Lord Storey – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Storey on 2016-01-13.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what strategies are in place to assist universities to monitor companies providing paid essay-writing services.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
The Government strongly condemns any form of cheating. All publicly funded providers of higher education courses are expected to comply with the UK Quality Code for Higher Education, published by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). One of the requirements of the Code is to ensure that students do not obtain awards through any form of unacceptable academic practice relating to assessment, including plagiarism.
There is no centrally held set of data on the number of recorded plagiarism cases in UK Higher Education – responsibility for tackling plagiarism lies with the HE providers themselves, as autonomous organisations.
Institutions have a variety of mechanisms to address cheating by both international and EEA/UK students, including strong policies and specialist software. Between 2012 and 2015, the QAA carried out approximately 650 reviews of institutions. Of these, it only had to make recommendations to 30 individual universities and colleges on the need to improve systems and information related to plagiarism.
The QAA are discussing the legality of essay mills with the Consumer and Markets Authority.
