not answered by reading reviews, or by the service’s website, call customer service. If there is no customer service number, consider choosing a different site that provides assistance via phone. Here are some important questions to clarify and find answers to before you buy essay papers through any writing service:

• 1. How does the writing service select and qualify writers?
• 2. Does the essay service check drafts for plagiarism? How?
• 3. How does the writing service proofread and edit each order?
• 4. Will you be able to communicate with your writer?

Whether you are a graduate student needing custom writing assistance for a very specific topic or an undergraduate student wanting help creating a polished, perfect essay, it is important to find a plagiarism-free essay writing service that fits your specific needs.

6) Check your paper

If you are working with a top-rated writing service and are still concerned about plagiarism, you can always run your draft through plagiarism-detection software. For example, Copyscape is a plagiarism-detection software you can access online that makes checking your content easy by simply copy-pasting. If content comes up as similar, check to make sure you correctly cited it using quotations and a page number.

What you need to know to stay safe buying essays

Even when taking all these plagiarism-precautions when you buy essays online, some students wonder if it is safe to buy essays online.

Simply stated, yes. Using essay writing services to assist you in the learning and writing process is safe.

Here is why, plus what you need to know if you buy essay writing services:

1) Respecting your privacy

Confidentiality is incredibly important to your academic career which is why top-tier writing services, including Ultius, take it so seriously. A breach in confidentiality would not only be costly to the student, but also to the writing services. This is why high quality writing services use industry-leading practices to ensure your information as a client is kept completely private.

In fact, sites such as Ultius actually hide clients’ identities from company employees and writers. The only time clients are required to disclose identifying information is during the payment process (for security purposes). And since a third party vendor is used to process payments, clients’ identifying information is still kept private from the writing team.

2) Using a purchased essay safely

Here are some safe ways to use purchased essay papers:

• Buy essay papers to use as examples. Purchased essays can help tremendously in getting past writer’s block . This is especially helpful when an assignment’s instructions are complex or you can not decide what to write about. Seeing a well-organized example can help you understand assignment concepts and write your own words much more easily.
• Purchase essays to help with citing and formatting. Citation styles can be tricky and sometimes hard to explain. Seeing an example paper cited in the exact style your paper needs to be written in can make it much easier to understand how to cite sources correctly.
• Use purchased essay papers as research guides. Professional essay services can help demystify the research process, especially if you are looking for specific, recent, scholarly sources on an obscure topic.
• Buy essays to assist in organizing and outlining. Sorting out ideas for an essay can be a daunting task if it is on a new topic, is a long paper, or if you are pressed for time. Essay services can help you create and work from an outline.

3) Finding a service you trust

Ultimately, trust is the most important component of any working relationship.

When you trust the writing service and writer you work with, the process is much more helpful, easy, and enjoyable. Building trust starts by being able to communicate clearly over the phone with customer service and by being able to message your writer directly. Once you find a fit, it can be a huge time-saver, and a tremendous asset to your academic career.

If you are looking to buy essays, no plagiarism is acceptable so be sure to buy essay papers from a top-tier writing service.

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October 18, 2018

15% of students admit to buying essays. What can universities do about it?

by Jedidiah Evans, The Conversation

New research on plagiarism at university has revealed students are surprisingly unconcerned about a practice known as "contract cheating".

The term "contract cheating " was coined in 2006 , and describes students paying for completed assessments. At that time, concerns over the outsourcing of assessments were in their infancy, but today, contract cheating is big business.

In 2017 alone, the UK's Daily Telegraph reported more than 20,000 students had bought professionally written essays from the country's two largest essay-writing services.

According to a 2018 study , as many as 31 million university students worldwide are paying third parties to complete their assessments. This staggering figure was drawn by reviewing 65 studies on contract cheating. Since 2014, as many as 15.7% of surveyed students admitted to outsourcing their assignments and essays.

The growth in contract cheating speaks volumes about the modern view of education as a commodity.

Who's cheating?

A recent survey , led by the University of South Australia, found international students demonstrated proportionately higher cheating behaviours. So did students who spoke a language other than English at home.

In 2013, a large online survey on academic honesty at six Australian universities found international students were significantly less aware of academic integrity processes, and much less confident about how to avoid academic integrity breaches.

A 2015 study of US student demand for commercially produced assignments found students with English as their first language who liked taking risks were about as likely to buy an assessment as students who were reluctant risk-takers, but who spoke English as a second language.

It's no surprise that students whom we aggressively court for their higher fees and who are working in a less familiar language environment are turning to these services at higher rates.

A recent study on contract cheating in Australia concluded that the over-representation of non-native English speaking students in cheating surveys is linked to the failure of universities to provide support for language and learning development. Students are tasked with completing assessments for which they lack the basic English language skills.

What's being done about it?

Widely used plagiarism-detection companies, such as Turnitin , can detect similarities to material that already exists. But essay-writing companies loudly promote the fact their product is original.

In February this year, Turnitin announced plans to crack down on contract cheating. Its proposed solution , authorship investigation, hopes to automate a process familiar to any human marker: detecting major shifts in individual students' writing style that may point to help from a third party.

But despite these technological advancements, students who are turning to such services have reasons far more complicated than laziness or disregard for personal responsibility.

Is it worth it?

Despite the moral panic over grades for cash, there's some evidence to suggest students turning to essay mill services are not getting what they pay for. A 2014 mystery shopping exercise in the UK revealed the astonishingly low standard of commissioned work produced by essay mills. Of all the essays purchased, none received the requested grade, and many fell dramatically short of expected academic standards.

Rather than buying top grades, desperate students are being exploited by companies that take advantage of the very shortcomings (lower literacy and an ignorance of plagiarism protocols) students are hoping to mitigate.

One less obvious aspect of contract cheating that can't be fixed by intelligent software is the predatory nature of essay mill companies. According to a 2017 study on cheating websites, commercial providers rely on persuasive marketing techniques. They often repackage an unethical choice in the guise of professional help for students who are weighed down by a demanding workload.

How can we discourage it?

In recent years, several scholars have explored the legality of contract cheating, along with the possibilities of defining a new offence under criminal law of providing or advertising contract cheating.

In 2011, for example, a law was introduced in New Zealand that makes it a criminal offence to provide or advertise cheating services. Yet the criminalisation of such services leads inevitably to the prosecution of cheating students, something the legal system has so far been reluctant to do.

But even discounting the possibility of legal action, plagiarism has hefty consequences for university students under misconduct policies, including revoking course credits, expulsion, and a permanent record of cheating.

Redesigning assessments is the primary way to tackle the growing problem of contract cheating. Recent suggestions focus on the development of authentic assessments: tasks that more closely mirror the real-world demands students will face after they graduate from university.

Rather than simply completing an essay, for example, a history student might be tasked with interviewing a local non-profit organisation, and producing a podcast episode.

Teachers who use authentic assessments hope to reduce cheating by tying learning to student's hopes for their futures, but one obvious benefit is the difficulty of cheating in such individualised tasks. One key problem for overhauling assessment design is the troubling proliferation of casual labour in universities. The development of assessments is rarely, if ever, accounted for in casual teaching rates.

Turnitin works to reduce students' work into patterns and algorithms, weeding out supposed cheats and frauds. But a more considered response must take into account the complex reasons students turn to these services in the first place.

Understanding why students are willing to pay for assessments might also illuminate a problem at the heart of tertiary education – one that is related to our present repackaging of knowledge as a resource to be bought, rather than an ennobling pursuit that is worthy of all the energy, time, and attention teachers and students can devote to it.

Provided by The Conversation

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The Sydney Morning Herald

This was published 4 months ago

Exposed: How simple it is for cheats to buy a university essay

By daniella white, save articles for later.

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

Students are buying university assignments and essays on black market websites that remain readily accessible in Australia, despite being banned and the higher education watchdog having the power to block access.

No special skills are required to find them: a Google search will provide students with a buffet of illegal cheating services for just about any subject.

It’s prompted concern that the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) – the university watchdog – is not doing enough to enforce the anti-cheating laws it is funded to implement.

In a process seen by this masthead, essays and assignments that academics say would achieve credit grades were bought for as little as $120.

The offshore companies have even approached local academics to attempt to recruit them to their essay-writing businesses.

Mohan Dhall, an education lecturer at University of Technology Sydney and chief executive of Australian Tutoring Association, has spent months interacting with cheating agencies in an attempt to better understand the black market and inform his training of teachers.

One of those websites, Unemployed Professors, allows students to upload their assignment and receive bids to complete the assignment from potential essay writers.

Dhall paid that website $150 for a 1100-word essay for an Australian National University assignment titled “Inferential Statistics and Hypothesis Testing”.

He was able to talk to the essay writer and the finished product, which he said was of a credit standard, arrived within eight days.

“These sites talk about writing a masters at dissertation level,” Dhall said. “So clearly they have writers that can write at a very high and sophisticated level.”

Other websites, such as MyAussieTutor.com, are less brazen and appear to offer legal services. However, when Dhall requested an assignment be completed, he received an email from an address affiliated with a different website confirming it could be completed. Dhall was instructed to make payment to another website again, ExpertGrad.com. The finished product was passable but not of high quality.

New laws came into effect in 2021 that made it illegal to provide contract cheating services in Australia, with offenders facing fines of up to $100,000 or two years’ prison. The watchdog was also given the power to block web pages providing cheating services, and it says it has disrupted hundreds of websites.

But Dhall said many of the websites he interacted with – including Unemployed Professors – have remained online, despite the new laws.

“It stuns me how accessible these websites are and why there wouldn’t be a precautionary response,” he said.

“In other words, you’d err on the side of blocking a business and having it show why it should be unblocked, rather than err on the side of allowing it.

“Who cares, they are largely offshore businesses. What they offer only seems to be varying levels of unethical services. It seems to give a message that we seem tough, but we don’t act.”

Asked if TEQSA was doing enough to enforce anti-cheating laws, Education Minister Jason Clare said almost 290 cheating websites had been blocked by the watchdog since 2021.

“When students cheat, they risk graduating without the skills and knowledge needed to safely and ethically do their jobs. They also expose themselves to criminals and potential blackmail,” he said.

“TEQSA has also engaged with social media companies and online marketplaces to remove 841 pages, posts and advertisements for commercial academic cheating services.”

Some assignment writing services’ websites appear to be hosted in Australia, however when contacted via their provided local contact number, the number doesn’t work. Others reply from email addresses linked to websites hosted overseas.

Providers are also increasingly targeting students directly, on their university-issued email addresses, through social media and by infiltrating university courses and study chat groups.

Dhall said he was asked on LinkedIn to “collaborate” with an Indian-based contract cheating website, based on his role in tutoring. He said that was when he ended all communications.

A Chinese international student at Sydney University, who did not want to be named as he feared reprisal from cheating agencies in his home country, said he had encountered students who outsource their work to contract cheating providers.

“In a recent group assignment, one of the students asked if we wanted to use a service to write it,” he said. “I said no and did not feel good about using her work in the assignment because I didn’t know if it was genuine.”

The student also said he was often inundated with social media requests from essay mill services.

Contract cheating is an ongoing concern for universities, with research in 2021 co-authored by University of Western Australia cheating expert Guy Curtis showing about one in 10 students submitted assignments were written by someone else. But more than 95 per cent of students who cheat in this way are not caught.

Students who use the cheating services cannot be charged, but face severe penalties from their university, including failing the subject and expulsion.

Dhall said the prevalence and availability of contract cheating providers and the difficulty in catching students using them meant the style of assessment had to be overhauled.

“Currently, there is a lot of work given where students have a lot of agency to work at home and then submit it.

“We need a huge re-education on two levels: one, how we do assessment, so we can properly interrogate a student against the work they submit.

“Two, university lecturers across the country need to know the students they teach well, so they can match what they understand of their students’ ability against what comes in.

“If you don’t have those two things, we leave the system open to being rorted.“

TEQSA says Australian web traffic to academic cheating websites has fallen more than 75 per cent since it commenced blocking sites in 2021.

“Blocking these websites and accounts seriously disrupts the operations of these sites and makes Australia a less attractive place for these operators to target,” a spokesman said.

As well as blocking websites, legislation allows TEQSA to prosecute providers, who face up to two years’ jail if convicted.

However, the watchdog says its ability to pursue criminal or civil charges has been limited by the fact many people behind the illegal services are based overseas.

“TEQSA encourages individuals or registered higher education providers to pass on details of possible contraventions of the academic cheating provisions (including names, phone numbers or bank details), which significantly improves our ability to investigate these matters,” the spokesperson said.

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• Original article
• Open access
• Published: 29 June 2021

Essay mills and other contract cheating services: to buy or not to buy and the consequences of students changing their minds

• Michael Draper   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1272-8122 1 ,
• Thomas Lancaster 2 ,
• Sandie Dann 3 ,
• Robin Crockett 3 , 4 &
• Irene Glendinning 5  

International Journal for Educational Integrity volume  17 , Article number:  13 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Very few parts of the world have legislation that prohibits the operation or the promotion of contract cheating services. This means that commercial companies providing such services can formally register and operate in most countries. If a student enters into an agreement with a contract cheating provider, what rights do they have to change their mind and what are the risks if they choose to do so? This paper examines the question through legal, institutional and societal lenses, showing that although a student has the consumer rights to withdraw from a contract with an essay mill, they may also be putting their future at risk by doing so. Contract cheating providers are now embedded within many institutions, using sharp practices to connect with vulnerable customers, but are also perfectly placed to blackmail students or threaten to report them to their institution if they ask to cancel their order. The paper argues that, while not condoning the practice of contract cheating, supportive processes need to be in place to help students at risk as part of standard institutional duty of care. This must be backed up by institutional policy that considers academic integrity as a core value for all.

Introduction

The contract cheating industry, those services that (offer to) supply essays and other work for students to (mis) use during the assessment process, is proactive in encouraging students to cheat. Despite the unethical nature of this industry, at the time of writing this paper, legislation prohibiting commercial contract cheating only applies in New Zealand, Australia, Republic of Ireland and in several states within the USA (Draper et al. 2017 ). Even where legislation exists, companies supplying work to students can be based anywhere in the world (Draper and Newton 2017 ).

Given that essay mills operate with apparent impunity in most jurisdictions, what are the legal rights of students who initially choose to commission a bespoke assignment, but then subsequently have second thoughts and change their mind? The right for students to withdraw has not been previously discussed in the literature, but it is necessary for student protection. The contract cheating industry is such that it preys on vulnerable students, leaving them positioned to becoming victims of unfair or illegal actions. Immediately someone makes an enquiry about using a third party to complete their assessments, they become open to threats of exposure. Extortion threats that some of the authors have encountered involve students who have not actually purchased anything or not submitted the work provided.

A student may be unaware of consequences such as these when they are seduced by contract cheating provider marketing or may later realise the benefits that come from operating with academic integrity. Can such students withdraw from the contract they have made with a contract cheating provider and what are the risks if they decide to do so?

Essay mills are defined by the UK Quality Assurance Agency as organisations or individuals, usually with an online presence, that contract with students to complete assignments for a fee (QAA 2020 ). The original definition of contract cheating, put forward by Clarke and Lancaster ( 2006 ) refers to “the submission of work by students for academic credit which the students have paid contractors to write for them”. Despite the original paper describing contract cheating examples of varied assessment types, most notably computer programming, some subsequent researchers have equated the term solely with written assessments. Commentators, such as Bretag et al. ( 2018 ) have supported Clarke and Lancaster’s ( 2006 ) original discussion by suggesting that contract cheating needs to be considered as a nuanced problem that extends beyond essay mills.

One such nuance asks when contract cheating begins. If a student puts forward a request to outsource their assessments, is this cheating? If they commission and receive work but do not submit it, have they contract cheated? Other terms are sometimes used synonymously with contract cheating, including assignment outsourcing, commissioning, also essay mills and ghost-writing, all depending if the discussion relates to the student or the contract cheating provider. There are also wider concerns such as facilitation, where students act as agents for contract cheating providers, helping to funnel more business their way in exchange for a financial reward or a discount on future assignment orders.

Contract cheating is arguably more serious than other forms of academic misconduct because there is no honest engagement or endeavour on the part of students who engage in such activities. Students who plagiarise or collude with other students also preparing assignments need to know enough about the subject in question in order to plagiarise or compile relevant material. By contrast, all contract cheating students need to know is how to share their assignment briefs and arrange any payments. All agents and facilitators need to know is how to put people in contact with each other or to simply forward contact details (Draper et al. 2017 ).

Students can have original essays and assignments produced for them without payment, for instance by relying on friends or family. They can also make arrangements with individual writers. Underground networks of writers operate in many university courses where students can ask another classmate or recent graduate to write an extra version of an assignment for them (Lancaster et al. 2019 ). Students also directly approach individual writers operating online through their own websites, social media and third-party sites (Lancaster 2019a , 2019b ).

The focus of this paper is on services arranged through commercial providers which allow students to have assignments completed for them. The paper reviews how essay mills operate, discusses how students form contracts with essay mills, students’ legal rights to withdraw from contracts and how institutions should respond whilst still respecting their duty of care to students. Sharp practices operated by contract cheating providers are explained throughout. The intention of the paper is to not only provide examples to share with students, discouraging them from engaging with the contract cheating industry, but also to ensure that institutions update their academic regulations, policies and procedures to respond to the growing complexity of contract cheating and the possible responses of academic institutions if a student wishes to terminate an agreement with an essay mill.

The contract cheating industry

To understand the legal discussion presented in this paper, an understanding of how the contract cheating industry operates is important. Although research into the operation of the industry is still in its infancy, all indications are that this industry is massive, complex and deceptive (Crockett and Maxwell 2021 ; Rigby et al. 2015 ). This section discusses the operation of the essay mill industry, from the range of types of essay mills available, addressing how they recruit and develop new customers, through the production and submission of finished original essays.

This section provides only a high-level overview and the actual operation of essay mills can be much more complex. For example, a new contract cheating provider can buy off-the-shelf software to run their essay mill and, for a price, tap into existing networks of writers and quality assurance services without needing to set up this complex business operation for themselves.

Ultimately, it has to be remembered that the raison d’etre of essay mills is to make as much money as possible. It is not about the welfare of the customers, despite what the web sites and marketing materials may claim. This is an industry where providers will exploit any angle to persuade their customers to pay them more money. For example, essay mill employees may join a student suspected of academic misconduct at their University panel or write a letter of reply to an allegation of misconduct – for a substantial fee. All this often takes place beyond the reach of any national legislation.

The spectrum of contract cheating providers

At one end of the spectrum, contract cheating can involve well-established registered companies, some of which are operating as legitimate and very lucrative businesses. As discussed earlier, in very few administrations are these companies illegal. Such companies are responding to an acknowledged strong demand for a range of services and are able to make a lot of money.

At the other end of the spectrum are individuals, typically students, graduates, academics, and some falsely claiming to be qualified, who are directly or indirectly supplying work on demand for both students and academics. The recompense is normally financial, but there can be alternative rewards for small-time players, including sexual and other favours. In some cultures, pressures about loyalty to family or social contacts can place demands on individuals that compel them to become ghost-writers (Glendinning 2020 ).

In the middle of this continuum are ghost-writing individuals and fledgling essay mills, who may be going through agents to find work or bidding for work through auction sites. Most ghost-writers and the intermediaries justify their actions by saying this is their way of making a living or supplementing their other income, as discussed for example by Shahghasemi and Akhavan ( 2015 ).

How contract cheating providers develop custom

How contract cheating providers develop connections with potential customers is of interest. The methods used are varied and can appear innovative. Services optimise their sites to appeal to students based on academic discipline or location, often with the same essay mill operating with different front ends (Lancaster 2020 ). For example, a student who searches online for “nursing essay help” could be directed to an essay mill shop-front containing photos of smiling nurses, and a student searching for “law essay help” could be sent to an essay mill shop-front with photos of graduating lawyers, but behind the fronts these are operated by the same firms relying on the same groups of writers.

Social media is heavily used by contract cheating providers (Lancaster 2019b ) with students posting even the slightest frustration with their essays on Twitter being regularly approached by companies offering these writing services (Amigud 2020 ). Often a commission payment is available to anyone referring business to an essay mill and job advertisements are posted by established mills to recruit recent graduates to go back to their campuses, infiltrate key events such as student association meetings and social events and recruit both customers and new agents. This can result in students working as agents or social media influencers, fake essay mill review sites that operate by collecting commission payments for introducing new custom to essay mills and even essay mills setting up fake student profiles to present themselves as a supportive environment for dissatisfied students.

Once a student has contacted or been referred to an essay mill, many more marketing techniques are used to ensure that students buy from them. Essay mills try to collect student email addresses by offering discounts. They use online chat to engage with students. Ritter ( 2005 ) noted how essay mills use language preying on students being dissatisfied with their courses to sell their services to them. Essay mills often present what they are doing as (‘tutorial’) support. Hersey and Lancaster ( 2015 ) discussed how some students consider assignments simply as commodities available to be bought and sold, and essay mills also rely on such student viewpoints.

The operation of a typical essay mill

Behind the scenes, many essay mills operate using a complex, software-driven writing and quality assurance process. Essay mills recruit writers, often using similar techniques to the ones they use to recruit students. In general, writing work is poorly paid with only a small percentage of the fee paid by a student going to the end-writer (Lancaster 2019a ).

One example of an internal model used by essay mills has been described in the literature (Ellis et al. 2018 ). A variant is presented here. Received orders are first checked by an administrator to ensure they are legitimate and can be completed. Some orders are rejected, but those that pass scrutiny are made available to writers. This often uses a bidding process, where writers pitch against one another to write the essay, a process similar to that seen in the earliest contract cheating study (Clarke and Lancaster 2006 ). Once completed, further internal quality checks are made, which may include the use of automated tools to ensure plagiarism is avoided or disguised. Writers can be penalised if their work is of poor quality. Once internally approved, the work is made available to the student, who either accepts it, or returns it for revisions through a back-and-forth process. If a student remains dissatisfied, they may raise their concerns with higher levels of essay mill management through a dispute process.

Even if a student accepts work from an essay mill, the end result is not risk free. The essay mill has the student’s contact details and can continue to market to them. Students can be required to continue to buy or they risk being blackmailed, an area which most students appear unaware of (Yorke et al. 2020 ). Writers disgruntled with the essay mill they work for can often figure out student contact details and their institution and may try and extort money from them directly or inform the educational institution of their impropriety. Also, once a student submits commissioned work via text-matching software, they become potentially identifiable by the company they used, whatever the precautions they had taken up to that point.

The legal grounds for students changing their mind

• Contract formation

The first question to be addressed asks when a student commissions academic work, does a legally binding commitment or contract of purchase form? This is not a trivial question. An analysis of the behaviours and wider contractual relationships involved in contract cheating was undertaken by Draper et al. ( 2017 ).

Irrespective of jurisdiction, formation of a legally binding contract normally requires an offer to contract, an unqualified acceptance of that offer and its terms without variation, with the acceptance being communicated to the person making the offer with an intention to create or enter into a legal relationship with the parties to the contract having legal capacity, including by age and mental capacity.

In major European jurisdictions the existence of an agreement is usually demonstrated by the identification of at least an offer and acceptance (Jansen and Zimmermann 2011 : 636–637). This is also the case in Australia. Some jurisdictions, such as England and Wales, also require the movement of consideration or benefit between the parties for a legally enforceable contract to be created, the usual example being the payment of money in return for the service or goods supplied. In such circumstances the student receives the completed assignment and the essay mill receives money by way of consideration.

The precise terms of the contract will depend upon the terms and conditions specified by the supplier and any other terms implied to make the contract work. Some jurisdictions, particularly in the counties identified above, intervene in the freedom to contract through the imposition of implied or imposed contractual terms to protect individuals contracting in a personal capacity, typically known as a consumer, as opposed to contracting in a business capacity. However, while the transaction may be made from the student’s end in a country with consumer protection, due to the nature and operation of essay mill sites, these rights can be compromised when the transaction occurs across international borders (Durovic 2020 ).

Intervention is needed because contracts made by a business with an individual acting in a personal capacity, known as consumer contracts, usually have the following specific characteristics:

They are pre-drafted by one party as a standard form contract. Normally this means they are drafted by the essay mill rather than the student.

The express terms of the contract, usually referred to as the standard terms and conditions, are not usually subject to negotiation. This means that a consumer such as a student must usually accept the pre-drafted terms and conditions as they are if they want to obtain the desired service such as the supply of the essay.

They are entered into in circumstances in which neither party is known to the other with unequal bargaining power and commercial sophistication. A student is at a significant disadvantage in understanding the terms of the contract compared with the essay mill that drafted them, and is bound by the terms of the contract of supply, even if they have not read or understood them, provided there is reasonable notice of and a reasonable opportunity to read the terms and conditions before the contract is made.

When a student is given reasonable notice of and a reasonable opportunity to read the terms and conditions of the proposed contract before clicking ‘ I agree to the terms and conditions’ or ‘ I accept the terms and conditions’ a binding and enforceable contract will be made on those terms at some point in the ordering process when there is a clear offer and acceptance of the terms of the contract.

Further, when a contract is made with a consumer, further additional implied or imposed contractual terms and protections for the benefit of the consumer may apply. These depend on the country or the legal jurisdiction in which the contract is made or the law which applies to the contract usually by an express term known as a governing law clause.

Durovic ( 2020 , 5) notes that “consumer law and policy is faced with two major challenges, which need to be addressed adequately on the global scale. The first one is an increasing number of cross-border transactions, whereas the second one is the rise of Internet as the leading global marketplace and the entire technological developments which have disrupted the traditional consumer law”.

As essay mills tend to operate across national boundaries it is crucial that an essay mill states, in an express term of the contract, the law and jurisdiction which is to apply to the contract having regard to its legal interpretation and enforcement, in terms of governing law and/or jurisdiction clause. However, many essay mills do not provide this.

The lack of express terms may not, in itself, prevent a national court from asserting jurisdiction if their consumer(s) are at risk. As Durovic ( 2020 ) notes, there are international conventions dealing with governing law, and consumer rights and permissible use of personal information gathered in online environments.

Express terms which are relevant to this paper are those requiring the payment of a deposit on order, the cancellation of a contract and those allowing for personal information to be taken and used in addition to a name and contact details. For example, the student may be required to provide the name of the institution at which they are studying, student number and photographic identification, none of which immediately appear relevant to the subject matter of the contract.

Contractual tricks

Many of the tactics used by essay mills could be considered unfair. They know that consumers, including students, do not usually read the terms and conditions of the contract before clicking and will not therefore know in any detail what they have agreed or indeed what their rights or obligations maybe under the terms of the contract beyond a superficial understanding that payment at some point will be required for the work (Rogerson 2017 ). For example, Berreby ( 2020 ) reported in The Guardian newspaper that hundreds of College students joining a new social network did not notice a clause where they promised to give away their first-born children.

The collection and use of other types of personal information and data beyond name and Institution etc. as a result of online contracts are a current concern. For example, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ( 2019 ) observed a range of practices used by platforms that did not conform with existing consumer laws, but nevertheless may not be effective at deterring conduct that is detrimental to consumers. Given the increasing value of data, some businesses engage in conduct designed to elicit data or information the collection of which may be considered unfair to consumers.

These design patterns have become known as ‘dark patterns’ because they prompt, mislead or sometimes force consumers to provide their personal data or cause them to sign up to services, often without the consumer realising (Bignull 2010 ). Dark patterns take advantage of skim reading of text and other unconscious habits through familiarity with user interfaces to procure either money or data from consumers, often without their fully informed consent (ibid). At their most benign dark patterns nudge the behaviour of consumers to a desired outcome in which the consumer unconsciously provides personal data or agree to its use by the business. These patterns can have significant impact on unsophisticated students as the next section discusses.

When does contract acceptance take place?

After placing an order for work a student may change their mind and seek to cancel the order. As a matter of general contract law, a student may withdraw their offer without liability at any time before the contract is formed by acceptance of the order by the essay mill. Depending on the terms and conditions, the offer made by the student may be accepted so that an enforceable contract arises as soon as the order is processed, or when the payment or deposit is taken, or upon dispatch of the essay to the student. However as noted above while a legal contract may exist it does not necessarily follow that it will be enforceable across international borders and this point should be borne in mind when considering the analysis that follows – particularly when there are unscrupulous operators in this area.

A legal analysis of the typical order process discussed in the background section would conclude that acceptance likely occurs when the order status is made available to writers within an essay mill or upon the status of the order being made available to the student for review. The precise moment of the creation of an enforceable contract will depend in the main upon the terms and conditions of supply. Options to revise or embark on dispute resolution are likely to be interpreted as express contractual rights which operate after the formation of the contract.

Thus, a student would be legally entitled to withdraw their offer to purchase work and without liability, because there is no contract, before the change in status of the order. After change in status of the order it is possible that the contract contains an express term allowing for cancellation subject usually to loss of any deposit or some other sum which genuinely represents the loss suffered by the essay mill, for example payments made to a writer. In such circumstances it is important that a student follow the terms of cancellation precisely in order to legally terminate the contract and limit the loss under the contract.

Without an express term allowing for termination of the contract, for example after a change in the status of the order to ‘available’, any attempt by one party to cancel a contract before performance of that contract will usually amount to a repudiatory breach of contract entitling the innocent party to damages in respect of any loss suffered if and when that breach is accepted. From the point of view of an essay mill that will usually be payments contracted to be made to a writer for their work and other administration costs.

Consumer contracts will usually have implied rights of cancellation attached to them by legislation and/or regulations. In England and Wales this will mean the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 .

Information about the rights of a consumer to cancel a contract should be detailed by the supplier and made available to the consumer before the contract is made. Failure to provide the information to a consumer as required by the regulations will allow a consumer to claim that a breach of contract has occurred and to seek an appropriate remedy. However as noted above these rights and protections may not be available or enforceable in a cross-border context.

Consumer protection and rights of cancellation

In England and Wales as the contract between the essay mill and student will normally be concluded remotely, namely online, a student’s rights to cancel the contract are to be found in the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. These are more generous than if the contract had been concluded face-to face. These regulations also apply to all auctions including online auctions. Online auctions result in contracts created at a distance rather than face to face.

As considered earlier the formation of a contract requires an offer and acceptance of that offer. It is likely that the website of an essay mill is treated in the same way as a shop window. The website is not an offer of a service or goods, but an invitation to treat, or in other words an invitation to another to make an offer to buy or order on stated terms and conditions. A student placing an order online is making an offer to buy an essay and not to accept the offer of the essay mill to supply an essay.

Depending on the terms and conditions the offer made by the student may be accepted so that an enforceable contract arises as soon as the order is processed or made ‘available’ or the deposit is taken or upon dispatch of the essay to the student as discussed above. As a matter of general contract law, a student may withdraw their offer without liability at any time before the contract is formed by acceptance. Once the contract is formed then a student will have statutory rights of cancellation without giving any reason for cancellation within a specified time. These rights can only be excluded in very limited circumstances which require the express and fully informed consent of the consumer. This means that they cannot be excluded by standard terms and conditions.

Rights of cancellation differ if the contract relates to goods or digital content or services. Both allow for cancellation within a 14-day period but the calculation of that period will be different if the contract relates to goods or digital content or services. If the supply of an essay is treated as the supply of goods then under the regulations a student has a right to cancel an order for an essay as soon as the order is placed up until 14 days from the day after the student receives the essay with a right to a refund within 14 days of either the supplier getting the goods back or the consumer providing evidence of having returned the goods. If the supply of an essay is treated as the supply of digital content, not supplied on a tangible medium or a service, then a student has 14 days starting from the day after the contract was made in which to cancel that contract with a right to a refund of money paid.

The regulations do allow for service to be started within the cancellation period and for a charge to be made providing that the consumer has expressly requested this. A consumer loses their right to cancel a service contract that has been performed fully within the cancellation period, providing they requested this and acknowledged that they would lose their right to cancel once the contract had been performed fully. It is likely that a contract for the supply of an essay will be treated as a contract for the supply of goods.

Additional rights are available under the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015 to reject a product if not of satisfactory quality or fit for purpose. In the context of a paid for assignment this will be difficult to establish against assignment briefs as marking has a degree of subjectivity. Essay mills seek to mitigate such problems through terms and conditions allowing for rewriting or some other form of offer or compensation. Similar consumer rights apply across Europe as the Act and Regulations are based on European Directives.

As Sutherland-Smith and Dullaghan have observed ( 2019 ), purchasers of contract cheating don’t always get what they pay for. Therefore, cancelation rights are a particularly useful addition to any express dispute resolution provided by the terms and conditions of the essay mill. Furthermore, a student may simply change their mind and cancel the order because of the risks attached to submission or their conscience gets the better of them or because of an institutional campaign or peer pressure or support.

The danger for a student is that they may forget, or may not feel they have been told at the outset when the contract is formed, that strict time limits normally apply to the use of statutory cancellation rights. This can limit their ability to raise a dispute with the essay mill.

In summary therefore, and subject to the point that rights and protections may not be available or enforceable in a cross-border context, a student has a right:

To cancel the order at any time before it is accepted and a contract formed

To cancel the contract under express cancellation rights but normally at a financial cost through loss of deposit or other recoverable loss

To cancel the contract under jurisdictional cancellation rights without financial cost unless expressly excluded in the circumstances described above

Institutional responses to the student right to withdraw

Although the paper has established that students have the legal rights of cancellation, it cannot be assumed that the essay mill will simply demur to the exercise of those rights. Therefore, it is recommended that institutions have their own responses prepared ready for when students wish to withdraw from contracts with essay mills.

Students do run the risk of blackmail and extortion if they proceed with a contract. They may discover the risk, ask to withdraw from their contract, but have such a request declined or ignored. They may also have used a contract cheating provider previously, not realising they would be expected to continue to purchase future pieces of work from them.

Universities should provide a mechanism for students to confess and to seek support. Students should be encouraged to use this. Such a mechanism would also be a welcome development for universities. Not only would it save considerable time and resources in investigations and hearings, but there is potential for accessing new intelligence about essay mills that would not otherwise have been found.

Sanctions to negate an unfair advantage are often unavoidable in such a situation. Students cannot be seen to be rewarded for assessments they did not complete themselves. However, in return for their cooperation, students could perhaps be taken through a less formal process, combined with a programme of support, guidance and monitoring, to ensure they are not tempted to do this again (QAA 2020 : 12–17). This might include, for example, a situation in which a student who confesses shortly after submitting a single commissioned assignment could be provided with the opportunity to redeem themselves, for instance by repeating the work, subject to measures such as grade caps designed to neutralise the potential for an unfair advantage.

In some cases, a light touch approach may not be possible. Consider, for example, a situation involving a final-year degree student confessing to having routinely commissioned over three or four (or more) years of study, with a progression dependent on pre-requisites from one year to the next. In addition, there might be course-specific regulations arising from professional institutional accreditation that over-ride more general regulations.

If a student does not confess, then they face serious and complicated risks. Put simply, once a student communicates with an essay mill, even if only making an enquiry, then that essay mill has some version of their identity and contact details on a database (possibly overseas) which is potentially available to other parties. Any commissioning and payment would provide additional details, irrespective of any subsequent change of mind. Even if a student manages to conceal their identity and their institution when commissioning an assignment, once that assignment is submitted through similarity checking software, then the student is potentially traceable. All a blackmailer needs to do is submit the assignment to the same similarity checking software themselves, possibly via a facilitator’s account or an account that’s been compromised, see which institution is identified as the main result, and then go ‘phishing’ at that institution, possibly with the assistance of a staff or student facilitator at that institution, Of course, if they’ve already unsuccessfully tried to blackmail the student, they might simply ‘whistle-blow’ to that institution with sufficient evidence to support the allegation. Essay mills are not famous for their ethical principles: they are interested in making money. A database of student details is a marketable commodity that could be traded to unscrupulous third parties, who themselves can engage in extortion.

Raising students’ awareness about these in-built dangers of engaging in contract cheating is not just part of the deterrence measures for educational providers, it is also part of their duty of care.

This paper serves to emphasise that a decision by a student to resort to contract cheating can be changed. That change of mind or heart is supported by the law and should be reflected in institutional regulations and policies. The right of students to change their mind is not a message that has been addressed in the literature or heard often in conferences or within institutions; but, nevertheless, it is important and needs to be discussed with students.

It should be possible for a student to change their mind and do so in way that offers them a degree of protection from the sharp and unscrupulous practices of essay mills, as identified in this paper. To benefit from that protection the student must disclose to the institution the arrangements they made with the essay mill. To do this will take a significant amount of courage on the part of a student. It is therefore critical that institutional regulations and policies provide a framework to enable and support such a decision, ideally with support from student organisations. In so doing, institutions need to uphold the fundamental aim of fostering academic integrity as a core value for all.

Availability of data and materials

No data was used in the writing of this article.

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Draper, M., Lancaster, T., Dann, S. et al. Essay mills and other contract cheating services: to buy or not to buy and the consequences of students changing their minds. Int J Educ Integr 17 , 13 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-021-00081-x

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Received : 25 January 2021

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Published : 29 June 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-021-00081-x

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International Journal for Educational Integrity

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Prevent plagiarism, run a free plagiarism check.

• Knowledge Base

What Is Plagiarism? | Definition & Examples

Plagiarism means using someone else’s work without giving them proper credit. In academic writing, plagiarizing involves using words, ideas, or information from a source without citing it correctly. In practice, this can mean a few different things.

Table of contents

Common questions about plagiarism, more tools and resources for avoiding plagiarism, frequently asked questions about plagiarism.

It’s easy to understand why you shouldn’t buy essays, but students often struggle with the details of quoting , paraphrasing , and citing sources . Below, we address some questions and misconceptions students often have about plagiarism.

I need to quote and paraphrase a lot. Won’t my paper be full of distracting citations?

It’s true that some papers do feature a lot of citations. There are ways to reduce clutter by citing more efficiently, such as:

• Combining multiple citations into one set of parentheses (usually separated by semicolons )
• Not repeating the full citation when you cite the same source multiple times in a row
• Using “ ibid. ” to indicate a repeated citation (in certain styles)
• Omitting citations for information that is common knowledge

Do I need to cite a certain number of sources? Can citing too much be a bad thing?

There’s no fixed number of sources you should cite. Your use of sources should be based on strengthening your argument, not meeting a quota. A high number of citations isn’t inherently a good or bad thing. Some types of academic text (e.g., a literature review ) are more likely to cite a lot of sources than others.

When you do think you’ve cited too much, it’s worth considering whether you need all the information you’ve included. All information should directly contribute to your argument, not just be tangentially related.

One thing you should avoid is quoting too much. If large portions of your text consist of someone else’s words, it distracts from your own arguments. It’s usually better to paraphrase unless you’re specifically analyzing the language of the source (e.g., in literary analysis ).

Is it better to just avoid using sources so I don’t risk accidental plagiarism?

No, using sources is an essential part of academic writing . Academic research is an ongoing conversation between researchers. Drawing on other sources, and positioning your own ideas in relation to them, is not optional.

But it’s understandable to be concerned about plagiarism. If you’re worried about the possibility of accidental plagiarism, make sure to:

• Quote and paraphrase sources correctly
• Manage and cite your sources using a citation generator
• Use a plagiarism checker before submitting your work to detect any problems
• Use generative AI tools responsibly (outputs may be detected by an AI detector )

Is paraphrasing a kind of plagiarism?

No, paraphrasing is just a way of incorporating information from a source into your text by putting it into your own words. As long as you cite the source correctly, paraphrasing is the best way to incorporate information in most cases.

However, paraphrasing can be considered plagiarism if you:

• Don’t cite the source of the information, or cite it incorrectly
• Phrase the information in a way that’s too close to the original (e.g., just swapping out a couple of words instead of reformulating the sentence)

Scribbr offers a variety of tools and services designed to help you with citations and plagiarism checking, including the best plagiarism checker available.

Plagiarism Checker

Citation Generator Citation Checker Citation Editing

And you can check out the in-depth articles below to learn more about the different kinds of plagiarism, its consequences, and how to avoid it:

• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• How to avoid plagiarism
• Consequences of plagiarism
• Academic integrity vs. academic dishonesty
• Common knowledge
• How plagiarism checkers work
• Examples of plagiarism
• Plagiarism resources for educators

The consequences of plagiarism vary depending on the type of plagiarism and the context in which it occurs. For example, submitting a whole paper by someone else will have the most severe consequences, while accidental citation errors are considered less serious.

If you’re a student, then you might fail the course, be suspended or expelled, or be obligated to attend a workshop on plagiarism. It depends on whether it’s your first offense or you’ve done it before.

As an academic or professional, plagiarizing seriously damages your reputation. You might also lose your research funding or your job, and you could even face legal consequences for copyright infringement.

Paraphrasing without crediting the original author is a form of plagiarism , because you’re presenting someone else’s ideas as if they were your own.

However, paraphrasing is not plagiarism if you correctly cite the source . This means including an in-text citation and a full reference, formatted according to your required citation style .

As well as citing, make sure that any paraphrased text is completely rewritten in your own words.

Accidental plagiarism is one of the most common examples of plagiarism . Perhaps you forgot to cite a source, or paraphrased something a bit too closely. Maybe you can’t remember where you got an idea from, and aren’t totally sure if it’s original or not.

These all count as plagiarism, even though you didn’t do it on purpose. When in doubt, make sure you’re citing your sources . Also consider running your work through a plagiarism checker tool prior to submission, which work by using advanced database software to scan for matches between your text and existing texts.

Scribbr’s Plagiarism Checker takes less than 10 minutes and can help you turn in your paper with confidence.

Plagiarism can be detected by your professor or readers if the tone, formatting, or style of your text is different in different parts of your paper, or if they’re familiar with the plagiarized source.

Many universities also use plagiarism detection software like Turnitin’s, which compares your text to a large database of other sources, flagging any similarities that come up.

It can be easier than you think to commit plagiarism by accident. Consider using a plagiarism checker prior to submitting your paper to ensure you haven’t missed any citations.

The accuracy depends on the plagiarism checker you use. Per our in-depth research , Scribbr is the most accurate plagiarism checker. Many free plagiarism checkers fail to detect all plagiarism or falsely flag text as plagiarism.

Plagiarism checkers work by using advanced database software to scan for matches between your text and existing texts. Their accuracy is determined by two factors: the algorithm (which recognizes the plagiarism) and the size of the database (with which your document is compared).

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What is your plagiarism score?

Experts say 'predatory' essay writing firms are thriving, and there's no law to stop them

Nursing professors say a term paper purchased by cbc did not raise red flags.

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A CBC News investigation has revealed how fast and convenient it is to purchase a custom academic essay that can go undetected by university professors and plagiarism software.

The term paper was purchased through a self-described custom essay writing service that is based in Toronto but serves post-secondary students across Canada.

The real-life assignment was provided by the Ryerson University school of nursing, which agreed to analyze the purchased essay.

"It was very disturbing to me, because I would expect to see this paper," said Corinne Hart, an associate professor of nursing at Ryerson, who assigns the essay in a third year course. "Now I feel really suspicious about other papers."

Academic integrity experts say businesses that sell custom-written papers are proliferating across the country. There are also concerns that the companies are becoming bolder and more sophisticated as they grow.

"I see these as predatory companies," said John Paul Foxe, director of Ryerson University's academic integrity office.

"They will go so far as to say, 'If you engage with us, you're not cheating, you're not doing anything wrong, you won't get caught.'"

That practice has been dubbed "contract cheating" in the academic integrity field.

While universities and colleges do not allow students to submit work that isn't their own, companies that sell custom essays are fully legal in Canada.

Essay company explains how to hand it in

During a hidden camera interview at an essay writing store in Toronto, a representative said the company would not sell a paper to a student who intended to submit the paper as their own work.

The company, which is one of several in Toronto alone, insists that it provides work for "research purposes" and buyers must sign a contract agreeing not to submit the work as their own.

However, the staff member also explained how some minor alterations to the purchased essay would make it fit for submission.

"You just take it and paraphrase it into your own words, that eliminates any issue with plagiarism," said the staff member. "Then you can't say you used someone else's work as your own."

The company guarantees that its papers are produced by native English speakers who have masters or doctorate-level degrees in relevant disciplines, and that each paper is a new and original piece of work tailored to the specific assignment.

The company said many of its customers use the purchased essays as a guide to help them produce their own work.

"A lot of people don't know how to write papers, they don't know APA format, and they don't know how to cite things," said the staff member.

According to the company's website, it has produced more than 100,000 custom essays over the past 18 years.

"I've seen it around, I know people who use it," said University of Toronto student Fatima Zafar, standing near a light standard covered in an essay company's flyers.

"Sometimes friends joke about it, but I don't know if they're for real or not," said York University student Pedro Charneca.

$226 for a B-range paper

The paper obtained by CBC News was written on the topic of gun violence in Toronto. It did not raise any red flags in a brief analysis by nursing professors.

The essay was eight pages long, took seven days to write and cost $226 before taxes.

Hart said she likely would give it a B or B-, while nursing program director Nancy Walton said it looked to her like a B+ paper.

"If I had read this without knowing that it was even suspicious of being a contract cheating paper, it would not have occurred to me," Walton said.

"We would never want to think that a nursing student is engaging in contract cheating, but I guess ... I really might not know."

Academic integrity experts say a lack of research and awareness also has made it difficult to combat contract cheating.

While essay writing companies plaster university and college campuses with flyers every semester, the actual number of students buying papers is practically impossible to determine.

A 2018 study by Swansea University in Wales found that contract cheating has been self-reported historically by 3.5 per cent of students. Foxe said he believes the problem likely is more widespread.

"I would expect it to be somewhat higher than that," he said of the self-reported figures. "By virtue of the fact that these companies are expanding at the rate they're expanding, that tells us that these businesses have customers."

Foxe said he regularly deals with contract cheating issues. In some recent cases, he said, the essay writing companies have even tried to blackmail students by threatening to report them unless they pay additional fees.

Canadian laws 'a bit behind the times'

While experts acknowledge that online access to these services is widespread, they say that cracking down on the businesses operating within Canada's borders could be effective.

The Academic Integrity Council of Ontario (AICO), an organization that represents 30 universities and colleges, is calling on the provincial government to make essay writing services illegal.

"We're a bit behind the times here in Canada," said Amanda McKenzie, AICO's former chair, who also works at the University of Waterloo.

McKenzie said laws targeting essay writing companies have been successfully introduced in New Zealand and Australia, where more than 70 post-secondary students were expelled in a contract cheating scandal in 2015.

She said companies in Canada should no longer be allowed to operate under the guise of providing "research" assistance.

"They know that students are going to take that material and probably turn it around and submit it," McKenzie said. "It's why the student came to them in the first place."

Hart agreed, and said any measures to cut down on cheating and dishonesty should be pursued, especially in a field where graduates have significant responsibilities for health and public safety.

"As nursing students they're looking after people, and there's an expectation of ethics and of truth telling and all of those things that buying a paper basically negates."

In a statement to CBC Toronto, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities said officials are aware of the issue, but that it should be addressed by institutions and individual students. There are no plans to introduce legislation targeting the companies, the spokesperson said. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Boisvert is a multimedia journalist at the CBC's Parliamentary Bureau in Ottawa. He previously covered municipal politics for CBC News in Toronto. You can reach him at [email protected].

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8 Best Urgent Essay Writing Services You Can Safely Order

It is critical to choose a reliable essay writing service for your assignments. If you pick the wrong business, you may find yourself putting everything on the line. This is especially true in situations where deadlines are running out.

Depending on your school level, instructor grading policy, and country of residency, one service may be preferable to another. We selected the best urgent essay writing services based on various criteria, including quality, speed, and customer support.

However, we know that this kind of service doesn’t “ one size fits all” for your needs. That’s why we have made a list of recommended quality essay writing services you can safely work with. 

The list of the best companies includes:

• WriteMyEssays
• EvolutionWriters
• ExpertWriting
• SpeedyPaper

Let’s take a closer look at why these services were named the best. 

#1 PaperHelp

It is the best last-minute essay writing service. PaperHelp has been operating for over a decade and is one of the most well-known and reputable paper writing services accessible today. The majority of clients say this service delivers high-quality papers on schedule. It also comes at a reasonable price.

Customers have left a lot of good comments on PaperHelp’s website. Although some customers are dissatisfied, the customer service responds to each of them and makes every effort to address any problems.

The website provides a money-back guarantee as well as free revisions. If PaperHelp cannot locate an author for your project, if your paper is delivered late, or if it is discovered to be plagiarized, you may be eligible for a refund. The order procedure is easy: fill out an online form with the kind of paper, its formatting, timeframe, and other pertinent information. 

After that, you may assess your expenditures using a pricing calculator. On the main page, there is also a pricing calculator. A high school research article with a two-week timeframe will cost you $12 per page. With the same deadline, a page of a Ph.D. dissertation would set you back $24.

Customers note:

• on-time delivery and rush orders;
• papers of good quality and uniqueness;
• writers who excel in research papers;
• excellent customer service;
• support staff evaluates all client feedback.

You may not like:

• you cannot always find the writer that fits your project.

#2 WriteMyEssays 

WriteMyEssays is another perfect place to write your urgent essay. This website offers a diverse variety of academic writing, proofreading, and editing services. As a result, we believe WME is the most acceptable option for producing an essay.

The cost starts at $9, which is a very reasonable price. This is true at first but keep in mind that when deadlines are included.

It may become very costly. They do provide an infinite number of revisions, so you can make as many changes as you want till you’re happy.

You will undoubtedly discover a writer who meets your requirements on the site since it offers specialists in every area of study. This business employs over 1000 writers and has a 4.5/5 rating, indicating that most of its clients are pleased.

Customers note: 

• a competent writing staff for your project; 
• students get 100% unique articles; 
• simple price calculator on the site; 
• good reviews; 
• reasonable pricing;

You may not like: 

• you won’t be able to communicate with your writer.

#3 EvolutionWriters

Customers at Evolutionwriters have the option of selecting the degree of quality they want. If you choose the basic package, regular writers will handle your orders. 

If you need high-quality and urgent paper, however, you should select the premium VIP bundle. Specialized writers handle the premium VIP order. These writers are typically more seasoned and more expensive than the others.

Potential customers should examine some samples of Evolutionarywriters’ products on their website to determine the degree of quality. They’re all arranged by content area. 

You would get an insight into what you can anticipate from the authors in terms of quality in the subject you are searching for if you read them. The paper’s quality varies significantly, which is related to the person assigned to write it. 

The variation in paper quality between the basic and premium packages also affects the quality of the paper. However, prices are competitive, starting at $9.97 a page for a college essay with a 14-day deadline. 

As with other professional essay writing websites, the more complex your job is, the better the author’s professionalism, and the closer the deadline, the higher the price. Furthermore, the papers required for admission and scholarship are very costly.

• a lot of selection of writers;
• the starting price is so affordable;
• specialized ghostwriter and author.
• it can be costly depending on your deadline and writing purpose.

#4 ExpertWriting

ExpertWriting is a top-rated writing service with a variety of unique features. It does not, for example, have its own writing staff. Instead, this business works with freelancers. 

As a consequence, It can provide very cheap rates. You may specify an ENL writer when placing an order, even though not all of our authors are native English speakers. The writing is of reasonable quality, and the business also has a competent customer service staff. 

Although the money-back policy is a little hazy, several clients claim to have received a full refund when dissatisfied with their papers. There are three stages to the ordering procedure. 

To complete your purchase, you must first give the required information regarding your assignment, choose extra services, and then pay for it.

A high-school research paper with only a two-week deadline costs $7.50 a page, while a doctoral dissertation with about the same deadline costs $35 per page.

• low-cost options;
• high-quality work;
• responsive customer service.
• the money-back guarantee is unreliable.

#5 SpeedyPaper

This reputable paper writing service provides academic assistance with writing, editing, and problem-solving assignments. This business employs many experienced writers, and you may assess their writing abilities by reading sample papers on the website.

For individuals who have never utilized research paper services before, the website offers a wealth of information. The greatest part about SpeedyPaper is its customer service. As the company’s name implies, support professionals respond promptly and are always willing to assist you with any problems.

Unlike other writing services, SpeedyPaper consistently produces high-quality papers despite tight deadlines. SpeedyPaper is a fantastic option if you need your paper written fast. 

You have the option of hiring ordinary or PRO/TOP authors, but the quality will be excellent in any case. The business also provides three free revisions, although some clients claim to have received extra revisions for free.

The cost of a high school essay with a 20-day deadline is just $9 a page. You can get it for $11 a page if you need it in two weeks, and a Ph.D. dissertation with the same deadline would set you back $23 per page.

• excellent client service;
• reasonable prices;
• 3x Free revision included;
• there is a referral scheme available.
• there are not many PRO/TOP authors available.

#6 EssayPro

EssayPro is unique among writing services in that it allows clients to choose the authors who will work on their assignments. Many expert writers provide well-written papers on a variety of subjects. 

Many clients say this service is excellent for challenging projects, so it might be a wise choice if you need a term paper or dissertation. It also comes at a reasonable price.

One of the best aspects of this service is paying for your purchase once you get it. However, before placing an order, make sure you have sufficient funds in your account. 

To purchase a paper, you must first register and fill out an online form with the specifics of your project. After that, you’ll start getting applications from authors, and you’ll be able to speak with them and choose the one who best fits your needs.

The prices are reasonable. A high school essay or research paper writing made in two weeks will cost $10.80 a page, while a Ph.D. dissertation would set you back $15.60 per page.

• this service accepts orders with tight deadlines;
• possibility to choose a writer yourself;
• direct contact with authors.
• the available authors may not reply right away.

#7 99Papers

With writing rates as low as $8.94, this business is undoubtedly one of the most affordable essay writer services in the United States. They provide a 5% discount on your first purchase and will assist you with anything from SWOT analysis reports to research paper essays.

Furthermore, 99 Papers is a personalized writing service that enables you to communicate directly with your writer. This is a fantastic feature since it allows you to be precise about what you want and provide comprehensive instructions.

Nonetheless, this business promises to produce 100% of papers on time, which seems too good to be true. They also offer ESL and quality ENL writers so that you may hire one or the other depending on your budget.

• low prices as low as $8.97;
• customer service available 24 hours a day, seven days a week;
• get a 5% discount on your first purchase;
• directly message your writer;
• quick turnaround, start from 3-hour deadline;
• member discounts.
• writers who are native English speakers are more expensive;
• suspicious statistics.

#8 EssayBox

The service is well-known for producing high-quality essays, admissions papers, dissertations, marketing strategies, and more. If you want, they can proofread, modify, and edit your article, just like any other good writing company.

They are also reasonably priced, with plans beginning at $11.40. You can also get a 5% discount on your first purchase, and if you buy a lot of pages, you can get lifelong savings on your upcoming work.

Their service pricing starts at only $11.40 and provides a 5% discount on your first purchase. If you purchase a large number of pages through them, you may get lifetime savings on subsequent jobs. More than 15 pages will save you 4%, more than 50 pages will save you 8%, and more than 100 pages will save you 15%!

Essay Box has ESL and ENL authors vying for jobs. However, there’s no assurance that a native English speaker will choose your project. They do, however, offer a 3-hour initial turnaround time and a reputation for delivering high-quality work.

• get 5% off your first purchase;
• get up to 15% off for long-term members;
• the pricing starts from $11.40;
• 24/7 customer service.
• you can’t choose whether ESL or ENL writer does the job.

Is buying essays online safe?

If the essays are created from scratch by experienced writers, it is safe to purchase them online. The level of security varies depending on where you purchased the essay and how you plan to utilize it.

Can Turnitin detect essays bought online?

Turnitin can’t tell whether an essay was produced from scratch or if it was purchased online. It’s excellent at detecting plagiarized articles and papers obtained from public databases that their system has previously cached.

Is paying someone to write an essay illegal?

Paying someone else to create your essay is unethical. It is strictly prohibited at colleges and institutions. However, it is not unlawful to pay someone to write an essay for you over the internet.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a student who is stressed out by your hectic schedules and other responsibilities that you can’t seem to keep up with, urgent essay writing services may help you get through it.

You may have part-time work to help pay for school, but you’re also expected to complete examinations, tests, and, of course, essays.

Affordable essay writing service may assist you in producing high-quality, dependable, and cheap articles that will amaze your professor. All you have to do now is pick a trustworthy essay writing service, and you’re ready to go!

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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT: These DC-area athletes are bringing back some metal from the Paris Olympics

‘It’s that easy’: Homeland Security official warns that some teens are illegally buying prescription drugs online

Gigi Barnett | [email protected]

August 11, 2024, 6:44 AM

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From vaping, the cost of school supplies to cellphone policies, the WTOP team is studying up on hot-button topics in education across the D.C. region. Follow on air and online in our series  “WTOP Goes Back to School”  this August and September.

As school gets back in session for many D.C.-area students this month, authorities have a warning for parents: The new school year often brings a spike in dangerous illegal online drug sales.

“Parents are unaware,” said Mike Prado, deputy assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations and head of the agency’s Cyber Crimes Center. “They still think that if their child is going to be involved in drugs, they’re getting it from a friend or on a street corner somewhere.”

A growing number of teens are turning to social media sites, like Snapchat and TikTok, to buy illegally obtained prescription painkillers, including OxyContin, Percocet, Xanax and Adderall, according to Prado.

Buyers and dealers can cover their tracks on social media sites by using emoji and direct messaging features to coordinate transactions.

“Increasingly, we see children and teens being able to go online and access this just like any regular online marketplace,” Prado said. “It’s that easy, unfortunately.”

What’s more: Drug cartels secretly lace many of the counterfeit pills with deadly doses of fentanyl, a potentially lethal synthetic opioid, Prado said. Those are called “fentapills.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tracked a steady surge of overdose deaths since 2020. Most of the deaths have been caused by fentanyl mixed with other drugs like methamphetamines, which is an artificial stimulant.

“It’s one of those things where you don’t know what you’re taking and you’re really taking your life in your hands,” Prado said. “Even though it’s illegal, it shouldn’t be a death sentence for someone to acquire a narcotic.”

Prado said his agency sees a boost in these illegal sales when teens are headed back to school.

“Whether it’s high school or college, kids are back together socially,” he said. “And sometimes we see an uptick in recreational drug use. It’s important for parents to be aware.”

Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here .

© 2024 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

Gigi Barnett is an anchor at WTOP. She has worked in the media for more than 20 years. Before joining WTOP, she was an anchor at WJZ-TV in Baltimore, KXAN-TV in Austin, Texas, and a staff reporter at The Miami Herald. She’s a Navy wife and mom of three.

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Elon vs. advertisers —

Elon musk declares “it is war” on ad industry as x sues over “illegal boycott”, "we tried peace for 2 years, now it is war," musk writes..

Jon Brodkin - Aug 6, 2024 7:13 pm UTC

Elon Musk's X Corp. today sued the World Federation of Advertisers and several large corporations, claiming they "conspired, along with dozens of non-defendant co-conspirators, to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from the social network formerly known as Twitter.

"We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war," Musk wrote today, a little over eight months after telling boycotting advertisers to "go fuck yourself."

X's lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas targets a World Federation of Advertisers initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). The other defendants are Unilever PLC; Unilever United States; Mars, Incorporated; CVS Health Corporation; and Ørsted A/S. Those companies are all members of GARM. X itself is still listed as one of the group's members.

"This is an antitrust action relating to a group boycott by competing advertisers of one of the most popular social media platforms in the United States... Concerned that Twitter might deviate from certain brand safety standards for advertising on social media platforms set through GARM, the conspirators collectively acted to enforce Twitter's adherence to those standards through the boycott," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit seeks treble damages to be calculated based on the "actual damages in an amount to be determined at trial." X also wants "a permanent injunction under Section 16 of the Clayton Act, enjoining Defendants from continuing to conspire with respect to the purchase of advertising from Plaintiff."

The lawsuit came several weeks after Musk wrote that X "has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket," and called for "criminal prosecution." Musk's complaints were buoyed by a House Judiciary Committee report claiming that "the extent to which GARM has organized its trade association and coordinates actions that rob consumers of choices is likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms."

Yaccarino claims “illegal boycott” is stain on industry

We contacted all of the organizations named as defendants in the lawsuit and will update this article if any provide a response.

An advertising industry watchdog group called the Check My Ads Institute , which is not involved in the lawsuit, said that Musk's claims should fail under the First Amendment. "Advertisers have a First Amendment right to choose who and what they want to be associated with... Elon Musk and X executives have the right, protected by the First Amendment, to say what they want online, even when it's inaccurate, and advertisers have the right to keep their ads away from it," the group said.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted an open letter to advertisers claiming that the alleged "illegal boycott" is "a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue."

"The illegal behavior of these organizations and their executives cost X billions of dollars... To those who broke the law, we say enough is enough. We are compelled to seek justice for the harm that has been done by these and potentially additional defendants, depending what the legal process reveals," Yaccarino wrote.

Yaccarino also sought to gain support from X users in a video message . "These organizations targeted our company and you, our users," she said.

Musk followed up with a post encouraging other companies to sue advertisers and claimed that advertisers could face "criminal liability via the RICO Act." X previously filed lawsuits against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Media Matters for America , blaming both for advertising losses.

X doesn't provide public earnings reports because Musk took the company private after buying Twitter. A recent New York Times article said that "in the second quarter of this year, X earned $114 million in revenue in the United States, a 25 percent decline from the first quarter and a 53 percent decline from the previous year."

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Nearly half of online pharmacies selling weight loss drugs are operating illegally, study finds

Consumers who try to buy popular weight loss drugs online without a prescription risk being scammed or receiving unsafe products , a new study shows.

About 42% of online pharmacies that sell semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s anti-obesity drug Wegovy, are illegal, operating without a valid license and selling medications without prescriptions, according to a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open . 

People who shop online for weight loss drugs “face serious consumer risks” of receiving “ineffective and dangerous products,” said Tim Mackey, an author of the report and professor of global health at the University of California, San Diego, as well as the director of the Global Health Policy and Data Institute. The study also included researchers from University of Pecs in Hungary.

Shortages of the popular weight loss medication, which belongs to a class of drugs called GLP-1s, have led to “a black market of illegal knockoffs ,” said Dr. Christopher McGowan, the founder, medical director and research director of True You Weight Loss, a weight loss clinic in Cary, North Carolina.

“This is absolutely terrifying,” said McGowan, who wasn’t involved with the research. Illegal pharmacies are “exposing patients to risks related to unregulated, low-quality, potentially contaminated products. The average person cannot be expected to safely navigate this online medication minefield, which is why it’s best to stick to brand-name, FDA-authorized medications,” he said.

The popularity of semaglutide has surged in recent years, with more than 2.5 million prescriptions filled in the U.S. by December 2023, according to a separate study published Friday in JAMA Health Forum.

Manufacturers can’t keep up with the demand for drugs, which can cost up to $1,300 a month out of pocket, and many who can’t find the drugs in their local pharmacies turn to online vendors and telehealth.

Many shop online for semaglutide, which is also sold as Ozempic to treat Type 2 diabetes, because their insurance plans won’t pay for the injections or because their doctors won’t write them a prescription, Mackey said.

Medicare doesn’t cover the drugs when prescribed for weight loss , and many state Medicaid plans heavily restrict coverage. Most people who receive GLP-1 prescriptions have private insurance, according to the JAMA Health Forum study.

“It is no shock that people would turn to the internet for alternatives,” McGowan said. “Unfortunately, this is where unscrupulous purveyors are preying on the desperate.”

Illegal pharmacies pose safety risks

In Mackey’s study, he and his colleagues tested samples of semaglutide ordered from six online pharmacies for quality and safety. 

Two of the online pharmacies had received warning letters from the Food and Drug Administration within the last year for unlawful sale of unapproved and misbranded semaglutide.

One vial of semaglutide had high levels of endotoxin, a toxin found in bacterial cells, although researchers didn’t find any live bacteria that could cause infection. Being injected with endotoxin, which may have come from environmental contamination during manufacturing, can make people feel sick.

The online purchases sampled in the study contained up to 39% more semaglutide than what is indicated on label, which could result in an overdose.

Overdosing on semaglutide can cause severe nausea and vomiting, as well as dangerous drops in blood sugar, which can lead to fainting, according to the FDA.

From January to November 2023, control poison centers across the U.S. reported nearly 3,000 calls involving semaglutide, a more than 15-fold increase since 2019. Most overdoses resulted from dosing errors made by consumers injecting themselves with the drug.

Wegovy and Ozempic, both made by Novo Nordisk, are sold in injection pens that are relatively easy to use. Off-brand versions of semaglutide — which can come from compounding pharmacies or the online pharmacies examined in the study — often come in vials of liquid that require consumers to fill a syringe with the correct dose.

On its website, Novo Nordisk says patients can spot counterfeit medications by looking for certain telltale signs, such as packages with spelling errors or which are unsealed, or prices that seem too good to be true.

In a statement, a company spokesperson said that patients should be aware that Novo Nordisk is the only drugmaker in the U.S. that makes FDA-approved medicines with semaglutide.

“Telehealth providers and compounding pharmacies that are claiming to offer or sell unapproved compounded products claiming to contain ‘semaglutide’ are sourcing their ingredients from entities other than Novo Nordisk," the spokesperson said.

Online scams

Some websites purporting to be online pharmacies take consumers’ money but never deliver the medications, according to the study.

Although Mackey and the co-authors of the study paid for six orders, they received only three. Three of the websites they ordered from were “non-delivery scams,” asking for additional payments of $650 to $1,200 to help their products “clear customs,” according to the report.

In the best-case scenario, consumers who purchase GLP-1 drugs from illegal online pharmacies “just lose their money,” said Shabbir Safdar, executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, which researches the dangers of counterfeit medicines. “In the worst scenario, you end up with medications that are potentially harmful.”

Some people who can’t find semaglutide at their regular pharmacy have turned to compounding pharmacies, which mix or alter drug ingredients to create medications tailored to specific patient needs. Legitimate compounding pharmacies don’t dispense medications without a prescription , said Scott Brunner, chief executive officer of the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, an industry group.

Compounded drugs can be made and distributed with fewer restrictions when the drug appears on FDA’s drug shortages list, the agency says ; currently, several dosages of Wegovy are in shortage . Still, the FDA cautions that “compounded drugs should only be used for patients whose medical needs cannot be met by an available FDA-approved drug.”  

In a statement on its website, Novo Nordisk said it’s working to address shortages. “While we will do our best to support those who want to start taking Wegovy, it is important to recognize that overall demand will continue to exceed supply and some patients may still have difficulty filling Wegovy prescriptions,” the statement reads in part. 

Safdar said that buying compounded semaglutide carries risks compared to the brand-name versions.

People who made dosing errors while administering semaglutide from compounding pharmacies have been harmed and even hospitalized after accidentally taking too much, according to an alert issued last week by the FDA.

Brunner said consumers should only buy medications from compounders that are licensed by their state board of pharmacy .

Under the best circumstances, deciding to take a GLP-1 drug is a complex medical decision and patients need regular monitoring, McGowan, from True You Weight Loss, said. Consumers won’t get that sort of care if they buy drugs online without seeing a health care provider.

Even when taken as directed, GLP-1 drugs can cause many side effects , including nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, stomach pain, headache and fatigue, and, as a result, many people stop taking them after two years. The FDA advises health care providers to monitor patients carefully for kidney disease, eye disease, depression or suicidal behaviors or thoughts. 

Some doctors have also observed that GLP-1 drugs can trigger eating disorders in some patients, and the Collaborative of Eating Disorders Organizations, whose members provide treatment or support for people with disordered eating, recommend that doctors screen people for conditions such as anorexia before prescribing semaglutide.

“If a pharmacy doesn’t require a prescription, a medical consultation or any understanding of your health, it’s not legitimate,” McGowan said.

“Right now, there are no shortcuts,” he said. “Either you’re fortunate to have insurance coverage for GLP-1 meds, or you’re willing and able to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month in cash. There is currently no proven, safe workaround.”

Liz Szabo is an independent health and science journalist. Her work has won multiple national awards. One of her investigations led to a new state law in Virginia.

August 12, 2024 96 °F PBS Passport .st0{fill:#0A145A;} .st1{fill:#5680FF;} .st2{fill:#FFFFFF;} UH Search for: Search MENU CLOSE News & Information Features Hello Houston inDepth Topics Local News Texas Education News Politics Criminal Justice Transportation Energy & Environment Weather Hurricane Tracker All Stories >>> Arts & Culture Arts & Culture Main Classical Music Music Opera & Musical Theater Dance Visual Art Literature Theatre & Film Voices and Verses: A Poem-A-Day Series Awareness Hispanic Heritage Pride Month: Better Together! Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Black History Women’s History Education Programs & Podcasts Local Programs Party Politics Houston Matters with Craig Cohen I SEE U Texas Standard UH 100 Years of Houston Bauer Business Focus Briefcase Engines of Our Ingenuity Health Matters UH Moment Features Dead and Buried Career Frontier Podcasts Below the Waterlines: Houston After Hurricane Harvey Party Politics Skyline Sessions Encore Houston All Podcasts >> Support Membership Update Payment Method Upgrade Your Monthly Gift Give a Gift Membership Giving Programs Affinity Council Studio Society In Tempore Legacy Society Innovation Fund Volunteers Foundation Board Young Leaders Council Mission Ambassadors Donations Vehicle Donation Giving Opportunities Employee Match Program More Ways to Give Partnerships Corporate Sponsorship About About Us Meet the Team Join the Team Contact Us Ethics and Standards Reports & Financials Press Room Listen Watch Donate Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Linkedin Mastodon googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1488818411584-0'); }); article .entry-content .fullattribution img { max-width: 1px; max-height: 1px; } This article is over 5 years old National | NPR

Buying college essays is now easier than ever. but buyer beware.

What was once limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed into so-called essay mills on the Internet, becoming a global industry.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

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Elon Musk’s X sues advertisers over alleged ‘massive advertiser boycott’ after Twitter takeover

FILE - Elon Musk arrives before a joint meeting of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, July 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson, File)

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WICHITA FALLS, Texas (AP) — Elon Musk’s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers , alleging that a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.

The company formerly known as Twitter filed the lawsuit Tuesday in a federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.

It accused the advertising group’s brand safety initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping to coordinate a pause in advertising after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies.

Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying “now it is war” after two years of being nice and “getting nothing but empty words.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee which she said showed a “group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott” against X.

The Republican-led committee had a hearing last month looking at whether current laws are “sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”

The lawsuit’s allegations center on the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover and not a more recent dispute with advertisers that came a year later.

In November 2023, about a year after Musk bought the company, a number of advertisers began fleeing X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Musk later said those fleeing advertisers were engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.

The Belgium-based World Federation of Advertisers and representatives for CVS, Orsted, Mars and Unilever didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

A top Unilever executive testified at last month’s congressional hearing, defending the British consumer goods company’s practice of choosing to put ads on platforms that won’t harm its brand.

“Unilever, and Unilever alone, controls our advertising spending,” said prepared written remarks by Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA. “No platform has a right to our advertising dollar.”

What Kamala Harris has said so far on key issues in her campaign

As she ramps up her nascent presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is revealing how she will address the key issues facing the nation.

In speeches and rallies, she has voiced support for continuing many of President Joe Biden’s measures, such as lowering drug costs , forgiving student loan debt and eliminating so-called junk fees. But Harris has made it clear that she has her own views on some key matters, particularly Israel’s treatment of Gazans in its war with Hamas.

In a departure from her presidential run in 2020, the Harris campaign has confirmed that she’s moved away from many of her more progressive stances, such as her interest in a single-payer health insurance system and a ban on fracking.

Harris is also expected to put her own stamp and style on matters ranging from abortion to the economy to immigration, as she aims to walk a fine line of taking credit for the administration’s accomplishments while not being jointly blamed by voters for its shortcomings.

Her early presidential campaign speeches have offered insights into her priorities, though she’s mainly voiced general talking points and has yet to release more nuanced plans. Like Biden, she intends to contrast her vision for America with that of former President Donald Trump. ( See Trump’s campaign promises here .)

“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” she told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta at an event in Indianapolis in late July. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”

Here’s what we know about Harris’ views:

Harris took on the lead role of championing abortion rights for the administration after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. This past January, she started a “ reproductive freedoms tour ” to multiple states, including a stop in Minnesota thought to be the first by a sitting US president or vice president at an abortion clinic .

On abortion access, Harris embraced more progressive policies than Biden in the 2020 campaign, as a candidate criticizing his previous support for the Hyde Amendment , a measure that blocks federal funds from being used for most abortions.

Policy experts suggested that although Harris’ current policies on abortion and reproductive rights may not differ significantly from Biden’s, as a result of her national tour and her own focus on maternal health , she may be a stronger messenger.

High prices are a top concern for many Americans who are struggling to afford the cost of living after a spell of steep inflation. Many voters give Biden poor marks for his handling of the economy, and Harris may also face their wrath.

In her early campaign speeches, Harris has echoed many of the same themes as Biden, saying she wants to give Americans more opportunities to get ahead. She’s particularly concerned about making care – health care, child care, elder care and family leave – more affordable and available.

Harris promised at a late July rally to continue the Biden administration’s drive to eliminate so-called “junk fees” and to fully disclose all charges, such as for events, lodging and car rentals. In early August, the administration proposed a rule that would ban airlines from charging parents extra fees to have their kids sit next to them.

On day one, I will take on price gouging and bring down costs. We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits.”

Since becoming vice president, Harris has taken more moderate positions, but a look at her 2020 campaign promises reveals a more progressive bent than Biden.

As a senator and 2020 presidential candidate, Harris proposed providing middle-class and working families with a refundable tax credit of up to $6,000 a year (per couple) to help keep up with living expenses. Titled the LIFT the Middle Class Act, or Livable Incomes for Families Today, the measure would have cost at the time an estimated $3 trillion over 10 years.

Unlike a typical tax credit, the bill would allow taxpayers to receive the benefit – up to $500 – on a monthly basis so families don’t have to turn to payday loans with very high interest rates.

As a presidential candidate, Harris also advocated for raising the corporate income tax rate to 35%, where it was before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump and congressional Republicans pushed through Congress reduced the rate to 21%. That’s higher than the 28% Biden has proposed.

Affordable housing was also on Harris’ radar. As a senator, she introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would establish a refundable tax credit for renters who annually spend more than 30% of their gross income on rent and utilities. The amount of the credit would range from 25% to 100% of the excess rent, depending on the renter’s income.

Harris called housing a human right and said in a 2019 news release on the bill that every American deserves to have basic security and dignity in their own home.

Consumer debt

Hefty debt loads, which weigh on people’s finances and hurt their ability to buy homes, get car loans or start small businesses, are also an area of interest to Harris.

As vice president, she has promoted the Biden administration’s initiatives on student debt, which have so far forgiven more than $168 billion for nearly 4.8 million borrowers . In mid-July, Harris said in a post on X that “nearly 950,000 public servants have benefitted” from student debt forgiveness, compared with only 7,000 when Biden was inaugurated.

A potential Harris administration could keep that momentum going – though some of Biden’s efforts have gotten tangled up in litigation, such as a program aimed at cutting monthly student loan payments for roughly 3 million borrowers enrolled in a repayment plan the administration implemented last year.

The vice president has also been a leader in the White House efforts to ban medical debt from credit reports, noting that those with medical debt are no less likely to repay a loan than those who don’t have unpaid medical bills.

In a late July statement praising North Carolina’s move to relieve the medical debt of about 2 million residents, Harris said that she is “committed to continuing to relieve the burden of medical debt and creating a future where every person has the opportunity to build wealth and thrive.”

Health care

Harris, who has had shifting stances on health care in the past, confirmed in late July through her campaign that she no longer supports a single-payer health care system .

During her 2020 campaign, Harris advocated for shifting the US to a government-backed health insurance system but stopped short of wanting to completely eliminate private insurance.

The measure called for transitioning to a Medicare-for-All-type system over 10 years but continuing to allow private insurance companies to offer Medicare plans.

The proposal would not have raised taxes on the middle class to pay for the coverage expansion. Instead, it would raise the needed funds by taxing Wall Street trades and transactions and changing the taxation of offshore corporate income.

When it comes to reducing drug costs, Harris previously proposed allowing the federal government to set “a fair price” for any drug sold at a cheaper price in any economically comparable country, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan or Australia. If manufacturers were found to be price gouging, the government could import their drugs from abroad or, in egregious cases, use its existing but never-used “march-in” authority to license a drug company’s patent to a rival that would produce the medication at a lower cost.

Harris has been a champion on climate and environmental justice for decades. As California’s attorney general, Harris sued big oil companies like BP and ConocoPhillips, and investigated Exxon Mobil for its role in climate change disinformation. While in the Senate, she sponsored the Green New Deal resolution.

During her 2020 campaign, she enthusiastically supported a ban on fracking — but a Harris campaign official said in late July that she no longer supports such a ban.

Fracking is the process of using liquid to free natural gas from rock formations – and the primary mode for extracting gas for energy in battleground Pennsylvania. During a September 2019 climate crisis town hall hosted by CNN, she said she would start “with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands.” She walked that back later when she became Biden’s running mate.

Biden has been the most pro-climate president in history, and climate advocates find Harris to be an exciting candidate in her own right. Democrats and climate activists are planning to campaign on the stark contrasts between Harris and Trump , who vowed to push America decisively back to fossil fuels, promising to unwind Biden’s climate and clean energy legacy and pull America out of its global climate commitments.

If elected, one of the biggest climate goals Harris would have to craft early in her administration is how much the US would reduce its climate pollution by 2035 – a requirement of the Paris climate agreement .

Immigration

Harris has quickly started trying to counter Trump’s attacks on her immigration record.

Her campaign released a video in late July citing Harris’ support for increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and Trump’s successful push to scuttle a bipartisan immigration deal that included some of the toughest border security measures in recent memory.

The vice president has changed her position on border control since her 2020 campaign, when she suggested that Democrats needed to “critically examine” the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, after being asked whether she sided with those in the party arguing to abolish the department.

In June of this year, the White House announced a crackdown on asylum claims meant to continue reducing crossings at the US-Mexico border – a policy that Harris’ campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, indicated in late July to CBS News would continue under a Harris administration.

Trump’s attacks stem from Biden having tasked Harris with overseeing diplomatic efforts in Central America in March 2021. While Harris focused on long-term fixes, the Department of Homeland Security remained responsible for overseeing border security.

She has only occasionally talked about her efforts as the situation along the US-Mexico border became a political vulnerability for Biden. But she put her own stamp on the administration’s efforts, engaging the private sector.

Harris pulled together the Partnership for Central America, which has acted as a liaison between companies and the US government. Her team and the partnership are closely coordinating on initiatives that have led to job creation in the region. Harris has also engaged directly with foreign leaders in the region.

Experts credit Harris’ ability to secure private-sector investments as her most visible action in the region to date but have cautioned about the long-term durability of those investments.

Israel-Hamas

The Israel-Hamas war is the most fraught foreign policy issue facing the country and has spurred a multitude of protests around the US since it began in October.

After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late July, Harris gave a forceful and notable speech about the situation in Gaza.

We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

Harris echoed Biden’s repeated comments about the “ironclad support” and “unwavering commitment” to Israel. The country has a right to defend itself, she said, while noting, “how it does so, matters.”

However, the empathy she expressed regarding the Palestinian plight and suffering was far more forceful than what Biden has said on the matter in recent months. Harris mentioned twice the “serious concern” she expressed to Netanyahu about the civilian deaths in Gaza, the humanitarian situation and destruction she called “catastrophic” and “devastating.”

She went on to describe “the images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.”

Harris emphasized the need to get the Israeli hostages back from Hamas captivity, naming the eight Israeli-American hostages – three of whom have been killed.

But when describing the ceasefire deal in the works, she didn’t highlight the hostage for prisoner exchange or aid to be let into Gaza. Instead, she singled out the fact that the deal stipulates the withdrawal by the Israeli military from populated areas in the first phase before withdrawing “entirely” from Gaza before “a permanent end to the hostilities.”

Harris didn’t preside over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in late July, instead choosing to stick with a prescheduled trip to a sorority event in Indiana.

Harris is committed to supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, having met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at least six times and announcing last month $1.5 billion for energy assistance, humanitarian needs and other aid for the war-torn country.

At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Harris said: “I will make clear President Joe Biden and I stand with Ukraine. In partnership with supportive, bipartisan majorities in both houses of the United States Congress, we will work to secure critical weapons and resources that Ukraine so badly needs. And let me be clear: The failure to do so would be a gift to Vladimir Putin.”

More broadly, NATO is central to our approach to global security. For President Biden and me, our sacred commitment to NATO remains ironclad. And I do believe, as I have said before, NATO is the greatest military alliance the world has ever known.”

Police funding

The Harris campaign has also walked back the “defund the police” sentiment that Harris voiced in 2020. What she meant is she supports being “tough and smart on crime,” Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair for the Harris campaign and former mayor of New Orleans, told CNN’s Pamela Brown in late July.

In the midst of nationwide 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Harris voiced support for the “defund the police” movement, which argues for redirecting funds from law enforcement to social services. Throughout that summer, Harris supported the movement and called for demilitarizing police departments.

Democrats largely backed away from calls to defund the police after Republicans attempted to tie the movement to increases in crime during the 2022 midterm elections.

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