The UK risks jeopardising the integrity of its degrees unless it follows in the footsteps of other countries that have outlawed advertisements for essay mills, experts have said.
Previous education secretaries and higher education ministers had indicated their increasing concern about the growing market in essay mills after a 2018 paper found that it was likely that as many as one in seven recent graduates worldwide had engaged in contract cheating.
However, Times Higher Education understands that there are no current plans to introduce legislation in the UK, in contrast to the Republic of Ireland, which has passed a law banning advertising by essay-writing services, and Australia, which is proposing to outlaw contract cheating itself.
“We thought we were on the way to something. But aside from increased guidance and media attention, we haven’t got anywhere,” said Michael Draper, professor of legal studies at Swansea University, offering his assessment of the British situation.
In 2018, Sam Gyimah, who was then universities minister, said legislative options “were not off the table” after more than 40 higher education leaders called for the government to introduce a ban. In March 2019, the education minister, then Damian Hinds, said it was time to “stamp out essay mills” and called on PayPal to stop processing their payments.
However, Professor Draper has since published research on how the increased publicity and governmental pressure had changed the behaviour of essay mill companies. The findings, published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity, concluded that there had been no change.
“We’ve been having this conversation for years, but without legislation that disrupts their business model in the UK, why would [essay mills] behave any differently?” he said. “The UK is supposed to be a global leader in higher education – we must be able to guarantee the quality of our degree awards – but I fear the government’s attention is elsewhere.”
In July 2019, a private member’s bill was laid before Parliament by Lord Storey, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman in the House of Lords, that would have made it an offence to advertise cheating services for higher education assessments in England and Wales. However, Parliament was then prorogued, halting further progress.
According to Thomas Lancaster, a senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London, “the legal movement in the UK has completely stalled, and we are falling a long way behind countries like Australia, Ireland and Montenegro”.
“The key legislative approach we have to make is to stop firms being allowed to advertise to students within the UK. The advertising is blatant, persuasive, and students can’t avoid it. We need to make it as difficult as possible for contract cheating firms to do business,” he said.
Deirdre Stritch, approval and monitoring manager at Quality and Qualifications Ireland, which enforces the country’s legislation, said that the law had already passed “obvious measures of success” and that 13 adverts had been removed since it came into force last November.
The legislation also prompted work that will allow universities to block essay mills’ websites from their servers and has led to the creation of the academic integrity network.
It has not only disrupted the business model of essay mills but also “commenced a coordinated, concerted national conversation on this topic and given impetus to move at a quicker pace”, Dr Stritch said.
A Department for Education spokeswoman said that the UK government was clear it was “simply unethical for online essay writing companies to profit from a dishonest business which exploits young people”.
“We have…called on online giants to block payments and advertisements for these services,” she said. “We are not ruling out legislating, but there are a number of obstacles to eliminating essay mills through legislation, and we are working with the sector on effective ways of tackling this problem.”