Just recently, I was looking for a job as a student writer and then I stumbled across a website: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

I have to admit that I am impressed by this guy's work. He works as a ghostwriter, making incompetent students cheat on exams, classwork, coursework so they can get their degrees. He can juggle multiple assignments and complete them quickly. He says that he has no name, no opinion, and no voice. The three belong to his clients, while he just busily writes decent papers for money. He began his job as a college undergrad, not being able to pay for tuition. So, his classmates, seeing that he has so much free time, decide to use him and ask him to write papers for their assignments. Word spreads around the campus, and soon he becomes (sort of) famous for writing these papers that would be used by cheating students. My favorite part is the part where he writes for seminary students who request that he should write about the moral degradation of America due to abortion, homosexuality, and the teaching of evolution. (Like I said before, he has no opinions on such topics; he's just a writer who collects other people's opinions and his client's expectations and put them together in the finished product.) Students pay him a lot of money too. Check it out.

Yes, I always find these accounts disappointing and depressing. My feeling though is that he overstates the degree of cheating - though I completely agree with him that it does take place and is not uncommon.

When he says:

"For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?"

the answer is 'Yes of course I bloody do' - it's a signal to start checking out what that student is doing. The problem is proving collusion or cheating by getting someone else to do it for them. If you can't prove it, you have a problem. Students pay for their courses and also have rights. You can't just say, 'I think you're cheating so bugger off.' For a lot of academics, the easiest solution is to let sleeping dogs lie rather than pursue it.

Another part of the problem, and one that is reflected in that post, is that tutors are teaching far too many students in a lot of universities (as well as trying to do their research). I teach on a masters preparation programme for international students. We feed our students to British universities onto their graduate programmes. The thing is though, we are funded independently from the fees the students pay, not from the universities themselves (via the consortium that validates our programmes) or the government. This means relatively small class sizes - I am responsible for about 35 students this year (2 classes, I work part-time). This means I know them all well and have a good idea what they are capable of. A friend of mine, who works at a large and renowned American university is teaching over a thousand students this year on only ONE of the courses he teaches. He won't even see each and every student's work, only a sample. The rest is marked by assistants - usually graduate students. That sort of thing happens over here too (I only used that particular example because I was so gob-smacked at the number of students he was responsible for. It's not quite so extreme as that, of course, his assistants will hold tutorials and seminars with smaller groups and get to know students better but I was just amazed when he told me about lecturing to 1000 at a time (only about 200 in the actual hall, the rest on screen elsewhere - good luck with asking questions)).

Your source also says:

Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

He's wrong there. There's a lot of discussion though perhaps not published discussion, nor is there an adequate method of detecting and proving it. Straight plagiarism (from published sources) is getting easier to deal with but collusion and/or this sort of secondary plagiarism isn't. He also mentions the reasons why students cheat in the first place, he does mention: "English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid" which I would agree with. The biggest problem for us is the student who is hopelessly deficient and shouldn't be on the course in the first place. The problem is, before they turn up, the only thing you have to go on is their qualifications to date and it's likely they cheated to get those as well. We discuss endlessly every single year, students who need to be 'counselled off the course'. It's very difficult when they don't want to go. We specialise in ESOL students, so feel that is less of a problem for us and the rich lazy arse is a problem for everyone.

The thing I find most disturbing though is the thought that students who cheat like this might end up being doctors or the person who is flying the plane I'm in. It's a serious business. And you shouldn't imagine, despite what that poster says, that it isn't taken seriously.

^ Those kinds of "writing services" are doing students a huge disfavor. When it comes down to business, the students will most likely be incompetent in whatever theme they were supposed to study, which isn't helpful for anyone.

Also, teaching large quantities of students at once can kind of work for some subjects, but is at risk of not picking up those who are lagging behind. Not everyone feels comfortable asking questions in a huge crowd, and the teacher/professor can't keep track of each individual student.