Having recently marked a series of essays submitted by students 3 of the marked essays were clearly not the work of the student and there was no mention that the students had used such essay writing sites as secondary sources.
this is an interesting bit of information that you raise. however, i don't think that it supports your argument.
was it proved that these students used essay services to produce these essays? if they were, then your example demonstrates that the academic community is capable of catching cheaters. if they weren't, then it demonstrates that some students will get others to write their papers without resorting to professional writing services and also that the academic community is capable of catching cheaters. in either case, your example fails to demonstrate how or why removing the essay writing service industry would help stop students from cheating (and that the academic community is capable of catching cheaters). no further industrial action is needed.
it's not that i don't doubt that some students use these services to cheat. however, i am quite confident that for every empirical example of a cheater using an essay service, i can point to a student whose knowledge and performance has been honestly and ethically helped by the same service. you just aren't going to win that every student who uses one of these services is going to cheat with the finished product and you also can't win that ending the industry will stop all future cheating.
ultimately, i think your solution of removing the industry is short-sighted. in fact, i would argue that the increased publicity over the threat of cheating that has been generated as a result of this industry's success is a good thing that has helped improve university standards.
essay writing services have helped to increase the performance bar for academic discipline. university professors are now challenged to create assignments that are unique rather than cookie-cutter. this means requiring particular books, excluding generic topics and generally tailoring assignments to be different and challenging. responsible university professors can no longer allow students to complete a class based upon essays alone. so this increases the use of non-essay forms of testing, including written tests, oral tests and class presentations. this also presses university professors to better get to know their students, instead of treating them like a number at a distance. only by interacting with a student can a professor really get a good idea of cheating. all good things.
this industry didn't start cheating. however, it did bring academic performance under greater public and private scrutiny, resulting in universities adjusting their requirements to make cheating more difficult. just like WB's often aggressive posts, this industry does more good than bad.
a little evidence to support my previous post.
first, despite the fervor of concern over essay mills, they represent only a miniscule amount of actual academic cheating taking place.
The source is George Dunbar, University of Warwick, "The management of academic dishonesty: a survey of practice in UK psychology departments" 2005.
"Of the 23 departments responding to this item, 19 listed copying from published
sources such as textbooks and articles as the most common or second most common form of cheating detected, estimating on average that this accounted for 42% of cases. Copying from the internet was also relatively frequent, with 9 departments listing this as the most common type, at an average 21% of cases. However, only two departments recorded any incidents of students purchasing essays, and this was even rarer than cheating during invigilated examinations, which averaged under 2% of cases. This result for buying essays is in line with
the Freshminds (2004) survey of UK students, which found less than 1% of the sample admitted to buying from an "essay mill". Fabrication of project data was also relatively unusual at 6% of cases. The other relatively common form of cheating was unfair co-operation between students. Around 29% of cases were accounted for by copying another student's work or other forms of illicit collusion"
Polly Curtis, Guardian Unlimited 2004.
education.guardian.co.uk/students/work/story/0,,1250786,00.html
"Of those polled by FreshMinds research consultancy, 75% said they had never cheated in this way, while 9% said they had once. Some 16% said they had cheated more often - indicating that most offenders relied on cheating regularly.
However, very few were found to be employing online essay services, with most opting to copy segments from the internet into their own papers, or relying too heavily on past essay examples. "
Patrick Scanlon, from College Teaching, 2003 further notes that the claim that plagiarism has increased as a result of the internet is not correct:
"Only recently has online plagiarism been studied systematically, with results suggesting that anxiety over Internet-facilitated textual theft by college students may be fueled by misperceptions. In a survey of 698 students on nine campuses, Scanlon and Neumann (2002) found that students who went online to cut and paste text without citation constituted 24.5 percent of the sample, a level of Internet plagiarism similar to the numbers reported by McCabe and Trevino (1996) for "conventional" plagiarism. Only 2.3 percent of students in Scanlon and Neumann's study reported purchasing papers from online term-paper mills "often" or "very frequently," and 6 percent admitted to buying papers "sometimes." Another recent multicampus study revealed even lower numbers. Citing data from a survey of 2,200 college students on twenty-one campuses, McCabe found that 10 percent reported copying "a few sentences from a Web site without footnoting them," and 5 percent admitted to turning in a paper "obtained in large part from a term-paper mill or Web site" (2001, 41).
second, the existence of the industry makes cheating more difficult.
findings of a more recent study at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana
sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/020501073710.htm
"Ironically, paper mills may in the long run make plagiarism more difficult, the professors said. For one thing, paper mills have "created a niche for plagiarism-detection software." Also, what is available online is "of middling quality at best; students may reach the same conclusion." And, with the spread of printed matter now being scanned and put online, plagiarism-detection programs are increasingly capable of catching passages taken from printed sources"
and this is further supported by the proliferation of new university-sponsored websites that discuss plagiarism and means to combat its prevalence. if you wanted to see one, i'd suggest the University of Iowa, which if i remember correctly also has an excellent graduate level creative writing program.