In recent years, there has been an endless stream of academic fraud news, and the "paper factory" behind these misdeeds has also been exposed.
So, have you ever wondered about the question: where are these "innumerable" paper factories, and what kind of people are behind these papers?
A survey of essay factories revealed the answer: "If you've ever purchased an essay writing service, it's probably from Kenya. Such a large global industry provides some professional writers with enough income to make them a full-time job.
The investigators purchased services from three well-known essay factories (Peachy Essay, Edubirdie, UK Essays) and asked them to write a short essay on the history of education in the UK.
In addition to the most expensive UK Essays, which is located in the United Kingdom, the investigators were able to confirm the exact location of 2 other dissertation factories through a link with an embedded tracking script: Kenya.
Image source: Screenshot of the webpage
Kenya: A "Happy Home" for Essay Writers
In the early years, essay factories that provided ghostwriting services were generally located near schools, but since the advent of the Internet, the scope of services of the ghostwriting industry has continued to expand, even covering a global scale.
Paper factories like Edubirdie and EssayShark have sprung up, but given the cost of labor, developing countries have become fertile ground for producing gunmen.
Countries like Kenya, India, and Ukraine are favored by essay mills, as many of them speak English, have relatively good internet infrastructure, and have many college graduates working at home.
Today, Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, may have become the world's "ghostwriting" capital. "Most of the dissertation outsourcing companies are based in Kenya, and they usually disguise themselves as academic exchange websites. Behind every post of heated argument is a cross-border transaction. 」
在一篇题为 Profiling the international academic ghost writers who are providing low-cost essays and assignments for the contract cheating industry 的论文中，研究人员对一个联系买家和论文工厂的网站 (Fiverr.com) 上的订单进行了分析。
Image source: Screenshot of the paper
The results are surprising: Kenya, a country with less than one-sixth of the U.S. population, has 43.4 percent of orders fulfilled by writers, more than 31.6 percent of orders completed by U.S. writers.
Image source: Screenshot of the paper
In related reports, these paper factories have been referred to as "Kenyans who help the world cheat".
Ironically, while other students were paying for their essays to keep up with school, the Kenyan writers were using the money they earned from ghostwriting to continue their education.
According to a 2014 report by the African Association for the Development of Education, young people aged 15~35 account for 35% of the total population of Kenya, but have an unemployment rate of up to 67%.
A Kenyan gunman, who goes by the pseudonym William, reportedly said he is currently completing a dissertation for a master's degree, and the client has signed a contract to continue his PhD. studies.
William, a serious college student, occasionally struggled with his career, and was stopped writing a dissertation for a client from the United States. "Because of the quality of my papers, I am often asked to reduce the number of higher-end models and algorithms to match the client's real level. It's actually harder than writing an essay. But there is no way, customer experience comes first, and I can only deliberately keep some academic loopholes. 」
For a country like Kenya, where the per capita income is less than $1,700 a year, a skilled writer can earn $2,000 a month, a high income that many college graduates flock to.
Kenyan students ghostwriting for the sake of continuing their studies (Source: Network screenshot)
Paper factories are rampant
1/7 students have purchased papers from them
It is said that essay factories are overflowing, but how many students have purchased the services of essay factories?
In 2005, a study of North American students found that 7 percent of undergraduates admitted to turning in papers written by others, and 3 percent admitted to getting papers directly from essay mills. According to the principal investigators of the project, millions of papers around the world are produced online every year by ghostwriting.
Image source: Screenshot of the paper
A study published by Swansea University in 2018 showed that more and more students are paying for assignments to be written for them through essay mills.
Image source: Screenshot of the paper
Specifically, the survey, which surveyed more than 50,000 students, found that since 2014, 15.7% of students have admitted to cheating through essay mills, well above the average over the past 40 years (3.5%).
This means that one out of every seven students has someone to ghostwrite.
With the rising craze for studying abroad in the past decade, the internationalization of this industrial chain has also accelerated, and now behind all kinds of essay writing websites in China may be Kenyans who are crazy about coding words in apartment buildings in Nairobi.
Image source: Network screenshot|Purchase details of papers with prices clearly marked in Chinese
In many countries or regions, paper factories are not explicitly prohibited from wandering in the gray area of jurisprudence.
Even Academized, an essay writing website, is ashamed to say something like, "You can trust us with your assignments, knowing we're reliable." There are professional writers here to tailor your papers with the highest quality and 0 plagiarism, and you only need to take care of the more interesting aspects of life. 」
A Kenyan who is engaged in ghostwriting said that European and American countries are the most taboo academic paper fraud, once found plagiarism, students may fail the course, repeat the grade, and even be dropped out of school in serious cases. Therefore, in the process of writing academic papers, he must find, read, and reasonably cite a large number of academic materials.
Such a magical act of putting the cart before the horse makes people speechless.
This is despite the fact that governments in Australia, South Africa, Ireland and 17 states in the United States have taken action to curb the practice of paper mills. But what the results will be? Whether these people will be able to regain their academic integrity and stop hiring people to ghostwrite, we don't know.
Perhaps time will tell.
THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY EVEE, FROM LILAC GARDEN