Ghost Writing Essay Mills and Academic Integrity

Academic integrity, copying, plagiarism, collusion, ‘ghost writing’ and essay factories have become a fact of life in university or higher education, internationally.  This article endeavours to explain how or why is it an issue but at same time, short on what are the solutions?

While western democracies, and the developing world, have politicians, business and public leaders openly flouting ethical standards through egregious corruption and related unethical behaviour, is it any wonder?

Some solutions are precluded by universities’ corporate or financial needs e.g. rather than (barely modified) assessments that are more efficient to grade (or worse more multiple choice), there maybe a need for a return to in class open book and variety of assessments?

Academic Integrity at University (Image copyright Pexels).

From The Guardian, Chris Husbands:

'Essay mills prey on vulnerable students – let's stamp them out

Universities alone can’t stop the rise of essay mills. We need support from the government and tech firms to defeat them

In the 1990s, there was enormous optimism around how the internet would connect people and make knowledge available to all. Fast forward twenty years, and identity theft, cybercrime, online bullying and appalling sexual exploitation have become everyday news stories. Increasingly, it’s the perversions of the internet which dominate our thinking.

The business model is simple. You have an essay to write, you are time poor, you pay a fee for the essay to be written. The fee these crooks charge depends on the length, the standard you are looking for, and the deadline you are facing….

For universities, the digital world’s most concerning development is the spread of essay mills. They’re not new: it’s always been tempting for some students to pay someone to do their work for them. But the internet has vastly eased the relationship between customers and suppliers, fuelling the growth of these essay mills….

….Learning is based on integrity and scholarship: showing that students have read, understood and been influenced by the work of others, and can explain how their thinking is new or different. Education is not about getting grades, it’s about being an active participant in learning opportunities. If some of that is difficult, well, difficulty is the point….

….The Secretary of State for Education’s announcement that tech firms should block payments to essay mills and students should report on their peers is a step in the right direction. We need to work together to preserve the integrity of the UK higher education system from these unscrupulous companies, and the way they prey on vulnerable students who don’t fully understand the implications of their actions.'

Chris Husbands is the vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University

For more articles and blogs about academic integrity, copying and student plagiarism click through.

Mainstreaming Hate in Australia - White Nationalist Terror in NZ

After the tragic white nationalist extremist event in Christchurch’s mosques by an Australian extremist white nationalist gunman, we have observed attempts by local and international politicians and media to explain.  However, they are also guilty of propagating or encouraging white Nativism, white nationalism and nowadays promoting ‘western civilisation’ for attention, power, influence over policy making and elections while demonising diversity and multiculturalism.

Diversity and Multiculturalism (Image copyright Pexels)

In past decades, emanating from the US (according to Nancy MacLean author of ‘Democracy in Chains’), has been radical right libertarianism for corporates e.g. Kochs et al. and/or fossil fuel related sector to deny global warming, attacking science and education, demanding lower taxes, smaller government etc., while co-opting ageing conservative Christian evangelicals and white nationalists to vote the right way aka Trump and Brexit.

However, dog whistling and divisive narratives focused upon non-WASPs and non-Europeans, are also symptoms of a long-standing ideology, i.e. eugenics, which while being one and the same, has re-emerged amongst politicians, media and voters of the right in the Anglo world and parts of Europe (but described benignly as an electoral tactic), after becoming unpopular due to the Nazis’ experiments and holocaust.

This ideology, or power structure, is manifested and presented in multiple ways and media in Australia with refugees and ‘boat people’, US with Trump and UK with Brexit; back grounded by old WASP culture and isolationism.  Manifested as raw racism or promoting ‘whiteness’, ‘final solutions’ (to immigration), ‘globalisation’ (of people), promotion of border control or security, withdrawal from trade agreements, alarm round ‘high immigration’ or ‘exponential population growth’, use of offshore detention (camps/prisons), back grounded by criticism of ‘refugees’, Islam, and even local minorities whether women, recipients of welfare, LGBT, workers, indigenous or youth.

In addition to the poisonous ideology,  masked by dog whistling and proxy issues, is the transnational and systematic nature of the ‘architecture’ via academia, politicians and media (‘assembly line’ according to author of Dark Money, Jane Mayer) to normalise and spread the negative messaging; funded by (mostly) US radical right libertarians, oligarchs and selected think tanks.

Key architect, funded by oligarchs et al., was the recently deceased John Tanton, described in a New York Times article as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’, linked with Paul Ehrlich, Club of Rome, ZPG Zero Population Growth (supported by Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie etc. foundations), Population Matters UK, Sustainable Australia, white evangelical Christians, white nationalists and his US Inc. based network now influences (or even writes) White House immigration policy.

'Tanton’s own Social Contract Press has been influential: ‘The Social Contract Press (TSCP) routinely publishes race-baiting articles penned by white nationalists. The press is a program of U.S. Inc, the foundation created by John Tanton, the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement. TSCP puts an academic veneer of legitimacy over what are essentially racist arguments about the inferiority of today's immigrants.’

Not only had Tanton also supported the white Australia policy, liaised with ‘Sustainable Population Australia’ and its elite ‘environmentally minded’ local patrons, his TSCP also published and reviewed one of the most infamous white nationalist screeds which influences the controversial Steve Bannon et al., ‘Camp of the Saints’ (reviewed by Australian Academic Katherine Betts), from Sutherland in The Guardian 2004 ‘Far right or far wrong?’:

‘The book currently generating the most chatter is Jean Raspail's Camp of Saints. First published in 1973, in France, no British publisher (a gutless crew) has been brave enough to take it on. In America, publication was sponsored, in 1985, by the ultra-right (ultrawrong), anti-immigration Laurel Foundation, under whose aegis it now sells like hot cakes.

Camp of Saints foretells an imminent "swamping" of Europe by illegals from the orient. Forget passports or border controls: they just hijack tankers and come, an armada of subcontinental sub-humanity: a brown tsunami. Europe is so enervated by liberalism and postcolonial guilt and depopulated by "family planning" that the alien tide ("with a stench of latrines") just laps over the continent. A small resistance band (the "Saints") is liquidated - by the French government. The immigrants come, they settle, they rape, they steal. Above all, they breed. Raspail calls it "the Calcutta solution" - genocide by stealth. Europe becomes a Dark Continent.

Raspail's loathsome novel has recently achieved something like respectability. The author has a website and has been hailed "the Frantz Fanon of the White Race". Camp of Saints articulates a western nightmare fashionable among neo-conservatives. Civilisations won't "clash". The developed world (and in the Middle East, Israel) will simply be out spawned into extinction.’

What we now observe is frantic dissembling by most conservative politicians desperate to separate themselves from extremists, after their own unethical and divisive Nativist utterances or dog whistling from the past and present.

Ageing Populations and Monetary Policy

Australian economic, political and social narratives focus upon ‘high immigration rate’ and ‘population growth’ as negatives, claiming in first article following from The Conversation that the latter masks low or declining economic growth.  On the other hand, VOX CEPR suggests a linkage between ageing, longevity and declining per capita GDP; increasing numbers of retirees may well be a significant cause?

Ageing populations and declining per capita GDP (Image copyright Pexels)

'Vital Signs: Australia’s sudden ultra-low economic growth ought not to have come as surprise

March 7, 2019 1.28pm AEDT

Australia’s big little economic lie was laid bare on Wednesday.

National accounts figures show that the Australian economy grew by just 0.2% in the last quarter of 2018. This disappointing result was below market expectations and official forecasts of 0.6%. It put annual growth for the year at just 2.3%.

But the shocking revelation was that Gross Domestic Product per person (a more relevant measure of living standards) actually slipped in the December quarter by 0.2%, on the back of a fall of 0.1% in the September quarter…..

Population growth hides it

The more insidious answer in Australia is that, for a long time, our high population growth, fed by a high immigration rate, has masked a much less rosy picture of how we are doing. And neither side of politics has wanted to admit it.

At 1.6% a year, Australia’s population growth is roughly double the OECD average, which is perhaps why we hear politicians say things like “Australia continues to grow faster than all of the G7 nations except the United States,” as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg did this week.

The good news is that standard economic theory tells us that in the long run, immigration has very little impact on GDP per capita in either direction, unless it drives a shift in the population’s mix of skills.

But in the short term, it depresses GDP per capita because fixed capital such as buildings and machines has to be shared between more workers….

But the fundamentals of the Australian economy are looking somewhat weak. Like the US and other advanced economies, we are living in an era of secular stagnation – a protracted period of much lower growth than we had come to expect.

And until we do something to tackle it, such as a major government investment in physical and social infrastructure, we will continue to face anaemic wage growth, shaky consumer confidence, and mediocre economic growth per person.'

'The impact of population ageing on monetary policy

Marcin Bielecki, Michał Brzoza-Brzezina, Marcin Kolasa 05 March 2019

Population ageing is likely to affect many areas of life, from pension system sustainability to housing markets. This column shows that monetary policy can be considered another victim. Low fertility rates and increasing life expectancy substantially lower the natural rate of interest. As a consequence, central banks are more likely to hit the lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate and face long periods of low inflation, especially if they fail to account for the impact of demographic trends on the natural interest rate in real time.

Many countries, developed and developing alike, are experiencing a process of population ageing – fertility rates remain below the level that guarantees the replacement of the population and the average life expectancy at birth keeps increasing. As a consequence, the ratio of the elderly to the working-age population – the old age dependency ratio – has been, and will be, increasing over the upcoming decades. To give some idea on the magnitude of this process, while the ratio of elderly (aged 65 or more) to the working-age population (aged 15-64) in the euro area was around 0.25 at the turn of the 21st century, the proportion is projected to exceed 0.5 by 2050 (see Figure 1).

The demographic transition will have many consequences related to various aspects of economic activity. To mention just a few, the increasing share of elderly in populations is likely to negatively impact the growth rate of GDP per person (Cooley and Henriksen 2018) and the sustainability of pension systems (Boulhol and Geppert 2018), and will lead to an increase in the share of GDP being spent on healthcare and related services (Breyer et al. 2011)….'

For more articles about population growth and NOM net overseas migration click through.

Study Advice for First Year University Students

Following is an article from The Conversation Australia with five tips for starting out at university including support services, time management, reading literature, plagiarism or academic integrity and personal responsibility.

'Five top tips to succeed in your first year of university

February 25, 2019 6.15am AEDT

How to Study at University (Image copyright copyright Pexels)

This week, thousands of new students from around the country will be starting their first year at university. For many students and their parents, transitioning to university is an exciting but daunting experience. Here are five tips to help students succeed in their first year.

1. Find support services

All universities offer student counselling, mental health, sexual health, disability services, careers centres, accommodation and financial support.

One of the first places to look for these services is on your university’s website under the heading, Current Students. Students should also attend presentations during orientation week, ask their tutors and course coordinators or contact their student centre to get more information.

The best way to get information is to talk to other students….

2. Manage your time well

Learning how to juggle social and academic commitments is one of the most difficult challenges for new students. One of the best ways to manage study workloads is to draw up a semester plan. This can take the form of a timeline or calendar.

Students should start by entering in all assignments and exams on their semester plan and then work backwards to allocate time for researching, draft planning, proofreading and checking references…..

3. Keep up-to-date with readings

One common theme across different faculties is that a good assignment is one where arguments have been debated and claims supported by evidence. In order to do this well, students need to do the weekly readings assigned in their individual courses.

You also need to read beyond the required list. Lecturers are not interested in students’ personal opinions. They’re interested in students’ opinions that are informed by evidence. That is, supported by the readings and research the student has done….

4. How to avoid plagiarism

Learning how to reference reading sources correctly, to avoid plagiarism, is an essential skill. At the start of semester, most students have to complete online modules which explain the complexities of academic integrity.

Students caught plagiarising risk failing a course or being expelled from their degree. What this means for students is everything you read which has informed your thinking must be included in your reference list.

5. Enjoy university life!

If you’re not happy with your course or subjects, you should get advice from your faculty. Students are expected to take responsibility for their own learning progress, but you should still talk to your lecturers about any concerns.'


For more blogs and articles about academic integrity or copying and plagiarism, critical thinking and soft skills click through.

Brand Trust in Digital or Social Media Marketing

How can trust in brands be developed and maintained in an age of digital marketing, speed, mistrust and social media?

This article first appeared in The Australian on 15th February 2019, then via KPMG NewsRoom.

Brand Trust in Digital Times (Image copyright Pexels)

'Brand power in the age of declining trust

Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer report in 2017 carried a headline “Trust is in crisis around the world”. A KPMG report last year found that “trust has declined in almost every major economy and many developing ones”. In a CNN interview recently, Salesforce’s founder and CEO Marc Benioff argued that “companies that are struggling today are struggling because of a crisis with trust”.

There seems no end to the brands, organisations and leaders that have lost the public’s trust. There has been a royal commission into our banks, multiple questions over Facebook’s use of personal data, cheating cricketers, fake news, church leaders charged, and political parties bickering among themselves.

It is hard to believe that some brands and organisations have turned a blind eye to building trust with customers over the past decade. Trust is the basis of all relationships, gained slowly like drops of rain but lost in buckets. It is fundamental to business, symbolised in a handshake and eye-to-eye contact.

……These brands meet the “trust” checklist in the KPMG report – standing for something more than profit; demonstrably acting in the customers’ best interest; doing what you say you will; keeping customers informed; and being competent and likeable.

There is no doubt that brand trust is more complex in a digital world, where social media and data personalisation have enabled brands to act as if they are talking to you in person. Combine that with the exponential growth of individuals’ data that can be captured; digital marketplaces; smartphones; voice technology such as Google Home and Alexa; and the algorithms and deep learning of artificial intelligence, and there are far more opportunities to get brand trust wrong. This is especially so when trust is measured at lightning speed and some decisions around brands are being made by machines acting like humans.

Data became the hottest brand trust issue last year. The biggest data breach involved the Marriott International hotel chain and had an impact on up to 383 million people on the Starwood booking database. This included more than five million unencrypted passport numbers. Facebook had multiple issues, the most discussed being Cambridge Analytica’s access to Facebook users’ data. This data was used to persuade voters to change their opinions in the last US presidential election.

Consumers started to question the trust they had in these brands: one US survey showed 71 percent of people were worried about how brands collected and used their personal data. …… Marketers also had their doubts after YouTube posted ads that appeared alongside offensive videos, leading to a number of companies and their media agencies withdrawing advertising from YouTube for a period.
In the past five years, some of Australia’s biggest companies have rushed to establish or buy into data businesses that can offer insights into the purchasing behaviour of their customers and also use that information to improve their marketing communications……

Some companies have commercialised this data by selling it to outside organisations that match it with their customer profiles, adding to the knowledge they have on their customers. Some have questioned the ethics of this, even if it is anonymous; others ask who actually owns the data – the individual or the companies?

Trust around data relies on the fundamentals: common sense says that being a friendly and helpful neighbour is better for a long-term relationship than being annoying or remote. The personal customer data a business holds needs to be treated in the same way. In a business environment where consumers have more choice than ever, as well as more transparency and lower barriers to switching brands, boards, CEOs and marketers cannot ignore the need to invest in brand trust.

For more blogs and articles about digital marketing, social media marketing and consumer behaviour click through.

Students better than professors teaching tutorials?

Interesting article from The Conversation regarding university tutorial teaching or tutoring quality, students or academics?  The glib answer would be neither form of pedagogy, in fact 'andragogy' for adult learners shows that many should be learning together as students, not through teacher centred direction.

Student Tutorial Teachers or Professors? (Copyright image Pexels)

'Research shows students are as good as professors in tutorial teaching

February 19, 2019 5.23pm AEDT

Professors and graduate students are at opposite ends of the university hierarchy in terms of experience, qualifications and pay. But at many universities, both do the same job: they teach tutorials offered in parallel with lectures.

Our research explores whether it makes sense for professors to teach tutorials – and we found it doesn’t. They are no more effective as tutorial instructors than students.

This finding implies that universities can reduce costs or free up professors’ time by asking students to teach more tutorials.

Measuring instructors’ effectiveness

We conducted a survey about tutorial instruction in OECD universities. Our results show that tutorials are used in 63% of OECD universities. At 25% of these institutions, tutorials are taught by students, 29% by professors and 46% by a mixture of the two.

Using professors to teach small groups is expensive, and reducing costs is a central concern given the increases in tuition fees and student debt.

We have studied the costs and benefits of using tutorial instructors with different academic ranks, using data from a Dutch business school that offers four key features. First, tutorials are taught by a wide range of instructors, ranging from bachelor’s students to full professors. Second, the school’s dataset is large enough (we observe more than 12,000 students) to give us enough statistical power to detect even small differences between instructors.

Third, at this business school students are randomly assigned to instructors of different academic ranks, creating a perfect experiment for seeing whether academic rank matters. Finally, we were able to supplement these already excellent data with measures of students’ satisfaction with the course, and students’ earnings and job satisfaction after graduation, for some of these students. This is important since instructors might matter in many ways and we need to cast a wide net to capture a range of student outcomes.

Students just as effective

Overall, our results show that lower-ranked instructors teach tutorials as effectively as higher-ranked ones. The most effective instructors – postdoctoral researchers – increase students grades by less than 0.02 points on a 10-point grade scale compared with student instructors. The differences between all other instructor types, from student instructor and full professor, is smaller than that.

Full professors are also no better than student instructors in improving students’ grades in the next related course or job satisfaction and earnings after graduation. We do, however, find that higher-ranked instructors achieve somewhat better course evaluations, but these differences are small.
These findings are counter-intuitive. Yet they are consistent with the general findings in primary and secondary education that formal education does a poor job at predicting who teaches well.

What could be the reason why all the extra qualification and experience of professors does not translate into better results for their students? The content of tutorials might be adjusted in a way that students can easily teach them. Further, lower-ranked instructors may compensate for their lack of experience by being better able to relate to students and being more motivated.

Key implication

The implications of our findings are obvious. Universities can free up resources by not asking their most expensive staff to do a job that students can do equally well. We show that the business school we study can reduce the overall wages they pay to tutorial instructors by 50% if they only employ student instructors.

There are, of course, reasons why universities might not want to exclusively rely on student instructors. Students might not be able to teach some more technically advanced master’s courses.

There might be some research-inactive but tenured professors whose most valuable use of time is tutorial teaching. And, as with other research that rely on data from one institution, future studies need to show whether our results hold in other universities as well.

But even if these studies uncover some benefits to students of being taught by a professor, we would be surprised if these are worth the extra costs.'

Unclear what is quality teaching and learning? Higher education or universities put great importance upon narrow and high-level specialised knowledge exemplified by a doctorate, i.e. content or subject matter expert. Further, the vocational Certificate IV of Training & Assessment TAE40116 is included on many job descriptions as a desirable teaching qualification and meanwhile ‘real world’ experience can be ignored by institutions and/or embellished by the beholder (unlike the ID points system, all factors are not taken into account).

Related issues here, theory of teaching and learning, pedagogy (for children) is cited but for adults we should be speaking about andragogy.  Andragogy of adult education focuses upon adults’ need for knowledge, motivation, willingness, experience, self-direction and task-based learning.
Good instructional or learning design for adult centred learning:

• broad and deep needs analysis based on learners’ knowledge, expertise and real skill gaps
• motivated when they have input and some control over learning, activities and outcomes
• participate in learner centred activities, interaction and social learning
• opportunities to contribute knowledge, expertise and reflect on their business practice
• contribution to and management of learning activities through tasks and problem solving; post course too.

A more complete qualification is the UK Cambridge RSA CELTA or TEFLA, especially behavioural theories fitting 'andragogy', including teaching skills, and dealing with significant numbers of adult students for whom English is not their first language.

Another issue to emerge has been that of 'ID Instructional Design' on behalf of university teachers, but not based upon subject matter or teach/learning skills (when ID is implicit for any competent teacher).

Finally, explaining in terms of cost (cutting or savings) may seem mercenary when high fees are now the norm for most students.

University Students Studying for Graduate Unemployment?

There is much concern about the employment prospects of school and university graduates and the following article highlights some concerns and points on reasons including high school career counselling, parents, industry, universities and back grounded by ignorance of skills in demand.

One could add that societal attitudes and knowledge about science, maths or data and digital are low in Australian elites, meanwhile working age population aka baby boomers is in transition and meanwhile, many low level positions require university degrees as a minimum requirement.

Too Many University Graduates? (Image copyright Pexels)

‘Who’s really to blame for too many unwanted graduates?

By Tony Featherstone

February 7, 2019 — 12.01am

Why do thousands of young Australians enrol in the wrong university degree each year and overlook in-demand professions that are screaming for graduates.

In engineering generally, about 10,000 students graduate at our universities each year and about 16,000 engineers arrive here annually from overseas, according to Engineers Australia analysis. There would be a massive engineering shortfall without skilled migration.

It’s crazy that so few Australian students study software engineering, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and other emerging fields, relative to industry demand, yet there is a growing surplus of graduates in the arts, journalism, law and other fields with fewer jobs.

The obvious culprit is universities. They have fanned a graduate glut – and a generation of students with high debt and diminished job prospects – by accepting more students into fields that already oversupplied….

….Industry, schools and students are part of the problem. Business complains about not enough graduates being developed in a new area, yet runs a mile when it has to fund university research or co-develop teaching courses. It’s easier to outsources graduate training to universities, take no risk and let taxpayers co-fund the learning. Then, whinge about universities.

Schools, too, can do more to encourage students to pursue in-demand occupations. I don’t know enough about career counselling at schools to form an opinion, but something must be wrong if so many students enrol in degrees that have terrible job prospects.

Perhaps school curriculums are not sufficiently aligned with the needs of universities. Industry berates universities for not producing enough graduates in areas with skill shortages, yet schools might not be producing enough students with the skill and passion to do engineering and similar courses at university.

Again, that’s changing as more boys and girls study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects at school. But change is slow and off a low base – engineering, for example, has been crying out for more students, particularly women, for years.

Then there’s students and parents. We tell our kids to follow their passion when choosing a career: think with your heart rather than your head about a degree; take a year or two off for travel before university; chop and change degrees if you don’t like them.

That’s reckless advice. I’m not saying students should enrol in degrees they have low aptitude for, or will make them miserable. They must have an inclination, either natural or an ability to develop one, in any field to succeed in the long run.’

For more blogs and articles about higher education teaching, work skills, digital technology and science literacy click through.