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Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas

Credit... Illustration by The New York Times

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By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi

Tuition was due. The rent was, too . So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.

Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.

“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”

Since federal prosecutors charged a group of rich parents and coaches this year in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme , the advantages that wealthy American students enjoy in college admissions have been scrutinized. Less attention has been paid to the tricks some well-off students use to skate by once they are enrolled.

Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites — with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments.

Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.

The essay-for-hire industry has expanded significantly in developing countries with many English speakers , fast internet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya, India and Ukraine. A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya has over 50,000 members .

After a month of training, Ms. Mbugua began producing essays about everything from whether humans should colonize space (“it is not worth the struggle,” she wrote) to euthanasia (it amounts to taking “the place of God,” she wrote). During her best month, she earned $320, more money than she had ever made in her life. The New York Times is identifying Ms. Mbugua by only part of her name because she feared that the attention would prevent her from getting future work.

It is not clear how widely sites for paid-to-order essays, known as “contract cheating” in higher education circles, are used. A 2005 study of students in North America found that 7 percent of undergraduates admitted to turning in papers written by someone else, while 3 percent admitted to obtaining essays from essay mills. Cath Ellis, a leading researcher on the topic, said millions of essays are ordered online every year worldwide.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Tricia Bertram Gallant , director of the academic integrity office at the University of California, San Diego. “If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every accredited university into a diploma mill.”

When such websites first emerged over a decade ago, they featured veiled references to tutoring and editing services, said Dr. Bertram Gallant, who also is a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity, which has worked to highlight the danger of contract cheating . Now the sites are blatant.

“You can relax knowing that our reliable, expert writers will produce you a top quality and 100% plagiarism free essay that is written just for you, while you take care of the more interesting aspects of student life ,” reads the pitch from Academized, which charges about $15 a page for a college freshman’s essay due in two weeks and $42 a page for an essay due in three hours.

“No matter what kind of academic paper you need, it is simple and secure to hire an essay writer for a price you can afford,” promises EssayShark.com. “Save more time for yourself.”

In an email, EssayShark’s public relations department said the company did not consider its services to be cheating, and that it warned students the essays are for “research and reference purposes only” and are not to be passed off as a student’s own work.

“We do not condone, encourage or knowingly take part in plagiarism or any other acts of academic fraud,” it said.

A representative for UvoCorp, another of the companies, said its services were not meant to encourage cheating. “The idea behind our product design is to help people understand and conform to specific requirements they deal with, and our writers assist in approaching this task in a proper way,” the representative said in an email. “According to our policies, customers cannot further use any consultative materials they receive from us as their own.”

Representatives for Academized and Ace-MyHomework did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

A major scandal involving contract cheating in Australia caused university officials there to try to crack down on the practice. A similar effort to confront the industry has emerged in Britain, but not in the United States.

Contract cheating is illegal in 17 states, but punishment tends to be light and enforcement rare . Experts said that no federal law in the United States, or in Kenya, forbids the purchase or sale of academic papers, although questions remain about whether the industry complies with tax laws .

“Because American institutions haven’t been whacked over the head like Australian schools were, it’s easier to pretend that it’s not happening,” said Bill Loller, vice president of product management for Turnitin, a company that develops software to detect plagiarism . “But it’s absolutely happening .”

Mr. Loller said he had worked with some colleges that have students who have never shown up for class or completed a single assignment. “They’ve contracted it all out,” he said.

Contract cheating is harder to detect than plagiarism because ghostwritten essays will not be flagged when compared with a database of previously submitted essays; they are generally original works — simply written by the wrong person . But this year, Turnitin rolled out a new product called Authorship Investigate, which uses a host of clues — including sentence patterns and a document’s metadata — to attempt to determine if it was written by the student who turned it in.

Some of the websites operate like eBay, with buyers and sellers bidding on specific assignments. Others operate like Uber, pairing desperate students with available writers. Either way, the identities and locations of both the writers and the students are masked from view, as are the colleges the assignments are for .

Still, in some of the assignments that Ms. Mbugua provided to The Times, names of colleges that the essays were meant for became clear. One assignment asked students to write about a solution to a community problem, and the essay Ms. Mbugua provided described difficulties with parking around Arizona State University. “Students could always just buck up and take the walk,” the paper said.

Bret Hovell, a spokesman for Arizona State University, said the school was not able to determine whether the essay had been turned in.

In Kenya, a country with a per capita annual income of about $1,700, successful writers can earn as much as $2,000 a month, according to Roynorris Ndiritu, who said he has thrived while writing academic essays for others.

Roynorris Ndiritu , 28, who asked that only part of his name be used because he feared retribution from others in the industry in Kenya, graduated with a degree in civil engineering and still calls that his “passion.” But after years of applying unsuccessfully for jobs, he said, he began writing for others full time. He has earned enough to buy a car and a piece of land, he said, but it has left him jaded about the promises he heard when he was young about the opportunities that would come from studying hard in college.

“You can even get the highest level of education, and still, you might not get that job,” he said.

In interviews with people in Kenya who said they had worked in contract cheating, many said they did not view the practice as unethical.

As more foreign writers have joined the industry, some sites have begun to advertise their American ties, in a strange twist on globalization and outsourcing. One site lists “bringing jobs back to America ” as a key goal. American writers, who sometimes charge as much as $30 per page, say that they offer higher-quality service, without British spellings or idioms that might raise suspicion about an essay’s authorship.

Ms. Mbugua, the Kenyan university student, worked for as little as $4 a page. She said she began carrying a notebook, jotting down vocabulary words she encountered in movies and novels to make her essays more valuable.

Ms. Mbugua, 25, lost her mother to diabetes in 200 1, when she was in the second grade. She vowed to excel in school so that she would one day be able to support her younger brother and sister.

A government loan and aunts and uncles helped her pay for college. But she also worked, landing in an office of 10 writers completing other people’s assignments , including those of American students. The boss stayed up all night, bidding for work on several sites, and then farmed it out in the morning .

“Any job that is difficult, they’re like, ‘Give it to Mary,’” she said.

There were low points. During summer break , work slowed to a trickle. Once, she agonized so much over an American history paper about how the Great Depression ended that she rejected the job at the last minute, and had to pay an $18 fine.

But Ms. Mbugua said she loved learning, and sometimes wished that she were the one enrolled in the American universities she was writing papers for. Once, when she was asked to write an admissions essay for a student in China who was applying to the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University, she said she dreamed of what it would be like to go there herself.

Eventually, Ms. Mbugua said, she decided to strike out on her own, and bought an account from an established writer with UvoCorp. But UvoCorp forbids such transfers, and Ms. Mbugua said the account she had purchased was shut down.

Now Ms. Mbugua finds herself at a crossroads, unsure of what to do next. She graduated from her university in 2018 and has sent her résumé to dozens of employers. Lately she has been selling kitchen utensils.

Ms. Mbugua said she never felt right about the writing she did in the names of American students and others.

“I’ve always had somehow a guilty conscience,” she said.

“People say the education system in the U.S., U.K. and other countries is on a top notch,” she said. “I wouldn’t say those students are better than us,” she said, later adding, “We have studied. We have done the assignments.”

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“It’s something that is known about now but wasn’t when we started,” says King, who also produces under the banner of her company White Teeth, alongside Lammas Park MD Anna Smith Tenser, Bona Orakwue and Tabs Breese.

“That’s one of the interesting things about the journey of the film. It’s ahead of the Zeitgeist, so we’re constantly wondering what is going to happen next.”

Kingori, who was born in Kenya and moved to the UK as a teenager, made history in 2021 when she became the youngest black Oxbridge professor and the youngest woman to ever be awarded a full professorship at the University of Oxford.

The Shadow Scholars was already underway by that point after a casual meet-up in 2019, in which Kingori mentioned she had stumbled on some surprising data during a talk at the interdisciplinary research hub, the Oxford Internet Institute, which suggested fake essay writing was a new area of economic activity in Kenya.

Not much had been written about the phenomenon of the essay mills at that point but a report out of Canada in 2019 about a Kenyan man who had written essays for more than 100 students in the same year group in a single university, encouraged Kingori and King to go on a recce in Kenya.

“The literature was saying things like these aren’t good writers, they’re often just plagiarizing and copying and pasting, but I deduced, not only must this be big but also that the work must be good if it’s happening on this volume,” she said.

“Luckily, Patricia was on maternity so I said, ‘Hey, would you like to bring your new baby to Kenya?’ She’d been working there for the last 15 years or so and had a series of relationships that introduced us to the first ever writer that we met, which then opened the door to more conversations.”

Initially, they gathered information through a focus group with writers, which were not filmed.

“That conversation really blew our minds. I remember being back at the hotel, and the two of us just being like, “This is unbelievable”, in terms of the scale of what they were doing. They were talking about these back-to-back days where they were setting their alarms for 3am to be up in time to get the work, then working pretty much through the day and night,” says King.

“One aspect that was really interesting to us was that we’d heard anecdotally that there weren’t very many women involved, but as you see in the film, it’s something that is actually heavily populated by females and single moms.”

Focusing on the stories of writers Mercy, Emmanuel and Chege, filmmaker King was keen to steer clear of sensationalism, or playing into hackneyed tropes about Africans, and also sought to protect the people for whom the essay writing was an important source of income.

While the subjects complain about the long nights and health impact of hunching over a computer for hours, these writers are skilled digital natives with an upwardly mobile outlook who take pride in their work, feel empathy for the students they write for, and relish riding the digital wave, doing battle with geo-blocking along the way.

“I didn’t want to paint people like Mercy and Chege simply as people who are exploited but as people who are actively engaged in their own liberation through innovative ideas and working as hard as they do and creating systems to counter things that are designed against them,” says King,

“They are the people who are populating this space. They’ve got their own sort of professional rules and regulations that they’re trying to keep, and honor codes.”

The findings also shook Kingori and King’s beliefs around education as a tool for empowerment and advancement and raised questions around centuries-old racist beliefs around the intellectual inferiority of Africans, and the injustice of the lack of opportunities for these writers who have proven their academic prowess one hundred times over through their work.

“As we were filming, it really occurred to me that education is intergenerational. Every student I spoke to, even the anonymized student who was cheating in North America, their family really wanted them to get a degree. They’d put their life savings into it because they believed it would get them ahead,” says King.

“Once that started emerge, it was interesting to me, to draw a parallel between the professor (Kingori) and the people who are doing this work, because Patricia was from Kenya and maybe had her circumstances not been such that her mother decided to move and had the opportunity to do so, she would be another brilliant mind working in this industry… so many hopes and dreams are pinned to education.”

Another key development in the film’s evolution was the decision to anonymize the interviewees, in response to a growing global backlash against the essay mills as the film progressed, with some countries bringing in legislation outlawing their use.

“Up until the third year of filming, we were confident that we were going to be able to show their identities but then a number of legal changes occurred, one of which being the ban in the UK,” says King.

“We decided it was in their best interest to make the writers non-identifiable. It wasn’t an easy task after three and a half years of filming, thinking that we were going to show them. We’d shot it incredibly intimately. We’d done close ups, filmed at night with people as well as multiple people in one space.

The production worked with Ryan Laney, visual effects supervisor at Teus Media, who created “digital veils” using generative AI to give synthesized new faces to the interviewees.

“It’s actually extremely innovative and new,” says King, adding that the slight blurring of the faces also fed into discourse of the interviewees being anonymous academic talents who help Western students obtain their qualifications.

“There was a sense of disappointment for all of us, because it really had been a desire to make visible the people who had been made invisible by this system, by these structural forces,” says King. “The best the way we could really honor that was to make sure that their voices and their lives were portrayed truthfully, but with an added layer of protection.”

A more recent twist in the story, as the film completed post-production this summer, was the so-called Gen Z demonstrations which broke out in Kenya in June, as young people took to the streets and internet to protest tax hikes and an attempt to legislate digital products and work.

While, the film does not capture the protests, King suggests the tech savvy protagonists of her film epitomize Kenya’s Gen Z.

“What was interesting in terms of the timeline of the film was how it was at least having a conversation with what we were seeing,” says King. She hopes to show the doc in Kenya soon: “Our plan was always to have impact screenings where we take the film back to the some of the specific communities but showing it on the African continent feels like an absolute necessity.”

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

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"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.