Academic ghostwriting: to what extent is it haunting higher education?

Students are paying agencies to write their essays. Julia Molinari asks whether it can ever be considered ethical – and what universities can do to detect and stop it      

By Julia Molinari    

Guardian Professional, Thursday 3 April 2014

If you Google "academic proofreading," you will see a list of sites offering to "proof" your work. What they are also offering, however, is to write your assignments for you. How do I know this? There are two main reasons.
The first is that I occasionally assess ghost texts: I teach English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Where I work, students don't sit traditional exams. Instead, they write research papers and at the end of the process (which we scaffold), they sit a viva voce exam to extend and defend their research. Both the paper and the viva are assessed. This, we believe, provides several opportunities to get to know the writers and their texts. In the end, we are reasonably confident that final papers are genuine.
Now and then, however, a student will submit a piece of beautifully polished and referenced work that is clearly at odds with evidence from our day-to-day interactions. It is usually sufficiently and artfully peppered with inaccuracies to be attributable to a novice writer, but we know it is not the student's work. When a piece of work is plagiarised, we can usually prove it – but in cases where the student has paid someone else to write the piece, we can't.

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