#contract-cheating — Public Fediverse posts

Have LLMs destroyed essay mills?

I found myself wondering about this when I stumbled across a photo I took in London nearly ten years ago. It was jarring to be reminded how visible LLMs were such that they literally took out advertising on the tube. It’s ironic these were banned in the UK only months before the launch of ChatGPT. The language of the policy suggests potential complexity about its implementation:

It is now a criminal offence to provide or arrange for another person to provide contract cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at a post-16 institution or sixth form in England, enrolled at a higher education provider in England and any other person over compulsory school age who has been entered for a regulated qualification at a place in England.

Similarly, it is now an offence for a person to make arrangements for an advertisement in which that person offers, or is described as being available or competent, to provide or arrange for another person to provide a cheating service. Importantly, the offence centres around the act of advertising to students, and for the offence to be committed it does not need to be seen by its target demographic.

Don’t get me wrong. This was clearly a good thing. But given how much of a drugs trade (as well as a fraud trade predicated on getting people to transfer money for non-existent drugs) exists through mass commercial social media platforms, it’s difficult to imagine that a prohibition would be particularly effective. It would increase the costs of doing business and make essay mills less accessible to those students who were only dimly curious about the possibility. But it wouldn’t remove them from the internet.

Obviously LLMs were a different proposition. Why pay hundreds of pounds for an essay that can be produced through a chatbot? This was always more complex than it was imagined such that we’re only now (with Claude 4.5, Gemini 3 and GPT 5.2 as well as their deep research functions) when you can meaningfully hope to produce a ‘good’ essay based on the title alone. But how much of the work of essays mills was ‘good’ in the first place? Obviously the economic proposition which essay mills made to students fundamentally changed, suggesting a plausible possibility that LLMs overnight decimated any potential mass market for contract cheating.

Interestingly Joseph Thibault suggests that traffic has declined significantly but the essay mills have not died off:

While AI writing tech (not frontier models or wrapped products but services explicitly offering writing help to students, including ‘humanising’) traffic has jumped:

If the database he’s curating is reasonably representative this is good prima facie evidence for thinking that essays mills haven’t died and also suspecting that parts of the industry have pivoted into AI-enabled cheating. This raises the question of why they haven’t died? How have their offerings changed? Who is paying for them? Are writers now using LLMs themselves? How do students distinguish between automated writing and human expert writing? There’s a cruel irony in the image of students paying for contract cheating that is effectively done by someone using an LLM that the student could have accessed themselves.

#contractCheating #essayMills #generativeAI #humanisingServices #LLMs #malpractice #students #writingServices

The infamous "homework help" site Chegg has filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that Google's AI summaries are stealing their traffic.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2025/02/27/chegg-sues-google-over-ai-summaries/

#Copyright #Chegg #Plagiarism #AI #ContractCheating

An Australian training college that specializes in real estate and finance has been ordered to close over allegations of widespread cheating.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2025/02/04/australian-training-college-ordered-to-close-over-cheating-allegations/

#Australia #Certification #Cheating #ContractCheating

Those of you that haven’t read Dying Inside might be struck by some of the outdated ideas (there’s some sexism and racism) but the blunt portrayal of what it might be like to be a telepath in a University setting is prescient and powerful and so relevant to our thoughts on Gen AI and the academy… #HigherEducation #HigherEd #ScienceFiction #ContractCheating #GenAI #AcademicMisconduct #cheating #telepathy

A university launched a sting operation to test contract cheaters. They got was a lesson in blackmail and the dangers of the industry.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/03/28/blackmail-and-the-contract-cheating-industry/

#Plagiarism #ContractCheating #Blackmail #AcademicIntegrity

Ready to start into day 3 of the conference with Michael Draper presenting on the Recommendation CM/Rec (2022) of the Committee of MInisters to member States [of the Council of Europe] on countering Education Fraud

(Irene: Thank you for getting up in the morning to listen to a talk by a lawyer!)

Draper is one of the people responsible for championing the new criminal offense of #ContractCheating in the UK.

#ECEIA2023 #AcademicIntegrity

Now that contract cheating is forbidden in the UK (it is illegal to advertise such services and illegal to work with students in this manner, the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill was passed in 2022, https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/04/28/essay-mills-are-now-illegal-skills-minister-calls-on-internet-service-providers-to-crack-down-on-advertising/), the question is whether AI will put them completely out of business?

The answer is no, the companies still seem to be in business, suggesting that students use a VPN to access the "service"

#ECEIA2023 #AcademicIntegrity #ContractCheating

And this is just a weird story. Unexpected global fallout from AI ...

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For the past nine years, Collins, a 27-year-old freelance writer, has been making money by writing assignments for students in the U.S. — over 8,500 miles away from Nanyuki in central Kenya, where he lives. He is part of the “contract cheating” industry, known locally as simply “academic writing.” Collins writes college essays on topics including psychology, sociology, and economics. Occasionally, he is even granted direct access to college portals, allowing him to submit tests and assignments, participate in group discussions, and talk to professors using students’ identities. In 2022, he made between $900 and $1,200 a month from this work.

Lately, however, his earnings have dropped to $500–$800 a month. Collins links this to the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools.

https://restofworld.org/2023/chatgpt-taking-kenya-ghostwriters-jobs/

#ChatGPT #AI #AcademicWriting #ContractCheating

News: Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic

Given what we know about the #ContractCheating industry, #AcademicIntegrity folks are unlikely to be surprised by this...

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Organized crime. Fraud. Counterfeiting. I had no idea when I started researching #AcademicIntegrity that I would end up partnering with two amazing women who would co-edit a book on #FakeDegrees and #FraudulentCredentials as we worked alongside FBI Special Agent (retired), Allen Ezell, other global experts with deep knowledge of the #FakeDegree industry, learning how it relates to #ContractCheating, #AdmissionsFraud, #PaperMills, but here we are.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-21796-8

It was already an arms race before AI, not sure what is best to describe it now?

« Academics warn of ‘arms race’ in contract cheating » via SMH https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/academics-warn-of-arms-race-in-contract-cheating-20221122-p5c0a4.html #ContractCheating #uni #academics