Hmmm… I have sometimes wondered how a certain highly-qualified person could be so dumb… and this could be the explanation… 
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Oh Stella I have worked with so many well educated idiots in my years as an accountant/tax adviser. Schools, colleges and universities seem to have become exam factories and aren’t preparing kids for working/living in the real world.
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I was listening to the radio this morning where one of the entrepreneurs who sell bespoke essays was justifying his work. Unbelievable.
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It is difficult to do in an exam, impossible even, at least I hope so…but for unsupervised work, downloading an essay rather than reading, thinking about something and then coming up with your own work is common. I give those people 0. I spent yesterday at UBM talking about that in postgraduate work 
we have software we can run it through to pick up plagiarism but getting someone else to do the work is undetectable until the student is examined preferably by viva.
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Student nurses have to do an essay early on in their training for which they have to do research This is then checked for plagiarism. The trouble is they have been asking the same question for years so the same information is used over and over. Also people tend to use the same ways of expressing themselves which is also picked up on
Missed that - what was his excuse?
He said that they provided individual essays including links to the source material and they expected their customers to read the essay received, research the topic via the links provided then re-write it in their own style. The presenter did not believe that any of the customers would do that.
It’s fraud. Employers will expect a degree Certificate to be a level of proof that a candidate has the skill set needed to solve problems or debate outcomes based on learned knowledge and individual research. They would also see them as proof that a potential employee could work under pressure. Being able to buy a degree with a credit card cannot be allowed. In my day we were given a stark warning, plagiarism would result in expulsion. It still went on but not on a commercial level like this and those who were known to do so were looked down upon by their peers. The trouble is once standards start to drop different things become acceptable.
Agree totally. If the essays in question go in any way towards the final grades there is no other word for it.
Even if it is just course work which is assessed less formally it is fraud.
It’s also stupid, students making use of these facilities are simply not going to learn the subject properly and will be significantly less able than their grades suggest. It also says a lot about their attitude - unfortunately when they enter the world of work there won’t be a “phone a fried” option.
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