DD paid £130 to get an assignment done for her.

[Piggie90]

DD went away this long weekend and completely ignored her college research project before she went away. Cut a very long story short, she used some of her birthday money (18th) to pay a company (didn't even know they existed) to write a 2500 word project for her.

AIBU to never lend her a penny again? I'm actually fuming.

Whatever you do please don’t inform the college.
Your worry should be that she doesn’t see this as an easy option and repeat it.

She’s done it now, she may or may not got caught. For me the biggest issue is that if she doesn’t get caught and goes on into higher ed she will think this is OK to do again.

She absolutely needs the bollocking of her life and very clear direction why this is so wrong.

A student in DDs s cohort, doing a HCP course used his older sisters professional practice essay that she had done on a similar course five years before at a different university. It was his very first essay in first year and he thought he was being clever.

Ping! Caught at the first hurdle. He was failing student and was never trusted again for the duration of his three years. He barely scraped a third at the end of his degreee.

How on earth did you find out?! I admire her ballseyness but its 100% wrong. I wouldnt tell the college if i were you, that will damage your relationship to unknown levels. I would never lend her money again so she has to get a PT job around her studies. Shes stupid for using her 18th money for it and it would be tempting to replenish the money based on it being her 18th but dont. She will have learnt her lesson. A similar thing happened with my brother at uni, my parents paid the debt and the fine from the uni and my brother is now a self obsessed arse hole who thinks hes above everyone and expects my parents to bail him out of anything so let her learn her lesson. As a person of student age, i admire her thought process, as a mother, i am fuming for you!

It’s not ingenious or ballsy- the kids are offered this stuff online all the time- all she had to do was click and pay. Depending on the level, £130 isn’t much so she’s unlikely to have got a “premium” service. Which means she is quite likely to get caught.

Has she submitted yet? Is there time for her to rewrite it? Could she negotiate an extension? Do you think that it is a lack of confidence or laziness?

It is often easy to spot as for £130 they are unlikely to have put in the hours required for a good, unique assignment so it will either not be good, not be unique or be neither.

She will be caught out. There is anti-plagiarism software identifying this kind of cheating which scans essays and spots any identical work. The essay you daughter submitted may already be online or someone else might have paid the same person for the same essay.

She needs to feel repercussions from this. First off I would sit her down, get all the details from her about why she felt the need to do this, find out exactly how she is doing. Then I would very strongly encourage her to report herself to her tutor, with my support if she wanted, along with asking for the associated support (with the work, time management etc) for the reason why she felt the need to resort to this in the first place. I would at this stage make it very clear to her that whether I told the college or not would be entirely dependent on her attitude to what she had done. There would be heavy use of cautionary tales and of how doing this could wreck her career before it has even started.

I wouldn't be ostentatiously angry. I would be very very grave and serious so she feels the weight of what she has done and can't just dismiss it as Mother flying off the handle, iyswim.

In a world of outsourcing I think she is already learning valuable work skills:

Vendor selection
Price negotiation
Quality review
Consumption

Whether it’s a project or a large software project you could argue, as a one off, she probably learnt more than by doing the project!

So much sanctimony here.
Have you sat down with her and discussed why she felt the need to do this?
Is she committed to this course?
Is she actually capable of completing it?
Does she have some other issues that are disrupting her studies?

Our children will always disappoint us if we set unreasonable standards for them.
My youngest has ‘under-achieved’ throughout her life. Resisted being placed in the ‘Gifted & Talented’ group in Y10.
Dropped out of 6th Form College the week before her A Levels.
Was accepted for University if she could finish a Year’s Access course but dropped out 3/4 of the way through.
Eventually, in her late 20’s she got a proper diagnosis of the underlying issues and some properly appropriate therapy*
She’ll probably never fulfil her academic potential now, but she is, most definitely, fulfilling her life potential.

• BPD ** Dialectic Behaviour Therapy

Oh that's awful. Hope she's not planning a career in medicine, imagine your surgeon gaining qualifications by cheating!

Some might say it serves them right, others might say it shows up a systemic failure of modern day universities and their audiences.

Audiences?!

We're not entertainment.

If a student can't write an essay on a topic it means it's either not the course for them or they simply don't have the ability. No one is there with a gun to their heads, if a student doesn't want to engage with their course they should leave it.

My DS is a second year undergraduate and says that this goes on a lot. His course has quite a few foreign nationals who have poor functional English skills, making group projects really difficult as they are unable to participate meaningfully. However they manage to turn in perfectly written essays which don’t reflect this, or the level of understanding and knowledge they show in tutorials and labs. It makes him cross, mainly because of the extra work they create for the other students, and the unfairness that they’ll come out with the same degree. They generally live in private halls and dont mix socially other than with groups of their own nationality.

Can’t believe the number of sanctimonious people on here who would tell the college. These are the same parents no doubt whose children will be on here in years to come talking about how they’re nc.

yes she’s been stupid but ffs she bought an essay, she didn’t kill someone.

She needs to be made aware of the damage that being caught could do to her future educational and career prospects, but really must everything be analysed to death? The fact that these essay mills even exist doesn’t show huge emotional issues among students, it shows that there are companies who are prepared to cash in on students’ who spend too much time drinking and socialising and leave the essay writing to the last minute.

In short, most of these students buy this stuff purely because they can.

I wouldn’t be funding this kind of thing and I would tell her what I think of it, but she’s an adult. If she gets caught then she will have to face the consequences, and I would make her aware of that.

This is rife in open university.

Our children will always disappoint us if we set unreasonable standards for them. I was willing t go along but... since when has 'don't cheat, earn it' been an unreasonable expectation?

I taught so many FE students who pondered cheating when extremely stressed, most often by poor time management and/or a belief that they could cruise through A levels as they had their GCSEs!

All we ever had to do was sit and talk to them. Walk them through their options, show them what good time managment looked like. The ones who were fully engaged and were just having one of those moments got it and continued with slightly different mindset, others chose other options such as a different course, to drop a subject, to accept a poor mark and to move on etc.

The last group remained oblivious to their own culpability, called in the reinforcements - parents who would blame the staff - and threw all sorts of teen tantrums to try and get out of what was often their frst 'failure'. These students were usually either made or broken by the first instance of serious self doubt. But a few would manage to delude themelves a few more times. They hurt the most and were often the brightest students - as they had had less need for deliberate study, being organised before.

Piggie90 what you need to do is sit her down and eplxain the possible ramifications of this. Look at her FE contract, it will definitely explain what happens if plagiarism is found. Also show her the same for the university of her choice. Show her how much she has chosen to put at risk - far more than what would have happened had she just gone in and pleaded for clemency, aka an extension!

And yes, do consider persuading her to go in and tell her tutor what she did and asking for time to resubmit - depending on the type of assignment, she may not have that option if the deadline was set by the exam board!

But she cannot be left thinking she got away with it! She needs to feel the fear of being caught... and these days it is much more likely that she will be.

Universities are well tuned in to this sort of thing so chances are she’ll her caught, which will result in an investigative meeting and some sort of consequence, at best possibly having her qualification capped at a low level, at worst, being disqualified.
It’s not just a case of whether Turnitin recognises plagiarism, it’s whether it fits the style of her other work. Universities have to be really on this sort of cheating because of the huge increase in essay writing services out there.

It’s such a daft thing to do, because the effort of cheating and then having to try to tweak what you’ve paid for to try to avoid it being obvious plagiarism and also trying to match your own writing style- you may as well write the damn thing yourself.

It also raises the question of why? Is she not up to doing the work herself, ability wise? What would happen with the next big piece of work she has to do? It’s hardly going to build her confidence in her skills if she just relies on someone else doing the work for her.

Couldn’t disagree more with the pp she’ll learn ‘valuable skills’ from this about outsourcing, demand and consumption etc
Everyone knows these services are out there, she’s hardly some entrepreneurial spark for having handed over £130 for some bit of work which will most likely expose her as a cheat. She’s been well and truly done over if she thinks she’s done something clever.

I don’t think you’ll need to inform the institution because it’s highly likely they’ll spot something. I would be very wary of monetary gifts in future too as she clearly has no idea how to make good choices

There's nothing 'sanctimonious' about not wanting a young girl to start off down a path of buying her way through life, with the stakes getting higher and the potential loss greater each time, because (as you so aptly say) she can - and if (barring being caught out by college) all that happens to her this time is her mother tutting at her a bit but otherwise leaving her to her merry way, she is likely to feel she can.

She might develop a conscience, regret it deeply and not do it again. She might think 'great, got away with it' and store it away as a useful strategy for the future. Ruining her own work ethic, increasing the stakes/risks for next time and upsetting the playing field for everyone else's (= your) kids.

Just because she's 18, doesn't mean she might not need a little saving from herself now and again. This seems the right time to nip this sort of thing in the bud.

Chances are she's had the assignment for a lot longer than this weekend, so going away shouldn't have had too much of an impact on her completing it. The fact she has instead paid someone shows she has been neglecting to do it for some time.

As others who work in colleges and universities have said she will 100% get caught, so there's no need for you to tell them. The outcome of her being caught cheating will depend on the college, but it could easily lead to her being removed from the course.

My best friend’s daughter got caught for “auto-plagiarism” - she used parts of one of her own assignments (that had been through turnitin) for another assignment, but failed to list it in her references, even though it was her own work.

It was touch and go while they investigated, and eventually deducted 15% of her marks for that assignment, which took it down a grade. She was lucky and I’ve been telling all the uni students I know about it since, as none of them were aware of auto-plagiarism.

@mashedspud This is rife in open university

How would you know this? The OU uses several levels of plagiarism filter, including the fact that tutors have a small group of 15 students. This means that tutors spot plagiarism very quickly and easily because they know their students’ work. For this reason the OU are more likely to pick up plagiarism than brick universities!

It’s a crime that seems minor, especially if you’re not in the world of education, but ultimately can end up saying a lot about character. To cheat in this way is a betrayal of something honourable

Oh that's awful. Hope she's not planning a career in medicine, imagine your surgeon gaining qualifications by cheating!

It's common practice among international students on elite courses. Unis know and don't care. (£££)

Turnitin will just check for matches against previously submitted work. I can't catch work which is 100% original, but written by someone else. I am a freelance writer and I have been approached to do this sort of thing in the past. I always refuse, it's very, very wrong.

Of course it's cheating and I certainly wouldn't be lending her money again. And also questioning her whole life outlook if she thinks this is OK.

And everyone can get off their high horse about plagiarism. Good bought essays are personally written. I agree with Bernard that 160 isn't that high but I suppose it depends what level the essay is being written for.