We previously argued that that phrase ‘essay mills’ was less helpful than ‘contract cheating’ – the latter serving to stress both the negotiated or ‘contracted’ nature of the act as well as reminding us about the underlying violation of academic integrity. However, ‘essaymill’ is unhelpful for another reason: namely, it implies that contracted cheating is only about essays. In this section we note how social plagiarism is not confined to that traditional genre of assignment.
One hint of such service versatility is found in Lancaster and Clarke’s (2012) report of topic request postings by potential customers of the site essaybay (from sampling five months in 2010). These were analysed by academic subject areas. The top three categories of request were in disciplines that were indeed likely to require essays (‘Business and administration studies’, ‘Social Studies’ and ‘Historical and philosophical studies’). But the essay is less obviously the required product elsewhere; for example: ‘Subjects allied to medicine’ (#4), ‘Biological sciences’ (#6), ‘Mathematics and computer science’ (#8), and ‘Engineering’ (#10). In this section, we consider niche marketing among web-based contract cheating services. In a very crowded marketplace, it may make sense for services to develop such specialisation. The examples here are an illustration of this but also, through the links we consider, readers may find the sites identified useful to browse as examples of the general style of service provision.
Discipline-focussed essay services
The examples selected here generally do specialise in the traditional essay, as this is the form of assignment most often set, but that is not all that they provide. For example, consider the site ‘Law Teacher’ (a branch of ‘All answers’ – typical promotional video here). The site does offer an essay writing service (from £28, examples here) and a dissertation writing service (example here). However, perhaps in the interests of presenting its corporate mission as firmly ‘supportive’ of student learning it also offers free law research resources and worked illustrations of law problem cases.
Another discipline-focussed site is ‘Business Teacher’. As the name might imply it is run by the same company that runs ‘Law Teacher’ – although the site has a very different look and feel. It offers ‘writing services’ which can be assumed to be largely essays. But again, it also achieves a sense of well-meaning ‘study support’ by offering a range of free resources. Indeed, it may help promote legitimacy, that the site invokes the logos of powerful “featured companies” to decorate its page advertising free case studies and SWOT analysis guides and PESTL analysis examples. There are no vulgar chat windows mediating the commissioning approach, instead the customer uses an online ‘enquiry form’. Sceptics might be uneasy about revealing so much personal information on this form but, ironically, such trafficking in personal details may be seen as a mark of company reliability and respectability.
Some sites embed discipline-specialising services inside their general essay writing portfolio. Although this example for social media marketing could work for social studies as well as business marketing. The pitch for this particular service is as follows:
University assignments are quite different than those that students did in school because it follows specific structure and different writing style. Most students are not familiar with the professional terms and formal tone because they are new to this. Each assignment has to be done after intensive research so that students can support their arguments with appropriate evidences but mostly students face a lot of challenges while preparing their university marketing assignments. That is why they seek for professional assignment help that can guide them to achieve a better grade. Sometimes students fail to submit the assignment before deadline due to lack of time, stress, work load and busy schedule which results in low quality assignments and poor grades.
This advertising copy broadly resembles the promotional rhetoric of a typical website service. Despite the emphasis on essays having to strive for a formal tone, their own clumsy English might seem surprising. Yet not unusual. It is perhaps worrying that undergraduates are not noticing this and still purchasing the products.
Non-traditional assignment services
The sites mentioned in the above section broadened their reach by furnishing (free) study resources that complemented writing commissions. Other sites achieve niche marketing more directly, by offering production of non-standard assignment tasks. An example might be offers for poem writing. Although the standard of English on the sites own text might be a customer deterrent – even if “1000+ students can’t be wrong”:
The person who writes poem should have a good concept and good knowledge of analysing the nature and thoughts of which they are writing Poem writing assignment help. This poem writing assignment help is done by those who study literature subject.
Similarly, it seems likely that only students who have English as a second language could be comfortable with the company’s vision statement that “We are having a clear vision and that is to make the education system easier and better”.
Help with writing computer code is something that might be more readily obtained by cruising the open web seeking downloadable examples, or personal advice. However, sites may offer this service for code writing assignments – but also for more discursive assignments required in computer science, such as history of the discipline, marketing strategies, critical analyses of coding tools etc. This particular siteis also a good example of the relentless use of pop up invitations for contact; including, of course, online chat negotiations.
The offer to write lab reports raises a still deeper concern: would sites fabricate project data in order to generate a credible report? Text on this site suggests so: ” Whether writing your paper involves analyzing some theoretical information or performing a practical work and demonstrating certain results, it can be done by an expert with experience“. Any willingness to accept such a service would be a worrying form of lapsed integrity in students registered for empirical subjects. The site is another subsidiary of the ubiquitous company All Answers run by Barclay Littlewood; it does not promise this data-hatching service on its web pages but one supposes that it could be a matter of discussion during negotiation.
Academic staff may feel that requiring oral presentations may be a way to bypass the possibility of students purchasing essays. However, these sites also offer to author PowerPoint slide decks. This site makes the case for why it is “reasonable to have someone else do my PowerPoint presentation”. Another site offering this service illustrates its pitch with a graphic – that hardly arouses anticipation:
With the growth of online and blended learning courses, some assessment may depend on students making contributions to class discussion through forums on their virtual learning environments. Contract cheating sites have this covered also. Order-essays.com observes that:
In addition, sites will offer to write directing to a student’s blog if that is part of an assignment and the student is willing to share password access. A fuller sense of the typical ordering process is communicated in this video demonstration.
Beyond undergraduate commissioning
Contract cheating websites are not exclusively targeting undergraduates. They cater for secondary or high school customers. But they can also handle postgraduate commissions. Thus masterthesiswriting is a Hong Kong based company that suggests, appealingly perhaps, that their service will mean “you have more time to prepare for a dissertation defense using our papers” and that your order can be received “in parts with our progressive delivery feature”. Such services extend their offerings to the possibility of commissioning an entire doctoral thesis. Such services are less widely advertised on websites but they have attracted press attention – doubtless at the expense of the higher education sector’s reputation. Finally, the whole stressful experience of graduating can be sidestepped by visiting a site the will furnish a fake diploma.
This section should give a sense of the range of services available and some of the marketing as it is pursued for specific assessment projects. Incidentally we noticed signs that the quality of writing on the sites themselves does not encourage the alert customer to have much faith in services. This is a theme taken up later. First, and in the next section, we consider the more shadowy presence of freelance authors.
