Over 20,000 uni students are buying essays and dissertations

Another recent story, it turns out one of Trumps advisers has been done for plagiarism. She did her PhD like 20 years ago when her chances of being caught were low, when the software to identify this had not been invented. But now that it exists, reporters are running the old public dissertations of famous people, to try and shame them, through the program. Could be embarrassing for lots of people, like how drug testing gets better every year

As I said to someone else earlier, are you speaking for every single degree on offer at every single university based on your experience alone?

Another recent story, it turns out one of Trumps advisers has been done for plagiarism. She did her PhD like 20 years ago when her chances of being caught were low, when the software to identify this had not been invented. But now that it exists, reporters are running the old public dissertations of famous people, to try and shame them, through the program. Could be embarrassing for lots of people, like how drug testing gets better every year

This is the most stupid thing i've seen today. What are these people going to do when they leave university and get a job in that field? They most likely haven't gone to lectures, haven't done any of their own work, and have basically got into debt for a degree which they know nothing about. Doesn't seem like they get the last laugh here.

well surely the profs would be able to distinguish the difference between your quality of work and that of one of these writers and would be able to see the dramatic change in 'your' work

I wonder if there's the will to crack down on this. As revealed in the article, it's for the most part international students who are doing it: the Chinese and Arabs enrolled on masters courses that are their one-year finishing school. For the universities to make the switch to, for example, closed-book exams or presentation assessments that frustrate cheating, would only be to steer the next decade's entrants toward Canada or Australia or wherever else they can still get away with it.

The fact is that these students are an important source of income for universities and provide an economic boost to host communities. Lord love 'em they're often only here because of the expectations of parents having precisely no capacity to gauge their offspring's level of Englis. They've applied with agency-prepared personal statements and been accepted with IELTS scores that suggest them as hardly prepared to order breakfast never mind complete a masters dissertation.

There's definitely more lip service paid to this than real concern amongst universities.

The anti-plagiarism software being used increasingly in the university sector doesn't work spectacularly well and in the US there have been lots of cases of false accusations and even expulsions on the basis of mistaken plagiarism allegations from the software.

TBH, we are nearing the time when essays become a thing of the past and also actually where degree gradings become a thing of the past.

What's going to replace essaya/ gradings, in your view?