Last
updated: 07/02/08
Parents
buying essays for students
An
essay-writing firm has claimed that parents are spending hundreds of
pounds on degree level essays for their children studying at university.
UKEssays.com says that 78% of their student customers are using their
parent’s money to purchase ‘model essays’.
“The students will talk about the essay they want and then they
put their parents on the phone to give the credit card details,”
said a spokesman.
The company maintains that the essays are to be used as ‘models’
and not for plagiarism. However, on their website they offer a ‘Plagiarism
Scanner’, software which checks the essay purchased by students
for plagiarised work, so that customers can be ‘sure that your
work is 100% plagiarism scanned before you submit it to your University!’
Universities continue to express concern about students buying these
custom essays and submitting them as their own work.
Last year Google placed a ban on all advertising from essay-writing
companies across its advertising network.
UKEssays.com said it has about 6,000 customers and a survey of a third
of these showed that parents had become a major factor in purchases.
So-called ‘helicopter parents’, who increasingly want to
interfere in the way their children are being taught, are becoming more
and more a part of modern campus lives.
This latest survey suggests that parents, especially more affluent ones,
are willing to part with cash for essays.
UKEssays.com spokesman Jed Hallam said, “As the cost of education
goes up, so parents seem to feel that they need to have an element of
control.”
“There are parents who want a return on a very expensive education.
“It’s easy to assume that the middle-classes are buying
an unfair advantage over poorer but more able students,” he added.
But UK Universities, the group representing university leaders, continues
to voice its opposition to such companies, stating it is ‘absurd’
to believe that students are not misusing them.
A spokesman for the group also warned that there are, “Severe
penalties for those students caught cheating, with many institutions
already using advanced anti-plagiarism software to make sure that this
is enforced”.
by Michael Matthis
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