EVERY teacher knows the feeling: a student offers you a piece of work that seems just a little too good . . . you don’t want to make an unjust accusation. After all, if this is genuine, it means that your pupil has achieved a significant improvement. Nor do you want to give good marks to a cheat and make a fool of yourself. How do you tell if the assignment has been plagiarised? In the old days it was easier but, with the arrival of new technologies, the game has changed.

The internet is a wonderful source of information, but it is also a godsend to the dishonest. Material can be copied and pasted freely from a huge array of resources that are almost impossible to trace. Surveys suggest that, according to the strict guidelines theoretically applied by universities, most students have been guilty of cheating. Some claim that they were not properly informed of the boundaries and one was even reported earlier this year to be suing a university for withholding his degree. There can be no excuse, though, for those who simply go out and purchase an essay or assignment, then pass it off as their own. Essay-writing companies have existed for some years, but few students knew about them or used them. Now, on the net, you can find dozens of offers for hundreds of thousands of essays, at all levels and prices, on virtually every topic, from medicine, law, chemistry, to beauty therapy, leisure management and theology.

The last of these might be a good place to begin, because the online essay industry is an ethical minefield. For example, one British company protests that the essays and dissertations it sells are not to be passed off as the student’s own, while at the same time guaranteeing a 2:1 standard, insisting that essays are custom-written and assuring full confidentiality. Why all this emphasis on non-attributability if the material supplied is meant only as a guide or for reference? Some American sites are less guarded: “The chance that your tutor can check back your order is absolutely excluded,” says one, making quite clear the purpose of its confidentiality clause.

You might imagine that money motivates these essay suppliers. Not from the evidence on the web: “We believe that information and knowledge . . . should be shared by all of humanity for the benefit of all mankind,” says the UK-based 2:1 Essay, in a lengthy diatribe against copyright. The British and American firm MasterPapers.com alerted novice students to the dangers of using websites where essays are farmed out to foreign writers: they could put their academic careers at risk by using papers not written in good English. Always on the student’s side, MasterPapers explains that “the contemporary academic environment” leaves today’s student “absolutely no choice but to take advantage of our help”.

More than that, the same firm insists that it implements a “zero-tolerance plagiarism policy”. At first glance, you might think that this means the company is against students passing off MasterPapers’ essays as their own. Not exactly: in the mirror world of the essay factory, an anti-plagiarism policy means that the essays sold to students are guaranteed to be original and not themselves plagiarised. “There is absolutely no chance that your paper will be plagiarised, ” says SuperiorPapers.com. In other words, if you hand the work in to your tutor, it will not be traceable through anti-plagiarism software, such as Turnitin, YAP or iThenticate, with which the universities are doing their best to fight back. Some employ anti-plagiarism officers and the Joint Information Systems Committee has a separate Plagiarism Advisory Service.

What the websites’ anti- plagiarism guarantee means is that the essay factories are afraid of being hoist on their own petard and cheated by their own employees. So who are these employees? “Experienced academic writers with at least PhD or masters degrees,” claims Essay Relief (which warns its customers that essays are supplied “for assistance only” and “should be used with proper reference”). However, many of the anonymous operatives on the essay factory benches are probably active university teachers — the very people who are supposed to form the first line of defence against plagiarism. It does rather suggest a decline in academic ethics, doesn’t it? And what about the student who, with the best possible motives, purchases a paper and hands it in, only to find that it was written by his own tutor — who will, naturally, spot it as a cheat? Be warned: most of the essay companies operate a strict no-refund policy.

The author is a writer and former lecturer

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