Are Essay Mills fraud that is committing? An analysis of these behaviours vs the 2006 Fraud Act (UK)

International Journal for Educational Integrity volume 13, Article number: 3 ( 2017 ) | Download Citation

Many strategies have been proposed to deal with the usage Essay Mills along with other ‘contract cheating services that are students. These types of services generally offer bespoke custom-written essays or any other assignments to students in return for a fee. There have been calls for the usage legal methods to tackle the situation. Here we determine whether the united kingdom Fraud Act (2006) could be used to tackle a few of the activities of companies providing these services when you look at the UK, by comparing their common practises, and their conditions and terms, utilizing the Act. We found that most of the sites examined have disclaimers regarding the usage of their products but there are lots of contradictions that are obvious the actions for the sites which undermine these disclaimers, as an example all sites offer plagiarism-free guarantees for the task as well as least eight have advertising which seems to contradict their conditions and terms. We identify possible areas where the Act could possibly be used to pursue a legal case but overall conclude that such a method is unlikely to be effective. We call for a offence that is new be created in UK law which specifically targets the undesirable behaviours of these companies within the UK, although the principles could be applied elsewhere. We also highlight other UK legal approaches that may be more successful.

Introduction

The usage of so-called ‘contract cheating’ services by students has been a source of controversy and debate within Higher Education, particularly into the decade that is last. ‘Contract cheating’ refers, basically, towards the outsourcing of assessments by students, to third parties who work that is complete their behalf in substitution for a fee or other benefit (Lancaster and Clarke 2016). These services offer ‘custom assignments’ of almost any form, although custom written essays look like the most frequent. Students in many cases are in a position to specify the grade they desire (although there is not any guarantee this is delivered), request drafts, referencing styles and almost any other custom feature (Newton and Lang 2016). Services available are quick and cheap (Wallace and Newton 2014) and students underestimate the severity with which universities penalise the employment of contract cheating services (Newton 2015). Possibly the simplest arrangements are directly between students and essay that is‘custom companies’, a lot of whom are ‘listed’ companies with sophisticated promotional initiatives. However there are numerous ways that students can use third parties to complete work for them, because of the contract spread across continents; writers may behave as freelancers, doing work in a different country towards the student and their institution. These freelance article writers may make usage of online auction services to advertise and organise their work and these might be in yet another national country, and there could be another intermediary; an individual who receives your order from the student and then posts the task on an auction site (Newton and Lang 2016; Sivasubramaniam et al. 2016). Thus you can find multiple actors in contract cheating, one or more of whom may be liable if their actions violate what the law states; students, their universities, the persons paying tuition fees, writers, those who employ writers, the websites which host the writers, advertising companies, those who host the advertising, an such like. Here we focus primarily on UK-registered essay-writing companies.

Across education, a student who completes an evaluation to make credit towards an award is normally necessary to achieve this in the explicit basis that the submission is their own independent work. Ideally, both students and staff are given guidance about what constitutes academic misconduct and the effects of such misconduct (Morris 2015), in a fashion that promotes a positive, constructive approach to fostering ‘academic integrity’ (Thomas and Scott 2016). Then that student will normally face a range of penalties, administered by their university, for academic misconduct if a student submits work that is shown to comprise, in whole or in part, material that is not their own independent work. These usually include cancellation of marks for the relevant module or the relevant component of the module subject to any mitigating circumstances (Tennant and Duggan 2008) in the UK. Historically, these behaviours have not been dealt with through legal mechanisms in the united kingdom (QAA 2016) and also this relates to plagiarism outside academic circumstances which, when you look at the words of Saunders,”. just isn’t by itself illegal; it is only illegal if it breaches a well established legal right, such as for instance copyright, or offends up against the law of misrepresentation or any other legal rules” (Saunders 2010).

However, a commonly used test in making legal decisions is to decide how a ‘reasonable person’ might view a particular behaviour. If asked to describe the purchasing of essays for submission when it comes to purposes of gaining academic credit it seems logical to summarize that an acceptable person would conclude that such behaviour is ‘fraudulent’, particularly because of the language related to it (e.g. ‘cheating’). If another individual has knowingly assisted in that activity chances are they might reasonably be believed to have assisted, conspired or colluded in such academic fraud, cheating or dishonesty.

Then it is clear that the student commits academic misconduct, but what of the individual or company that supplied the work in return for payment if a student has purchased written work from another individual or a company for the purpose of passing it off as his or her own work? To what extent is that individual or company (an ‘assistor’) complicit this kind of misconduct? What is the liability that is potential of assistor and may action be used against them? Will be the assistors by their action inciting academic fraud? Unless the assistor is a student in the same institution an educational institution cannot normally take action against the assistor under internal disciplinary procedures. In addition, as well as perhaps more to the point, can there be the chance of fraudulent behaviour when you look at the relationship between your learning student together with company?

Broadly, legal wrongs committed in England and Wales might be addressed through the civil or criminal law (UK Government 2016a). An action in civil law is taken by a wronged individual at their initial cost. This cost is actually prohibitive and also normally requires the formulation of a claim recognised by the law that evidences loss or injury to the claimant that is individual by the defendant and for which a fix is sought. Thus the ability of educational institutions (or a student for that matter) to take civil action against assistors is restricted.

Action in relation to UK law that is criminal normally undertaken by as well as the expense of their state through the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) but requires a criminal offence to have been committed (private prosecutions at private cost are possible but relatively rare). The Code for Crown Prosecutors sets out of the principles that are basic be followed closely by Crown Prosecutors when they make case decisions. Crown Prosecutors must be satisfied there is evidence that is enough provide a “realistic prospect of conviction” and that it is the public interest to pursue a prosecution (UK Government 2013).

A purpose of this paper would be to measure the extent that a business organisation who supplies an essay or written work upon instructions from a student in substitution for money could be liable under the law that is criminal of and Wales for an offence under the Fraud Act 2006 (The Act) (UK Government 2006). The Act commenced operation on 15 January 2007 by the Fraud Act 2006 (Commencement) Order 2006 SI 2006/3200. The Act applies to offences committed wholly on or after 15 January 2007 essay writer and extends to England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Quality Assurance agency, considered all approaches to deal with contract cheating, a problem which they stated “poses a serious risk to the academic standards and the integrity of UK higher education” (QAA 2016) in August 2016 the UK regulator of Higher Education. Their consideration of possible legal approaches under existing law concluded that the Fraud Act was the “nearest applicable legislation”, but they failed to reach a strong conclusion on its use, stating that “Case law seems to indicate a reluctance on the part of the courts to be concerned in cases involving plagiarism, deeming this to be a matter for academic judgement that falls away from competence regarding the court (Hines v Birkbeck College 1985 3 All ER 15)” (QAA 2016).

Within their conclusion, the QAA suggest that the UK 2006 Fraud Act is “untested in this context”. Here we explore the detail of this Fraud Act further, and compare it into the established business practises of UK-registered essay-writing companies, with a particular give attention to their conditions and terms.