Cheating Goes Global

The age-old tradition of students hiring smarter kids to write their papers for them is one more industry gone global, according to an expose in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The magazine goes inside an essay mill—a service that sells custom-written essays to college students online—and finds a vast network of outsourced scholars from Virginia to Kiev to Mumbai. The sophisticated network of anonymous scribes research and write everything from one-page reports to entire dissertations. One hired essay writer admits, "I took one on Christological topics in the second and third centuries. I didn't even know what that meant. I had to look it up on Wikipedia."