Much of the literature on contract cheating recognises it as intimately connected to the remodelling of the Higher Education (HE) sector by ideas and principles of the free market. A great deal has been written about the adoption of a market orientation in the UK since the 1980s. These reforms of HE have underpinned the introduction and subsequent rise of student tuition fees, while state funding of HE was drastically reduced. This marketization of the sector forces HE institutions to compete for fee-paying ‘student-consumers’ and ushers in a culture of educational consumerism where students make a financial transaction for their education as if purchasing a commodity.
Though governments and HE institutional policy and practices have stabilised this idea of the student as a consumer, the values of the wider societal context might also be imported by students into their places of education. Many students are likely to have grown up embedded within consumer societies that normalise the idea that any desire can be met, or source of dissatisfaction alleviated, by market offerings. A prevailing culture of consumerism holds individual free choice in the marketplace as a supreme value and promotes the status of the consumer as sovereign ‘chooser’. Indeed, Molesworth et al (2009) have argued that many students arrive at universities with a consumer confidence drawn from prior experiences in commercial marketplaces and carry the same attitudes over to public goods such as education. Nixon et al (2016) have exposed the frustration and dissatisfaction felt by students when their personal desires are curtailed in learning environments. Put simply, many HE institutions exist in a prevailing culture that instils students to think of having a degree as if a possession rather than being a learner and developing intellectually (Molesworth et al 2009).
What does the student as consumer mean for academic integrity?
Marketization and the corresponding reconceptualization of students as consumers arguably produces the conditions for outsourcing to prosper. While the payment of tuition fees by individual students (or their families) inevitably produces a consumer subject position, institutional imperatives to respond to students’ needs and desires to ensure satisfaction encourage students to see themselves as consumers of a service. Knowledge may come to be viewed as the content of lecturers’ slides, not the result of an active meaning-making process. Assignments deemed irrelevant to a student’s personal ambitions become unnecessary obstacles to students’ success, not essential opportunities for deep learning. In such a context, ‘success’ in HE – perhaps ideally that of transformation through learning – becomes dominated by marks in the quest for a ‘good’ degree. Where dissatisfaction arises with the ‘service’ they receive, or the challenge of academic work is deemed too great, students can yield their consumer power to complain or engage in the marketplace in the search for a solution.
Sociological literature shows us that there are different ways to conceptualise ‘the consumer’. Each offers different insights about contract cheating. Conceptualised as rational choosers, students seek maximum need satisfaction for minimum effort, know their consumer rights, and demand value for money (Brooks 2018). Rigby et al (2015) have argued that this narrative works to construct the purchase of ‘submission-ready’ assignments as a rational choice: purchase is made when the potential benefits are deemed to outweigh the costs and risks. Our own research suggests that for some students, outsourcing assignments is seen as a sensible investment in one’s future, especially when comparing the cost to tuition fees:
I think it’s quite relative to your future. It’s quite a low price to pay. If you get the funds to pay someone £200 that is worth it, I guess, in the future.
It’s actually cheap when you realise that your degree is with you your whole life.
Some students see the purchase of a bespoke assignment as just another consumer good, as this aggrieved student testifies:
One of my classmates…told me all the students in that house have seeked help from the essay writing company. She then recommended me with one cuz I felt really stressful to finish my essay at that time. She told me that I can assume that I spent the same money to buy a LV [Louis Vuitton] bag, which really shocked me. Of course I didn’t ask that company for help, but I feel really bad that I tried so hard to finish my essay while She just spent money and get good grades.
The commodification of the educational experience is unlikely to be solely a result of tuition fees, however. Established consumer cultures thrive on stimulating desire – more so than satisfying rational ‘needs’ – and marketized universities often play a role in shaping and intensifying students’ idealised fantasies through their promotional communications (Haywood et al 2011). Market exchange is – the market promises us – the ‘easy’ way to gratify such desires, though new ones are quickly created. Buying assignments thus becomes a necessary add-on to the purchase of a university education, required to gain the dream job or realise an imagined future life. Such values are naturalised in a broader societal context of consumerism where labour-saving commodities embed the idea that ‘the good life is the effortless life’ (Fromm 1993, 26).
Other scholars have recognised the ways a marketized sector contributes to student academic integrity breaches (e.g., Kezar and Bernstien-Sierra, 2015). Saltmarsh (2004) argues that plagiarism is a tactic deployed by students to succeed within a high-pressure, high-cost educational climate which reduces the learning process to a financial transaction. Raaper (2019) similarly views students as actively negotiating dynamics of assessment within neoliberal HE contexts that prioritise employability, and finds that some students consider assessment as valuable primarily because it is seen as promoting their competitiveness in the graduate labour market.
The commodification of higher education lays the foundation for instrumental approaches to learning and assessment among students. Where a ‘good’ degree qualification is promoted as a private possession, perhaps even felt as an entitlement, gaining a degree becomes more important than the process of learning. Purchasing assignments allow students to achieve the former without the latter.
