online cheating essay

Cheating in Online Education: Myth vs. Reality

Although online learning is becoming more and more prevalent, there still persist myths about what it means to be an online student. One frequently discussed topic in the world of online education is cheating. According to one 2009 study, 73.8% of students surveyed felt that it was easier to cheat in an online class. This skewed perspective — that cheating is so easy — can lead to misconceptions about how prevalent cheating really is in the online setting.

Because online courses often do not involve face-to-face instruction, the uninitiated can easily fall prey to the idea that cheating is rampant. After all, how could a professor that is miles or even states away prevent students from just googling the answers to their tests? And if no one is checking, isn’t everyone doing it?

Myths about cheating in online education persist because of a lack of information. The idea that cheating is unchecked in virtual classrooms is simply untrue. In fact, while there have been conflicting results from multiple studies done on the issue of cheating in online courses, there is nothing to suggest that cheating is much more common in every online situation.

Following are five commonly held misconceptions about cheating in online education. The truth of the matter might surprise you.

Myth: Online universities don’t really care about cheating

Reality: There is some belief that online universities do not have the same rigorous academic standards that traditional colleges and universities do. However, the truth is that most so-called online universities are also traditional universities and that in fact these universities, on the whole, are vigilant about preventing cheating. Dr. Susan Aldridge, President of Drexel University Online, indicates that at her school, “We create solid barriers to cheating, while also making every effort to identify and sanction it as it occurs or directly after the fact.”

It is also important to consider the investment factor. Online learning programs invest in technology that will improve student outcomes and support success — including Learning Management Systems (LMS’s). While an online course could technically be proctored with little more than email and a message board, by using an LMS, a college or university is sending a strong signal that they care about the integrity of the course. In addition to plagiarism detection (see below), these systems can integrate with other cheating detection technologies that offer identity verification and other features designed to thwart cheating.

Further, colleges like the University of Central Florida invest heavily in training their online faculty. The UCF course IDL6543 is designed to ensure that faculty is comfortable teaching in an online environment. No faculty training in online learning would be complete without covering the possibility of cheating and methods for detection of possible academic dishonesty in an online environment.

These varied investments, in technology as well as training, demonstrate that online programs do indeed care about cheating and do everything in their power to detect and prevent it.

Myth: It’s impossible for online instructors to identify cheating

Reality: When you think about cheating, it is easy to go back to high school when an instructor at the front of the room sat watching vigilantly as each student completed a test or quiz, admonishing any student who did not keep his eyes on his own paper. Because online education does not have that physical presence, it can be easy to think that when cheating does occur, the perpetrators will not get caught.

However, just as universities who offer online courses certainly do care about academic honesty, so do they put into place mechanisms that can detect different types of cheating in the online setting. For example, according to Dr. Aldridge, Drexel University uses a number of technological advancements to minimize cheating occurrences, including:

• a variety of virtual test-taking strategies that have proven effective when it comes to preventing students from cheating on exams
• authentication technologies to electronically affirm an online student’s identity
• webcams to verify physical features like facial structure that can be checked against government-issued IDs
• software called BioSig-ID that uses keystroke analysis to recognize keyboard typing patterns, based on rhythm, pressure, and style, which is nearly as accurate as actual fingerprint authentication
• ProctorU, which integrates webcams with microphones that enable well-trained live proctors to monitor and/or record test-takers, by watching body language, eye movement, or other physical attributes known to indicate suspicious behavior

Clearly, institutions like Drexel University care about identifying cheating and are willing to invest in technology and techniques to minimize its occurrence.

Myth: Plagiarism checkers are easily fooled

Reality: Cheating on tests and quizzes by obtaining outside information, or even getting the answers, is just one form of cheating. Plagiarism — the use of another’s work without citation or attribution — is and has been a top concern in higher education since long before the introduction of online learning. According to the Harvard Guide to Using Sources , “In academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.”

Plagiarism, both intentional and accidental, happens in all types of colleges and universities, both in traditional classroom settings and online courses. However, online course instructors may actually have an advantage in detecting plagiarism. Because online courses rely on digital submissions of all work, plagiarism detection is baked into the process.

One key reason that plagiarism is so rarely able to pass through the online submission process is due to institutional investment in LMS’s that put plagiarism and academic dishonestly front and center in the software development process. For example, Plagscan is a plagiarism detection technology that can integrate seamlessly with popular LMS applications including Blackboard, Moodle, and Schoolology. Further, the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative partnered with VeriCite to incorporate plagiarism detection software into its LMS. As a significant network of online schools, this is yet another indicator that schools across the country take plagiarism seriously and are constantly on the lookout for the best detection methods.

Online submission applications like those offered above can automatically check for formatting errors from cut and pasted text and uncited passages that match up with other papers or sources. In the case of accidental plagiarism, students can even run their own papers through these types of detection programs via their LMS.

While no method of plagiarism detection is 100% foolproof, online students cannot expect to get away with it easily.

Myth: Online students are more likely to cheat

Reality: In a recent study from Marshall University , 635 undergraduate and graduate students were surveyed on student cheating behaviors. The researchers found that while 32.1% of respondents admitted to cheating in a face-to-face class, 32.7% admitted to cheating in an online course. The difference between these two numbers is quite small and it is also important to note that overall, more students admitted to “inappropriate behavior” vis a vis academic dishonesty in traditional classroom settings than did in online classrooms.

While results from a single study are never enough to make sweeping generalizations, the Marshall University survey certainly implies that cheating in online courses — at least under the purview of this specific university — is hardly rampant and is certainly not much more common than it is in a more traditional classroom setting.

Another study took another tack in establishing how common cheating in online exams is, as compared to face to face exams. While the Marshall study and many other cheating-based studies use self-reporting, Testing a model to predict online cheating—Much ado about nothing by Victoria Beck, examined data without relying on self-reporting. Instead, Beck uses indicators like GPA and class rank to predict exam scores, then compares those predictions with actual scores. The results of this analysis were consistent with the Marshall study and found that online students were no more likely to cheat on exams than those in face to face or hybrid learning environments.

Myth: Since all online students cheat, it isn’t that big of a deal

Reality: No matter how much easier it seems that cheating would be online, the fact is that students who choose to cheat are, as cliche as it sounds, just cheating themselves. The reality is that many students who choose to take courses online do so because they are dedicated to furthering their education no matter where or when they have to take courses. Academic honesty is critical to the continued success of online education programs and it is up to students, faculty, and institutions to ensure that the highest standards are upheld.

Adjusting to an Online Cheating Environment

By shoellis

By: Sierra President, Ethics and Policy Intern

Today, cheating is easier than ever. Regardless of its ease, cheating is still frowned upon in most traditional academic settings and will lead to negative consequences if caught. And yet, people continue to cheat. The recent advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), an overload of online resources, and a lack of student understanding regarding academic policies make it more likely that students will cheat and get away with it. Since we are in a digital age, where notebooks are replaced with screens and pencils are traded for keyboards, academics must find ways to regulate the use of these new technologies. If they don’t, learning and integrity may be put on the back burner while students still reap the benefit of their ill-gotten degrees.

What is cheating?

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, cheating is defined as “to deprive of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud.” [1] However, this blog is focused on cheating in an academic environment. Many universities have their definitions for cheating and typically consider it academic dishonesty.

For instance, the Office of Student Conduct website says, “Generally, academic misconduct can be thought of as any behavior that involves the giving, taking, or presenting of information by a student that unethically or fraudulently aids the student or another on any work which is to be considered in the determination of a grade or the completion of academic requirements or the enhancement of that student’s record or academic career.” [2]

The website also describes the most common forms of cheating, which include:

• Copying from another assignment or test,
• Collaborating with others on an assignment with the professor has required independent work,
• Using outside resources when completing an assignment or test,
• Falsifying test answers or grades. [3]

Under its Code of Student Conduct, NC State also expands its definition of cheating to account for technological advances. Specifically, the code says, “Using materials, equipment, or assistance in connection with an assignment, examination, or other academic exercise which have not been authorized by the faculty member, including but not limited to notes, calculator, or other technology.” [4]

Many universities nationwide have policies like NC State’s. Students should acknowledge these definitions, but educators must also recognize the benefits of using online resources.

Why are students cheating?

According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, 68 percent of undergraduate students say they have cheated on their assignments. [5] It might seem obvious why students cheat, but the University of Buffalo’s Office of Academic Integrity released a list that describes multiple reasons why students cheat, including some that may not immediately come to mind. [6] This list includes:

• Poor time management,
• Wanting to help friends,
• Fear of failure,
• Because everyone else is doing it,
• Unmonitored environment or weak assignment design, and
• Lack of academic policy understanding.

In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education , Owen Kichizo Terry expanded on the reasoning as to why students cheat by saying that the emergence of AI, like ChatGPT, makes it harder to get caught. [7] In the article, he provided a blueprint for how ChatGPT can be used to write an essay without detection. Terry argued, “In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own.” He said that ChatGPT can give students multiple ideas for a singular prompt. So, if a student uses one of the chatbot’s options and changes the words, then a professor may not think twice about who wrote it.

Kathryn Hulick wrote a ScienceNews article arguing that since ChatGPT and similar programs create new material, it is hard to consider plagiarism because plagiarism is when someone else’s existing work is copied without credit. Hulick also argued that, while there are many illegitimate uses for the technology, AI can also help with writing, like how calculators help with math, and Google helps find facts. Hulick also said that ChatGPT, for example, can help students struggling with sentence structure and grammar. [8] It is likely that when universities do not have policies about tools like chatbots that use AI, students may not see it as an issue to use them for assignments. While most universities are actively developing their AI policies, professors have recommended that students unsure about when and how to use AI should come to them for a conversation. This is particularly important since students may not realize the potential negative impacts of using AI.

What are the punishments for cheating?

Punishments for cheating can vary based on the assignment, professor, and academic institution. Ironically, I asked ChatGPT what can happen if someone cheats on an assignment. ChatGPT outlined several penalties that universities could require for cheating, which include:

• Receiving a failing grade
• Academic probation
• Loss of privileges (access to campus facilities or activities)
• A note on the student’s permanent record
• Required completion of an academic integrity course
• Suspension or expulsion
• Legal action

It is important to note that ChatGPT only provided an overview of the possible penalties, meaning that it is possible for a student not to receive any punishment or to receive something that is not on this list. Each professor, department, and university has a different way of handling cheating, some of which may include a warning system.

In 2020, Georgia Tech had a cheating scandal when it was discovered that multiple students in an online physics class were using Chegg to get complete answers to their final exam. [9] Chegg is a company that provides digital homework help. Since users can freely post on the website, the answers to some assignments are posted in their entirety, giving students another way to cheat. The physics class received an email stating that if they admitted to using Chegg, they would be offered a second chance to take the exam. If a student did not admit to cheating but was found to have been using Chegg during the exam, they were reported to the Dean’s Office for Academic Misconduct and recommended to fail the course. Similar Chegg investigations were also underway at Texas A&M and Boston University. [10] Chegg states in their honor code that they do not condone the use of their website for cheating and will act against anyone who violates this, which should deter students from these actions. [11]

Jarrod Morgan, the founder of online test proctoring site ProctorU, said finances are a huge stressor for college students. [12] The possibility of having to repeat a course and pay for it again can add to their stress.

How can professors and administrators limit cheating?

The easy answer is to bring back in-person paper and pencil tests. However, the ease of using technology in classrooms makes this an unlikely option. As of 2023, 87 percent of classrooms globally use digital teaching practices. [13] There is now an “arms race” between technological advances that make cheating easier for students and technologies meant to detect or prevent cheating. Below are some tools and initiatives that can help educators monitor online cheating.

Vicky Harmon, the instructional design and manager of professional development at Arizona State University-Tempe, said, “If a student is going to do it, they’re going to do it, but we try to make it as difficult as possible.” [14] As a result of professors trying to manage cheating concerns, below are some helpful tools:

• Online Test Proctoring which monitors and records a student’s test taking to ensure outside materials aren’t used.
• Plagiarism Software which helps professors cross reference written assignments with possibly plagiarized information.
• AI Detection Software is discussed more in-depth in Ethics of College Students Using ChatGPT
• Lockdown browsers require students to download software on their computers, which limits the number of browsers that the student can open while they are taking exams.

AI Advancement Initiatives, Guidelines and Policies

Aside from using software to detect and prevent cheating, many universities are making students and faculty aware of changes in AI.

In Fall of 2023, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created the UNC-Chapel Hill Generative AI Committee to help students and staff adapt to AI. This committee included a broad range of faculty and staff members and provided guidance for employees and students about how to use AI in classroom, research, and administrative work. This guidance outlines the following main points about the use of AI in teaching and class assignments:

• Students should only use AI to help them think, not to complete assignments,
• AI should be used responsibly and ethically,
• Students are fully responsible for their submitted work and cannot blame AI for anything wrong or false,
• Students should document any time they use AI,
• Professors reserve the right to change specific AI guidelines depending on the assignment/exam, and
• Confidential or personal information should not be put into AI tools.

UNC-Chapel Hill also has a “Carolina AI Literacy” initiative, which currently provides three instructional videos for students on:

• AI prompting and thinking,
• AI misinformation and biases, and
• AI plagiarism and citation. [15]

UNC-Chapel Hill also has Generative AI Training Modules for faculty members. These modules are split into these categories:

• Module 1 – Introduction to Generative AI
• Module 2 – The Art & Science of Prompting AI
• Module 3 – Teaching with AI
• Module 4 – Ensuring Academic Integrity with AI
• Module 5 – Launching Your AI Trajectory [16]

The UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Center provides tips that explain what generative AI is, how it can be used in education, and what the downsides of it can be. [17]

What is the takeaway?

In summary, there is no way around it: technology-based school learning is here to stay. Instead of trying to avoid it, professors need to be upfront with students as early as possible about what is and what is not accepted.

Professors should also take advantage of the online tools that are available to help them in their professional duties, including monitoring cheating.

With the quick emergence of AI, students may find out about new platforms before a professor can give the okay on its usage. To combat this, universities need to create and continuously update initiatives regarding AI. As a result of the fast-paced evolution of AI, UNC-Chapel Hill uses recommendations and best practices about AI usage, but in the future, this may shift towards requiring certain behavior through policy. It is also important for students and faculty alike to cooperate and communicate during this process since this new way of learning is new for everyone.

[1] Cheat Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster

[2] Academic Integrity: Overview | Office of Student Conduct (ncsu.edu)

[3] Academic Misconduct | Office of Student Conduct (ncsu.edu)

[4] POL 11.35.01 – Code of Student Conduct – Policies, Regulations & Rules (ncsu.edu)

[5] Think Twice Before Cheating in Online Courses (usnews.com)

[6] Common Reasons Students Cheat – Office of Academic Integrity – University at Buffalo

[7] I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT. (chronicle.com)

[8] How ChatGPT and similar AI will disrupt education (sciencenews.org)

[9] Georgia Tech warns physics students who cheated: Confess or fail (ajc.com)

[10] Texas A&M investigating ‘large scale’ cheating case as universities see more academic misconduct in era of online classes – ABC13 Houston

[11] Honor Code | Chegg

[12] How Cheating in College Hurts Students (usnews.com)

[13] What Percentage of Schools Use Technology in the Classroom? (techyinspire.com)

[14] Think Twice Before Cheating in Online Courses (usnews.com)

[15] Videos | Carolina AI Literacy (unc.edu)

[16] Generative AI Training Modules (tarheels.live)

[17] Generative AI in Academic Writing – The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (unc.edu)

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Another problem with shifting education online: cheating

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When universities went online in response to Covid-19, so did the tests their students took. But one of the people who logged on to take an exam in a pre-med chemistry class at a well-known mid-Atlantic university turned out not to be a student at all.

He was a plant. An imposter. A paid ringer.

Proctors — remote monitors some schools have hired to watch test-takers through their webcams — discovered by reviewing video recordings that this same person had taken tests for at least a dozen different students enrolled at seven universities across the country. The camera caught a spreadsheet tacked to the wall of his workspace with student names, course schedules, remote login information and passwords for websites that could feed him answers.

“We can only imagine what the rate of inappropriate testing activity is when no one is watching.” Scott McFarland, CEO, ProctorU

But he was in Qatar, beyond the reach of any attempts to hold him accountable, according to proctors familiar with the situation. They could not say what happened to the students who allegedly hired him.

It was a dramatic case, but far from unique. Universal online testing has created a documented increase in cheating, often because universities, colleges and testing companies were unprepared for the scale of the transformation or unable or unwilling to pay for safeguards, according to faculty and testing experts.

Even with trained proctors watching test-takers and checking their IDs, cheating is up. Before Covid-19 forced millions of students online, one of the companies that provides that service, ProctorU, caught people cheating on fewer than 1 percent of the 340,000 exams it administered from January through March. During the height of remote testing, the company says, the number of exams it supervised jumped to 1.3 million from April through June, and the cheating rate rose above 8 percent.

“We can only imagine what the rate of inappropriate testing activity is when no one is watching,” said Scott McFarland, CEO of ProctorU.

Related: As students fill summer courses, many ask: Why aren’t all colleges open in the summers?

And for most online test-takers, no one has been watching. One reason is that, as demand for online testing spiked, proctoring capacity was overwhelmed. One company, Examity, suspended its live proctoring services during the demand surge when its 1,000 proctors in India were locked down to curb the spread of the coronavirus there.

Ninety-three percent of instructors think students are more likely to cheat online than in person , according to a survey conducted in May by the publishing and digital education company Wiley. Only a third said they were using some type of proctoring to prevent it. Many colleges and universities moved ahead with online testing without supervision to save money. Others opted instead for less expensive, scaled-down kinds of test security, such as software that can lock a web browser while a student takes a test.

While locking a browser during an exam may help — and about 15 percent of instructors take that step, the Wiley survey found — it can’t stop other forms of cheating.

“You cannot give an exam if it is not proctored,” said Charles M. Krousgrill, a professor of engineering at Purdue, where faculty have been more willing to publicly discuss cheating than their counterparts at many other schools.

When, after the Covid shutdowns, Purdue gave students extra time to take their tests online, said Krousgrill, “there was rampant dishonesty.” He described some students in his department organizing videoconferences and sharing answers. “Once we went to online instruction, we could not watch. [The students] knew it, and knew the game was up for grabs. There were lots of kids who got caught up in that.”  

ProctorU, which provides proctors to be sure online test-takers follow the rules, caught people cheating on fewer than 1 percent of exams it administered before the Covid-19 outbreak. Since then the number has jumped to more than 8 percent.

Online tests have also meant a booming business for companies that sell homework and test answers, including Chegg and Course Hero. Students pay subscription fees to get answers to questions on tests or copies of entire tests with answers already provided. The tests are uploaded by other students who have already taken them, in exchange for credits, or answers are quickly provided by “tutors” who work for the sites.

For $9.95 a month, Chegg is offering a new service that provides fast answers to math problems submitted by smartphone camera, step-by-step solution included. Snap a pic, get the answer.

Related: While focus is on fall, students’ choices about college will have a far longer impact

Though these sites have been around since before the pandemic, their use appears to have exploded as more tests are given online. Students used Chegg to allegedly cheat on online exams and tests in the spring at schools including Georgia Tech, Boston University, North Carolina State and Purdue, according to faculty at those institutions and news reports. Universities prefer not to talk about cheating incidents, and federal privacy law limits how much detail they can provide.

At North Carolina State, more than 200 of the 800 students in a single Statistics 311 class were referred for disciplinary action for getting answers to exam questions from a company that offers online tutoring services.

At North Carolina State, more than 200 of the 800 students in a single Statistics 311 class were referred for disciplinary action for using “tutor-provided solutions” to exam questions from Chegg, said Tyler Johnson, the course coordinator.

After the exam, Johnson said, he asked his university to get Chegg to remove the questions, citing copyright law. Chegg did, and furnished a report of users who had either posted or accessed the exam materials.

“I was initially really naive to the extent to which these services are utilized by students,” he said.

Related: Amid pandemic, graduate student workers are winning long-sought contracts

The North Carolina State students have protested in a petition that they didn’t know using Chegg would be considered cheating, and that Johnson showed “no regard to the personal stresses we are enduring and have endured throughout the semester.”

Krousgrill and his colleagues at Purdue asked Chegg to remove their exam materials, too, and asked for help identifying cheaters. They found “a massive number” of students who had used Chegg to get test answers, he said. In one class, Krousgrill said, as many as 60 students out of 250 had done it, and 100 students in a colleague’s class were identified as having used Chegg in a similar fashion.

“I do feel for the students,” Eric Nauman, a professor of engineering and director of the engineering honors program at Purdue, told a web panel for engineering faculty and majors convened to discuss the use of Chegg and similar services for cheating. “If one person starts using it and gets a better grade and these exams are graded on a curve, then they’re in big trouble.”

The number of students who are cheating is almost certainly higher than the number being caught or reported. Research has shown that instructors believe cheating happens much less often than students do , which means they may not be looking for it. When they do find it, many choose to simply give cheaters an F, without reporting the incidents further.

“I do feel for the students. … If one person starts using [an online service] and gets a better grade and these exams are graded on a curve, then they’re in big trouble.” Eric Nauman, professor of engineering and director of the engineering honors program, Purdue University

“I had a conversation with a group of students several months ago,” said James Pitarresi, vice provost at Binghamton University. “And one of the students said, ‘Look, you know, probably 80 percent of the class is looking at Chegg. What are you going to do, expel all of us?’ ”

For most faculty, their only recourse is to ask the companies to remove their exam materials and identify cheaters. But that can take days or even weeks, and happens after the materials have already been shared and an exam is over. It also puts the burden on professors to go site by site, search for their material and ask that it be taken down. “I go through every couple of months and write to them and say, ‘Please take these 200 or 300 items off your site,’ ” said Krousgrill. “But that takes a lot of time.” Especially, he said, when his students are getting answers in 10 minutes.

The cheaters are often way ahead. Message boards at Reddit are filled with warnings to students not to use their school email addresses or real names when signing up for Chegg or similar services. That makes catching cheaters nearly impossible. Even when professors try to preempt Chegg and other sites ahead of time, as one did by embedding a trackable code in test questions, students figured it out and worked around it, according to faculty familiar with the example, although they wouldn’t identify which institution did this.

Chegg, which offers online tutoring services, declined to comment at length. A spokesman said the company supports academic integrity and hasn’t seen “any relative increase in honor code issues since the Covid-19 crisis began.” In an interview with The New York Times, Chegg chief executive Dan Rosensweig, when  asked whether his company’s services were being used for cheating, said: “Let’s face it: Students have always found a way, whether it’s in fraternities, or whether they go to Google. But Chegg is not built for that.”

The company reported  $153 million in revenue for the second quarter , when the pandemic shutdowns were at their peak — a 63 percent year-over-year increase. 

Related: Could the online, for-profit college industry be “a winner in this crisis”?

Chegg CFO Andy Brown told investors in a video call, “We’ve clearly been seeing tailwinds since the shelter in place and kids were learning off campus.”

Colleges were not the only institutions to rush examinations online. Advanced placement and other tests also went virtual in the spring and the parent College Board said it was prepared to move the SAT online in the fall if necessary but then reversed itself.*  So did law school entrance and placement exams, professional certification tests for financial managers and food handlers and many others.

The College Board , which administers the AP tests, reconfigured these exams to be “open book” when they were moved online, but without proctoring. Students reportedly used private messaging apps to collaborate on answers. Even before the exams began, College Board officials tweeted about “a ring of students who were developing plans to cheat” and canceled their registrations.

The College Board won’t disclose whether any cheating actually happened. A spokesman would say only that “at-home testing presents some different security challenges” and that the organization took steps to prevent it.

There are other reasons besides just having the opportunity that students are cheating online. About a quarter of students “indicated that it should be expected that students will use whatever is available to them in a take-home or online test ,” according to research published in the spring by the Journal of the National College Testing Association. It said “any inaction on the part of the faculty to provide a secure exam administration was seen [by students] as an indication that the faculty did not care about” cheating.

“One student with a pattern of cheating is an ethical problem for that student. Multiple students with a pattern of cheating devalues any grade or degree they might be receiving,” Steve Saladin, a co-author of the study, said. “And when cheating spreads to many students in many programs and schools, degrees and grades cease to provide a measure of an individual’s preparedness for a profession or position. And perhaps even more importantly, it suggests a society that blindly accepts any means to an end as a given.”

*This story has been updated to correct that the SAT was not moved online in the spring.

This story about online testing was produced by  The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our  higher education newsletter .

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Home > Blog > Tips for Online Students > Tips for Students > Can You Cheat On Online Classes: Reality And Consequences

Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

Can You Cheat On Online Classes: Reality And Consequences

Updated: November 28, 2024

Published: August 4, 2020

Even some of the best students may admit to having cheated at some point in their academic career. And, whether they have or haven’t, they may wonder, “Can you cheat on online classes?” as it may seem easier to do so than in a regular classroom environment.

But cheating not only puts you at risk of facing serious consequences, it also can bring down the overall reputation of your school. In an online program, students may think it is easier to get away with cheating, or that it’s much more common among students. But here’s why it’s wrong to think that way and why you should think twice before you attempt cheating in an online course.

How Can People Cheat In Online Classes?

Students may cheat in their classes for all kinds of reasons. It may not be necessarily because they want to break the rules, but because they’ve been overwhelmed in their coursework and they want to make sure their grades are not jeopardized. By cheating, they can put some of their worries aside.

Yet, cheating in a college course can actually leave you with more worries than had you not cheated in the first place. If you cheat, you can risk failing in your class, being put on academic probation, or getting kicked out of school.

That being said, some students may wonder if certain types of cheating are a lot easier to get away with in an online class than it would be in a physical classroom. Although you won’t be able to peek at someone else’s test to steal an answer, couldn’t you look up answers while taking an online test? What about asking a friend to take a quiz for you? And isn’t plagiarism much easier to do since your teacher has never met you in person?

These are just some of the ways students may think about cheating in an online class.

Why Not Cheat For A Good Grade?

Considering plagiarism is one of the most common forms of cheating in an institution of higher education, students may find other ways around writing that essay than copying and pasting paragraphs from sources online. These days, students are also paying for writers to write their essays and papers for them, which is a form of plagiarism many professors may not be aware of or pick up on, as the writing is still original. This may lead some students to think that a little cheating can go a long way in an online class, earning you an easy A.

In a physical classroom, this type of plagiarism may be easier to recognize as most professors can tell if the student’s writing reflects their personality or not. At the very least, they can sense a disconnect or inconsistency in their papers. Students may also fear cheating in this way in a physical classroom because if they do get caught, they’d have to face the professor in person, creating a stronger sense of accountability for the student, but may not be as worried in an online class.

This can make online schools more vulnerable to cheating, but because professors are aware this can happen, they often go that extra step to check if their students are being honest.

Cheating And Academic Integrity Go Hand-In-Hand

Not all online colleges are breeding grounds for cheating, and if they are, that’s probably a school you’ll want to avoid. If cheating is easy to do and therefore rampant in an online school setting (especially a for-profit school), it can bring down the overall quality of the school itself and thus the quality of your degree.

Therefore, if you’re not concerned so much that you’re going to cheat but that other students in your online program are, then you’ll want to make sure you attend an online school with a solid reputation. One that invokes some sense of responsibility and accountability among the students through face-to-face interaction, as well as coursework that demonstrates originality and personality that would be very difficult for a student to cheat on, even if they wanted to.

University of the People takes academic integrity seriously. We care about the quality of our school and hold all of our students up to the highest standard.

Image by thumprchgo from Pixabay

3 common myths about online cheating.

There’s quite a lot to understand about cheating in an online school. And, even if you’re not the type of student to ever consider cheating, you might be wondering if other students are getting away with it. Can this actually hurt the overall quality of your institution?

Additionally, since plagiarism is always a major concern, you might be wondering how easily it is to be caught plagiarizing, even if you didn’t intend to do so. This is a concern students have in physical classrooms, too.

Nowadays, with so much information easily accessible, some students may be plagiarizing a little bit, without even realizing it. Is this something you have to worry about?

Time to conquer the myths about online cheating.

1. Online Universities Don’t Mind Cheating

One would think that, in general, online universities wouldn’t mind cheating. But this is a myth. All online schools have their own ethics and standards that are in line with those of traditional academic institutions.

Plus, as most online schools are using some type of Learning Management Systems (LMS) instead of a simple email correspondence, this demonstrates that online schools care about the integrity of the course by keeping all students in check. If students are caught cheating, they will face whatever consequences are outlined by the school, regardless if it’s held online or in person.

2. Online Instructors Can’t Recognize Cheating

Speaking of Learning Management Systems, if you’re wondering whether or not online instructors can identify online cheating, the answer is: They can. Many of these LMS programs have cheating/plagiarism detection software integrated into them. This makes it actually quite easy for online instructors to identify cheating, perhaps even more so than in a physical classroom setting.

3. Plagiarism Checkers Don’t Work

Have you ever wondered how plagiarism checkers work? Well, in an online classroom, you can think of a plagiarism checker as a checkpoint. Because plagiarism checkers can be integrated into the LMS, some systems won’t even let you submit your paper if they can catch plagiarism right away. They catch cheating very well, indeed.

Are Online Students More Likely to Cheat?

Plagiarism-checking software aside, couldn’t a tech-savvy student find a way to get around the software that’s checking for cheating? Theoretically, maybe. But if a student is going to great lengths to get around all the mechanisms in place to catch cheating, perhaps they don’t need a degree as much as they think.

The fact of the matter is that if students are going through the effort to enroll in an online school, it may be because it’s too difficult to earn their degree in a physical classroom setting. Perhaps they have children to raise, a full-time job, or even a disability that makes online learning easier.

A study by Kessler International discovered that every 9 out of 10 students cheat in school , and it doesn’t matter if it’s online or in-person.

How Are Cheaters In Online Classes Caught?

Just because cheating in an online class may seem easier to do, as a student, you’re expected to be held up to a certain standard regardless. Just as you’re being watched when you take a test in a physical classroom to ensure you’re not cheating, there’s advanced technology that can detect all different types of cheating.

1. Proctors In Online Tests

One might think that in an online class, a student can have another student take the exam for them, and no one would ever know. But, just as you would have a test proctor in a regular classroom during a test, there’s technology that aids in online test proctoring to ensure students are not cheating. This is done through software that uses technology to scan your biometrics to ensure you are who you say you are. Webcams are also used to record students while they take their exam to look for any signs of cheating.

2. The Integration Of Plagiarism Detection Software

Because plagiarism checkers like Plagscan can be integrated directly into LMS software, your paper can and will be checked automatically for intentional or accidental plagiarism. Unlike a physical classroom where you may submit your paper printed out, your professor would have to go the extra mile to check if you’ve plagiarized. That’s not the case in an online classroom.

3. Advanced Technology: Keystroke Recognition, IP Tracking And Biometric Scanning

Even when you think you’ve found a way to avoid getting caught by a webcam and plagiarism checkers, there are other ways you can be caught cheating in an online class.

Some Learning Management Systems can detect your keystrokes to ensure you’re not copying and pasting or to detect typing patterns for a particular student. Others can track your IP address to check if another student in another location is posing as you.

Lastly, all this, combined with biometric scanning that can use facial recognition or fingerprint scanning to verify your identity, can actually make it quite easy to get caught cheating in an online classroom setting.

Image by tjevans from Pixabay

The consequences of cheating in an online class.

Think you’ve found a way to cheat without getting caught in an online class? Before you take that risk, it’s important to be aware of what the consequences are for cheating if you do get caught. Perhaps this will dissuade you from taking your chances.

If you cheat in an open online course, the first thing you should know is that you’re only hurting yourself. By cheating — especially if you do it frequently — you’re missing out on an opportunity to learn and ultimately feel that you earned your degree fair and square.

Not only this, the time you spend trying to avoid getting caught cheating could be better used to just prepare you for whatever assignment you need to do or test you need to prepare for.

Secondly, by cheating, you’re also risking damage to your institution’s reputation. Schools are only as good as their students, and if you and others cheat frequently (and get away with it), then you’re hurting that reputation.

But, most of all, if you cheat in an online class and get caught, there are risks. First, your teacher may fail you for the assignment, which can hurt your overall grade. Secondly, you could fail the entire course and have to retake it. Finally, depending on your school’s rules and regulations and the severity of your cheating, you may be expelled, which can make it harder for you to get into another school down the road.

Everyone Cheats, So What’s The Big Deal?

Cheating, unfortunately, is rampant in institutions of higher education. This may have some students thinking that it’s okay to do it once in a while. However, knowing that both physical and online schools are cracking down on cheating may stop you from trying it. The measures that online schools go to in order to preserve the academic integrity of an online institution is important to the students who attend there and the staff that work there.

If this integrity is important to you, then consider earning your degree at UoPeople. Here, we take cheating seriously in order to protect the reputation of our institution and ensure all our students feel assured that they are performing on a level playing field.

At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone. Read More

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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."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"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.

When does getting help on an assignment turn into cheating?

Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

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Students – whether at university or school – can get help from many places. They can go to a tutor, parent, teacher, a friend or consult a textbook.

But at which point does getting help cross the line into cheating?

Sometimes it’s clear. If you use a spy camera or smartwatch in an exam, you’re clearly cheating. And you’re cheating if you get a friend to sit an exam for you or write your assignment.

At other times the line is blurry. When it’s crossed, it constitutes academic misconduct. Academic misconduct is any action or attempted action that may result in creating an unfair academic advantage for yourself or others.

What about getting someone else to read a draft of your essay? What if they do more than proofread and they alter sections of an assignment? Does that constitute academic misconduct?

Learning, teaching or cheating?

There are a wide range of activities that constitute academic misconduct. These can include:

fabrication, which is just making things up. I could say “90 % of people admit to fabricating their assignments”, when this is not a fact but a statement I just invented

falsification, which is manipulating data to inaccurately portray results. This can occur by taking research results out of context and drawing conclusions not supported by data

misrepresentation, which is falsely representing yourself. Did you know I have a master’s degree from the University of Oxford on this topic? (Actually, I don’t)

plagiarism, which is when you use other people’s ideas or words without appropriate attribution. For instance, this list came from other people’s research and it is important to reference the source.

Sometimes students and teachers have different ideas of academic misconduct. One study found around 45% of academics thought getting someone else to correct a draft could constitute academic misconduct. But only 32% of students thought the same thing.

Read more: Assessment design won’t stop cheating, but our relationships with students might

In the same survey, most academics and students agreed having someone else like a parent or friend identify errors in a draft assignment, as opposed to correcting them, was fine.

Generally when a lecturer, teacher or another marker is assessing an assignment they need to establish the authenticity of the work. Authenticity means having confidence the work actually relates to the performance of the person being assessed, and not of another person.

The Australian government’s vocational education and training sector’s quality watchdog, for instance, considers authenticity as one of four so-called rules of evidence for an “effective assessment”.

The rules are:

validity, which is when the assessor is confident the student has the skills and knowledge required by the module or unit

sufficiency, which is when the quality, quantity and relevance of the assessment evidence is enough for the assessor to make a judgement

authenticity, where the assessor is confident the evidence presented for assessment is the learner’s own work

currency, where the assessor is confident the evidence relates to what the student can do now instead of some time in the past.

Generally speaking, if the assessor is confident the work is the product of a student’s thoughts and where help has been provided there is proper acknowledgement, it should be fine.

Why is cheating a problem?

It’s difficult to get a handle on how big the cheating problem is. Nearly 30% of students who responded to a 2012 UK survey agreed they had “submitted work taken wholly from an internet source” as their own.

In Australia, 6% of students in a survey of 14,000 reported they had engaged in “outsourcing behaviours” such as submitting someone else’s assignment as their own, and 15% of students had bought, sold or traded notes.

Getting someone to help with your assignment might seem harmless but it can hinder the learning process. The teacher needs to understand where the student is at with their learning, and too much help from others can get in the way.

Read more: Children learn from stress and failure: all the more reason you shouldn't do their homework

Some research describes formal education as a type of “ signal ”. This means educational attainment communicates important information about an individual to a third party such as an employer, a customer, or to an authority like a licensing body or government department. Academic misconduct interferes with that process.

How to deal with cheating

It appears fewer cheaters are getting away with it than before. Some of the world’s leading academic institutions have reported a 40% increase in academic misconduct cases over a three year period.

Technological advances mean online essay mills and “ contract cheating ” have become a bigger problem. This type of cheating involves outsourcing work to third parties and is concerning because it is difficult to detect .

Read more: 15% of students admit to buying essays. What can universities do about it?

But while technology has made cheating easier, it has also offered sophisticated systems for educators to verify the work is a person’s own. Software programs such as Turnitin can check if a student has plagiarised their assignment.

Institutions can also verify the evidence they are assessing relates to a student’s actual performance by using a range of assessment methods such as exams, oral presentations, and group assignments.

Academic misconduct can be a learning and cultural issue . Many students, particularly when they are new to higher education, are simply not aware what constitutes academic misconduct. Students can often be under enormous pressure that leads them to make poor decisions.

It is possible to deal with these issues in a constructive manner that help students learn and get the support they need. This can include providing training to students when they first enrol, offering support to assist students who may struggle, and when academic misconduct does occur, taking appropriate steps to ensure it does not happen again.

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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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