The going rate for essays is about US$33 per 1000 words, and those who cheat are not being caught, according to two studies that show how contract cheating has morphed into a sophisticated industry, with students in rich countries outsourcing work to providers in poor ones.

The studies, each published in the most recent edition of the journal Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, describe an industry that has grown from a few individuals posting on campus pin-up boards to one with registered companies and a global workforce.

Students are bombarded with ads for services, including online discussion/forum posting, presentations and graduation speeches, research proposals, thesis statements and admission applications, scholarship and internship letters, short stories and composing poems.

Meanwhile, overstretched markers aren't detecting the cheats.

In the first study, markers who were not told to look for cheating had a zero per cent detection rate.

When they were told to look out for cheating, the rate increased to 48 per cent - meaning they detected half of the acts of cheating.

When they were trained to identify red flags and use software comparing assignments to students' previous work, the rate increased to 59 per cent.

In Australia, as many as 10 per cent of students may be paying other people to write their essays and assignments, according to Deakin University Associate Professor Phillip Dawson, lead author in the study looking at detection.

"Sometimes lecturers will Google their assignment and see someone stupidly posted on a public forum with a real name trying to buy it," he told Hack

"But also sometimes if you're a lecturer you'll see an assignment and you'll go 'There's something suss about this - it's not of the same quality as a student's previous work, or they've made weird mistakes that nobody else makes.'

"In some cases there's metadata in the file - the author isn't the student, it's someone else.

We've certainly become more aware of it, and it's become easier to get hold of. Also, now there's all these Twitter bots where if you say 'I'm having trouble with my assignment', you get these companies trying to get you to cheat.

Cheating 'blatant' and 'wide-ranging'

Other studies have put the rate of contract cheating even higher - a 2018 meta-analysis of student surveys from over the past few decades found the percentage of students admitting to paying someone else to undertake their work has gone from about 3.5 per cent to 16 per cent.

To analyse market demand for cheating services, Canada and UK-based researchers looked at contract cheating on Twitter, identifying 28 active providers under the search query 'pay essay'.

They then looked at tweets to these providers from users in the United States.

It turned out students were openly negotiating cheating services with content providers.

"Student requests for contract cheating, made through a channel that is visible to the public, are both blatant and wide-ranging," the study states.

They cover a variety of academic disciplines and assessment types. The results demonstrate that demand for contract cheating is there.

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Whatsapp Top 30 subject areas students seek to outsource.

Maths, history, English and statistics were the main subject areas students sought to outsource.

Though one student was willing to pay US$3000 for an essay, the average amount was US$33.32 per 1000 words. As the authors point out, that's not a lot of money.

"The question needs to be asked about how contract cheating providers can work for what appear to be low rates," the report states.

They conclude the essay mills are in low-income countries. A previous study found 28 of 93 providers were based in Kenya, and as many as 20,000 people in Kenya are employed as academic writers, doing assignments for students in the US, UK and Australia.

"It's a real worldwide thing - there's an Australian shopfront for a cheating site but it probably really operates out of Kenya," Phillip Dawson said.

He said ideally markers would have more time to assess work, but since they didn't, a partial solution was machine-learning AI software.

"It can look at the student's previous work and go 'the sentences in this don't look right they use really different words in this piece' or all sorts of things," he said.

He said universities should keep digital copies of students' work so that submitted assignments may be compared with previous ones.

"We're never going to get to a situation where we have perfect detection for these sorts of things, but we're going to catch more of them."