Students are encouraged to cheat at the university from essay factories offering one-to-one-for-free deals, loyalty schemes and high-street refund offers, the conference said.
Experts have warned of a growing “normalization” of fraud in higher education, with the shift to online assessment, which began during the pandemic, making it easier and more common for students to seek outside help.
They also warned of the growing availability of essay writing tools with artificial intelligence, which are becoming more sophisticated, offering students even more opportunities for fraud to try to increase their grades.
The government is introducing legislation banning essay factories and advertising them, but experts fear there will be little prosecution, as most are based abroad and therefore outside the scope of the law. It will initially apply only to England, with limited application in Wales.
The Westminster Higher Education Forum’s virtual conference on Tuesday heard that essay factories – which sell essays or materials written to a student committee – now use comparison websites as part of the growing marketing of their services.
Michael Draper, a professor of law at Swansea University and an expert on academic integrity and fraud, said: “I think there were over a thousand sites on one comparison site, with more coming each month. This is a huge number.
“The growing commercial pressure of the type we usually find in supermarkets is affecting students. So many of these sites offer, for example, one-to-one-for-free schemes or loyalty schemes, or in some cases I’ve seen a refund. ”
When students try to withdraw, they may become victims of extortion against fake legal letters. The conference said it was “organized crime”, with some essay material reportedly provided by sub-Saharan African authors who are also open to exploitation.
Draper said students whose school education has been disrupted by the pandemic will be particularly vulnerable when they move into higher education. “Students are increasingly reporting the pressure they are experiencing, but also the cheating syndrome. “They just don’t feel ready for the challenges of higher education, learning and assessment, and we will have to deal with that,” he said.
He also warned that students unknowingly distribute their own valuable essay material using free online spelling or grammar tools, which can then find their way online where they can be picked up and used – or sold by someone another.
Other students have tried to make money by selling their own work, Draper said. “I have also seen some” entrepreneurial “activity from students who mainly sell their own materials from previous levels directly to other students. So the students themselves are jumping to that norm of normalization. “
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It was said at the conference that the secret agreement, in which students work together to complete an assessment to be taken on their own, has become a serious problem in recent years, especially with the displacement of online assessment, which has probably affected inflation of estimates.
Tom Yates, director of corporate affairs at the Agency for Quality Assurance, the independent body that reviews standards and quality in higher education in the UK, welcomed the new essay legislation and said it would change the dynamics that exist for students .
“Essentially, students will know that if they use an essay factory, they will be involved in a criminal entity, and we cannot say that this has been the case so far, and that should remove the temptation for many,” he said.
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