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.

brizzlemint

Have a look at student finance. You only get the loan for course fees, not the maintenance loan, I assume because they expect you to be working.

www.gov.uk/apply-online-for-student-finance

Fazack
Excuse me, but it is absolutely not bullshit

Then I'm sure you can provide some hard evidence for your assertion...

I don't really understand why ppl bother doing courses if they're not actually interested in them. Sorry if I sound 'sanctimonious' but it just seems like a waste of everyone's time (including the tutors who have to mark the essays).

Thanks Sashh
That's annoying about the maintenance loan as I'd do it full time if I could get that.

Google it. Plenty of articles interviewing essay mills about it, plus a long thread in here a while back.

brizzlemint

List of OU subjects you can get funding for

www.open.ac.uk/courses/fees-and-funding/equivalent-qualifications

Haha! Fazack - "google it". In other words, you have no evidence whatsoever for your claim that universities knowingly turn a blind eye to plagiarism and collaboration. I am not disputing the existence of essay mills, as you now seem intent on implying. I am disputing your claim that universities don't care about this.

Sashh

Interesting point. I might casually drop that into conversation with the latest wife he’s currently divorcing and thoroughly shafting.

And all because some arrogant dick of a tutor couldn’t believe that someone could have studied with him and yet have a completely different view of the set topic to him.

Sorry, doesn't work like that. The onus is on the tutor making the allegation to prove plagarism in front of an academic misconduct panel. The notion that an academic would say 'hmm my spidey senses are tingling here' and the misconduct officer would nod it through doesn't stack up at all, especially when the end ressult was that she was removed from the course. Doubly so if this was a first offence.

I know someone who has just been kicked out of university for plagiarism in her final dissertation in her 3rd year. She now has £50,000 of student loans to repay and no degree to show for it

Why don't you read the thread on here about it? If international students can't speak English but turn in perfect essays then you do the maths.

If you want to find out more about the companies concerned, google "Academic Knowledge". I'm not going to link to them on here but they're one of the main companies. They advertise quite frequently on freelance platforms.

I do think the universities are concerned. It is their reputation at stake if people they are supposed to have trained basically don't live up to their degrees. There may be elements within the academic system where there is less concern and it's more about getting fees off people, but the academic staff are concerned.

Agreeing with Funky -- if I (or Turnitin) pick up on something that is plagiarised or shows marked inconsistencies with previous work by that student, it goes first to the Academic Practice Officer in my department, is then seen by a Faculty APO, the student appears before a AP committee, and potentially the university equivalent (for instance, if the student appeals the verdict). I have to make a credible case, and a lot of people need to be convinced before a student has their degree terminated.

It's not at my individual whim, and at least in my field I've yet to meet an academic who isn't delighted to have a student intelligently disagree with his/her position, rather than regurgitate lecture note.

If she is caught she will be thrown off the course. Stupid risk to take. If turnitin doesn't notice its likely the persons marking it will. We had one at the university I work at flagged up recently. It was decided the student had submitted it tho. Turnitin didn't flag it, but we know what the students work is usually like...

To the people praising her - how many of you would be happy with a nurse who'd cheated their way through their course? Would you want to be on the receiving end of their care?

Or if you were trying to hire someone to do a job for you and paying good money for a service from a second rate cheater with their sketchy degree.

Cheating finds its way through to a person's work and causes problems for the employer and lowers standards if enough people do it.

My first thought was "wow, that's cheap". I'd be worried about the quality.

Why would anyone praise cheating, pointless to study if you just cheat

Well it is going to be a worrying wait for the work to be marked! Do please come back and tell us if she gets found out. I would be interested to know if she felt £130 was worth the consequences if she does.

When I was in uni someone done somethng similar, but it was the tutors who picked up on it, as the writing style was completely different to how he normally wrote. He was kicked off the course.

When I was on my second degree, I over heard a group of students talking about how they’d all paid to have their assignments wrote for them. Kind of turned a professional qualification into a joke- why work your ass off reading and putting essays together when others are just paying for theirs. They got through the plagiarism software too🤷🏻‍♀️

@Belenus - I wish I'd seen more of the lecturers being concerned! They either didn't notice that in ever lecture the same people never turned up despite them "checking in" (you can tell when a Seminar doesn't have a quarter of it's listed attendees) and they certainly didn't seem to mind when they graduated and went out into the workplace. Without giving too much away these are very public facing roles that should require in depth knowledge for safety reasons.

Presumably it also bumps up the marks for those who are doing their own work - so it's harder to get a 70+ if a chunk of people have sent off and paid for 60%+ papers in the cohort.

I want to know what you said to her and what you're going to do about it, OP. Fair enough if you're not going to dob her in but surely there needs to be some serious consequences for her actions?

The uni lecturers also cheat with their publications. Some supervisors manage to publish (in order to go up the paying scale you often need to show publications) without writing anything. All work is done by their students. The students would put a blind eye on it as they want to see their names in the prestigious magazines.

Stupid girl

@AhoyDelBoy I completed my degree in 2004 and it definitely did exist then. Although probably nowhere near as common.

If she does it at uni she will be expelled.

Two Masters students got kicked out of my uni for a similar thing. Plus one for cheating during an exam. He was a foreign language student and was allowed to use a dictionary. He had annotated it with notes for the exam and got caught.