Essay mills

[CommonFishDiseases]

How do you know if a paper you are marking has been purchased from an essay mill?! I know how to use TurnItIn to check for plagiarism but purchasing an essay is different, isn't it? A colleague said I need to be on the lookout but I'm not sure how?

If it is rather generic and not tied to your course materials. But if you use general questions, it will be hard to tell

Thanks JC

It's also sometimes a bad sign if students are giving a totally different response to the question than might be expected if they were starting from your lectures/classes & suggested reading - it's obviously not impossible for students to develop an entirely independent approach, but it's often unlikely, especially in the 1st & 2nd years. If that approach also doesn't match up with your experience of the student's work so far, and/or makes extensive use of resources to which your library has no access, those make for an especially bad combination!

Ask your colleagues. What do they look for?

Look at how the person writes, if the "voice" isn't the same.

Also make your questions less generic!

You could also do a search for what might be out there already. You will then have a good idea of what your students might have come across. I find that my students tend not to use essay mills as such but they happily use extracts from "sample essays" in lieu of their own research. I can usually tell in two ways:

(a) a very similar phrase pops up in two or more essays. Popping the phrase into google usually takes me straight to an online "sample"; and/or
(b) the student refers to obscure or out of date materials we haven't covered in lectures, materials or the usual resources I would expect undergraduates to be looking at.

In my experience, where it's students for whom English is a foreign language, looking at the quality of the English compared to their emails can be a giveaway. Of course they may have had help with proof reading. More generally I think it can be very hard to tell!