what is essay mill

Essay mills explained: What they are and why you should avoid them

Essays and term papers can be stressful, especially for international students who sometimes doubt their ability to research in depth and write thousands of words in English, all to a tight deadline.  

That’s where essay mills come in, exploiting the fears of students and offering to do the hard work for them in exchange for money. 

But here’s the spoiler alert - you should absolutely avoid essay mills. All the time.

They don’t work for you. They don’t even work for the essay writers themselves, and you should see that as a big warning sign. But more on that below.

What are essay mills? 

Essay mills are pretty straightforward: You pay a company to write your essay for you. The company in turn offloads the essay to a (usually freelance) writer. A couple days or weeks later, and you get your completed essay in return. 

It’s not like a proofreading service, where someone can check your spelling, grammar and citations for a fee (though even those are controversial in universities). No, essay mills offer to write you an entire essay from scratch. 

In other words, they allow students to commit academic fraud. In fact, they exploit the worries and stresses of students and entice them into cheating. They’re considered deeply unethical, and put students themselves at risk of severe punishment if caught. 

Another business model of this kind are essay banks. Here, students can buy essays that have already been written. But there’s a much higher risk of getting caught for plagiarism, since who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people have used that very same essay. 

Are essay mills legal or illegal?

The legality of essay mills depends on where you go to university, but the unethicality is clear no matter the location. Here’s a quick rundown of essay mills’ legal status in popular study abroad countries:  

Anti - essay mill legislation in the UK was passed in the House of Commons in February 2021, and will soon be made law. It’s not totally illegal yet, but it’s just a matter of time. 

The Republic of Ireland has also passed a number of bills to help tackle essay mills, while the practice is totally illegal in Australia and New Zealand. 

As for the USA and Canada, some US states have made them illegal, while Canada is under mounting pressure to follow suit.  

But the content and nuances of these laws changes from place to place. For example, in some US states it’s illegal for the student to use them, whereas the bills in Ireland, the UK, New Zealand and Australia are an attempt to criminalise essay mill companies themselves.

However, when we talk about legality, we’re of course talking about the law. But just because you might not cause a criminal offense by using essay mills, it’s still academic fraud and/or plagiarism. And getting caught for that can come with some dire consequences. 

Long story short, you really shouldn’t use them, regardless of their legality. 

Why you should avoid essay mills

1. if it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.

The writer's pay is awful. I mean really bad. Trust me -- I write for a living, and I’ve seen hundreds of advertisements for essay mill jobs. Every time I see one I can’t believe how little money the writers make for so much time and effort.  

But does this affect you? Totally! Would you care about doing great work if, a) the money was terrible, and b) it wouldn’t take you anywhere in your career? I know I wouldn’t...

Let’s talk about cost and time to put this into some perspective. The price range of essay mills varies wildly depending on the writers they employ. You can pay anywhere between £10-£35 per page. Roll this out over a 10 page essay, and it could be anywhere between £100 and £350 for the final product. But you can also come across offers for much, much less money than this.

While that higher end of £350 might seem like a lot of money, trust me -- it’s really nothing for the amount of research, writing, citations, editing and proofreading required. 

If £100 per day is considered a “just fine but not great” sum of money in the UK, a writer would have to do all the work on your essay in 2.5 days just to make it worthwhile. And they’d have to do it without the subject knowledge that you have. 

2. The writers aren’t subject experts

Think about it: if they were a subject expert, would they really be working for a shady company that facilitates cheating? Not a chance. 

The main point is that these writers are badly underpaid and they’re not experts, therefore they’re putting very little effort or expertise into your essay. They just want to do it as quickly as possible before moving onto the next one. 

3. There’s no guarantee of a good grade

None. Since the writers are underpaid, lack expertise and rush their work, it’s a recipe for a bad final product. Multiple studies have shown that essay mills do mediocre work at best. 

The essay you pay hundreds of pounds for might get you a pass grade, but you could do much better yourself. 

4. The punishment is harsh

Every university has severe laws on plagiarism and academic fraud, which is the exact result of using an essay mill. At its most lenient, a student caught breaking rules on plagiarism will receive no grade at all for the work, but at worst they can be suspended or even expelled from your university.  

But the perfect “crime” goes unnoticed, right? Well, it’s unlikely in this case. 

5. Essay mills and detection services

Most universities use pretty innovative plagiarism detection software these days, which can pick up on any hint of fraudulent work. Thus, the risk of getting caught is very high. And by the time a student does get caught, they’ve already lost their hard earned cash to the essay mill company. 

6. Essay mills don’t care about you

The company doesn’t care about you, and nor does the writer. That’s a pretty bad starting point for doing business! Once they’ve got their money and done their sub-standard work, they can move on to exploiting someone else’s fears. 

7. There’s a risk of scams 

Most essay mill sites demand a deposit of the final amount, or sometimes the entire fee up front. Either way, you won’t see your essay until you’ve paid them something. This makes it a prime opportunity for scam artists to take your money without giving anything in return. 

You see, it’s extremely easy for scam artists to launch a website advertising essays for sale, then just shut the operation down once they’ve made some quick cash without doing any work. 

Speaking of scams, here’s an article on some other international student scams to watch out for !

8. There’s a risk of bribery too

And then there’s the risk of bribery. Even if a student thinks they’re anonymous while dealing with essay mills, they’re not. There’s an email address, bank account name, even their IP address to worry about. 

So if the company or the writer decides that they want to blackmail or bribe a student by threatening to unveil the truth, they can. And they’ll always be able to.  

A final word on essay mills: Honest work is the best work

It sounds old fashioned, but there’s no replacement for smart, hard, honest work. Any student can write a great term paper or essay assignment on their own. All it takes is time, research, and some focus. 

Even if you’re under pressure or lack some confidence in your English ability, there are so many better ways to deal with it. Use a study abroad education counsellor , speak to your teachers and your friends. They’ll be able to point you in the right direction and help make that essay easier. 

As for essay mills? Forget about them. They’re exploitative, they serve no good purpose, and you can do a better job yourself!

So you’re thinking about studying abroad? Great! Check out the range of amazing courses available through Edvoy. Click here to get started or click the button below!

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Essay Mills and Why to Avoid Them

• 2-minute read
• 6th July 2018

Struggling with deadlines? College life feeling stressful ? You might be tempted to take a shortcut, especially if someone points you toward an essay mill. But what are essay mills exactly?

To help out, we’re here to explain what they are and why you should NEVER use them.

Essay Mills and Essay Banks

Some online businesses offer essays to students at a price. These come in two main types:

• Essay mills provide custom essays based on a specified topic, word count and deadline
• Essay banks sell pre-written essays, which are cheaper but less tailored

These businesses sometimes say that the essays they sell are just “templates” that students can use to generate ideas. However, using an essay mill is widely seen as cheating .

The Problem

Maybe you’ve read the descriptions above. But maybe you still think it sounds like an easy way to get a paper done without all the hard work of researching and writing it. Think again.

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If you use a paper from an essay mill or essay bank, you will regret it for several reasons:

• Using someone else’s words without citing them clearly is plagiarism
• If you are caught submitting a paper from an essay mill, it will count as academic fraud
• Colleges have software, such as Turnitin, designed to spot plagiarism
• Papers from essay mills can cost hundreds of dollars and there is no guarantee of quality

As a result, using an essay mill could leave you poorer and get you kicked off your course!

Essay Mills vs. Proofreading

But what if you still need help on a paper? If essay mills are a bad idea, what is your alternative? Well, the good news is that we can help! Having your work proofread has many advantages. We can:

• Correct your spelling, grammar, and punctuation
• Make sure your vocabulary is academic and that terminology is consistent
• Check that all of your sources are referenced correctly
• Tighten up your writing to make sure it is clear and concise

And all of this without making any major changes that could count as plagiarism. You will, of course, have to do the research and writing yourself. But that is how you learn things in the first place! The key is that we’re here to support you.

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Essay mills: What are they, and why students should avoid them

Have you ever been stuck on what to write for your university entrance essay, or felt under pressure with the numerous deadlines looming and have no time to work on your thesis?  Maybe a friend has told you how they’ve used essay mills, or perhaps you’ve seen an ad yourself popping up on your screen while surfing the internet.

Essay mills, or “essay factories” , are businesses that offer a service to write an essay or term paper for students for a fee.

These are not your basic proofreading or editing services, but businesses where essays are written for you. They do extensive research, proofreading, citations, and deliver a final essay to the customer (i.e. you, the student), which you can credit as your own.

Essay mills are nothing new in this day and age, having started in the mid-1800s when students in fraternity houses shared term papers. Later in the 1950s, the lucrative business of ghostwriting evolved where writers wrote material on behalf of authors or celebrities. 

Specialised companies were set up near university campuses where students could walk in and purchase the services of a team of writers to do their essays for them. However, with the onset of technology and the internet, the essay mills business has mushroomed in recent years. 

Some students have opted to use essay mills to get their work done without the stress and pressure of researching and working on a paper themselves. These essay mills or essay factories are easily accessible and promoted via various social media and online platforms.

Gareth Crossman from Quality Assurance Association for Higher Education (QAA), an independent body that checks on standards and quality in UK higher education, told the BBC that one in seven college students  might be cheating  on their work. 

With essay mills, there’s a risk of bribery, while there’s no guarantee that the article purchased is of excellent quality. Source: Christina Quicler/AFP

International students whose English isn’t their first language may be tempted to use essay mills due to their lack of language skills or insecurities.

Despite that, they are highly unethical and can lead to students being found guilty of plagiarism and academic fraud. Nowadays, many universities and colleges use software such as Turnitin, which can easily spot any discrepancies or plagiarism in a student’s work. 

Some are even resorting to asking students to take oral examinations if it is suspected that they have not completed the work themselves. Ultimately, it’s best for students to avoid essay mills at all costs.

Students have an obligation to submit authentic work while at university, and understand how writing and researching for a paper is part and parcel of the learning journey. 

Taking the easy option of using essay mills services is for short gain only as students are essentially cheating and taking the credit for something that another person has worked on. To boot, there’s no guarantee that the article purchased is of excellent quality or free from plagiarism.

Suppose you are struggling with writing your term paper; why not consider taking some extra classes to improve your English language skills or talk to your university professor or counsellor for some valuable advice? 

There’s nothing quite like that feeling of pride and accomplishment of submitting work that you worked on yourself. After all, as the ancient Greek philosopher Sophocles once said, “Without labour, nothing prospers.”

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This blog post was published under the 2015-2024 conservative administration.

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2022/04/28/essay-mills-are-now-illegal-skills-minister-calls-on-internet-service-providers-to-crack-down-on-advertising/

Essay mills are now illegal - Skills Minister calls on internet service platforms to crack down on advertising

Skills Minister Alex Burghart has written to internet service platforms to make sure they know that essay mills - which facilitate cheating by helping academic writing, often by appearing to be legitimate - have been made illegal and to call on their support in making sure they can no longer advertise online. Here you can read that letter.

The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill has become law. Through this act, the Government has legislated for landmark reforms that will transform post-16 education and skills, including criminalising essay mills.

As you may know, Essay Mills are online platforms that facilitate contract cheating. Contract cheating happens when a third party completes work for a student which is passed off by the student as their own work. Many essay mill companies use marketing techniques which indicate they are offering ‘legitimate’ academic writing support for students. Reports also indicate that some essay mills seek to blackmail students who use these services. It is right that we have legislated against these insidious crimes.

It is now a criminal offence to provide or arrange for another person to provide contract cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at a post-16 institution or sixth form in England, enrolled at a higher education provider in England and any other person over compulsory school age who has been entered for a regulated qualification at a place in England.

Similarly, it is now an offence for a person to make arrangements for an advertisement in which that person offers, or is described as being available or competent, to provide or arrange for another person to provide a cheating service. Importantly, the offence centres around the act of advertising to students, and for the offence to be committed it does not need to be seen by its target demographic.

There is now a strengthened, collaborative effort across the sector to tackle essay mills and we want you to be part of this campaign. Platforms such as yourself play an integral role in helping us to make the most effective use of the legislation; marketing and advertising are the lifeblood of any successful industry. We are aware that high numbers of essay mills have used your platform to promote their services to students in the past, paying for advertising to promote their companies. Essay mills are now illegal entities, and you should not carry their advertising. It is no longer a moral question; you will be facilitating an illegal activity. I ask you to do everything in your power to prevent the advertising these unscrupulous practices.

Removing essay mill access to online marketing will seriously hamper their efforts to target vulnerable students and I implore you to do so following the introduction of this legislation. We must now all work together to capitalise on it.

I hope that in writing to you today I have underlined the urgency of this issue and the important role that companies like yours play in stamping out essay mills once and for all and am sure I can be confident in your support.

Thank you for your support with this important matter.

Tags: cheating , essay mills , internet service platforms

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

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Essay mills: university course work to order

David matthews investigates the scale and threat of the custom essay industry.

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The damage contract cheating can inflict on society is clear. Graduates emerge from university with huge (and in some disciplines, potentially dangerous) gaps in their learning and knowledge

Picture the following scenario: marking an essay by one of your more underwhelming students, you grow suspicious. You would like to be pleased by the unexpected quality of the work, but instead you feel “a twinge that a sentence is too neatly framed”, as one scholar who has found herself in this position puts it. The analysis is superb, the writing style good - but is it too good? It bears little resemblance to previous work by the same student: indeed, it is in a different league. But it has been through Turnitin, the academic plagiarism checker, and come back clean. Has the student miraculously improved, or are you looking at a particularly pernicious problem afflicting today’s higher education sector: the paid- for, custom-written essay?

Custom essays, usually bought through websites known as essay mills, are in some ways an academic’s worst nightmare. Unlike standard examples of copy-and-paste plagiarism, they cannot be detected using software because they are “original” pieces of work - just not the student’s. They also arguably represent an even more cynical form of cheating than, for example, regurgitating unattributed passages in a piece of submitted work.

For many years, essay mills have been brazenly advertising their wares online, although they are always careful not to condone customers handing in bought pieces of work, arguing that the essays purchased are intended simply as useful guides or reference material.

No one knows how big the market in custom essays is, or whether universities are managing to detect those students who do hand them in. There are also concerns that in an age of mass higher education and high student-to-staff ratios, lecturers are less able to get to know their students’ work, making this form of cheating more difficult to detect. And there are fears that the pressures of the job might encourage some academics to turn a blind eye to the practice. But perhaps the most important question is whether it is possible to prevent this form of cheating in the first place.

Asking how many custom-written essays are being bought and sold in the UK is a bit like asking “how long is a piece of string?”, argues Thomas Lancaster, senior lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University . For obvious reasons (including the fact that cheats do not want to be caught, essay mills operate online, and there are no official statistics), it is difficult to come by reliable figures.

However, Lancaster, along with his former colleague Robert Clarke, has attempted to quantify the scale of the problem.

The pair studied a large sample of essay mill sites between March 2005 and June 2013, and identified nearly 19,000 attempts at contract cheating by students.

While they examined websites that could be used by anyone anywhere in the world, a more detailed study of 59 postings in 2011 on one website, vworker.com, found 18 references to assignments at UK universities.

“What we detected is the tip of the iceberg,” cautions Lancaster. No one even knows how many essay ghostwriting sites there are on the web, but five years ago Lancaster and Clarke listed 158.

In addition to the online activity, there is an unknown number of essay writers who advertise their work offline - even on campus.

“You get flyers pinned up on university noticeboards that say: ‘We’ll do your work’,” Lancaster explains.

Then there are those who arrange contract essays socially, for friends, family members or students one or two years below them, who leave no public trace at all.

Prices vary dramatically. An upper-second, five-page undergraduate history essay will set you back £70 at the cheaper end of the market, but some sites charge in the region of £150-£160. One website, which sells itself as a “premier” service, charges £50 an hour. This may sound expensive, but it is loose change compared with the cost (particularly for international students) of having to retake a year.

At the top end of the scale, postgraduate dissertations of 25,000 words cost in the region of £2,800.

Some essay writing companies are willing to provide more specific estimates of the scale of demand for their services, although the figures are self-reported and some academics say that the firms may exaggerate their popularity to attract publicity and gain more custom.

Jennifer Wiss, business development manager at All Answers (which trades under a number of names on the web, including UKessays.com), says that the company dispatched 11,470 custom essays in 2012, of which three-quarters were ordered from UK IP addresses.

This figure is difficult to verify, but the firm’s accounts appear to be consistent with a company selling essays in such quantities.

Wiss estimates that a further 4,000 custom essays are written in the UK by rival agencies each year (although students at British universities can also order from abroad).

In 2005 Barclay Littlewood, who was then chief executive of All Answers (which promoted itself as UK Essays), estimated that the business was worth £200 million a year and boasted that it had allowed him to buy a Ferrari and a Lamborghini.

Robert Eaglestone, professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London , believes that custom-written essays are a problem, but thinks that some essay mills choose to exaggerate their size through the press “because it’s good advertising. It’s a very media- friendly problem.”

Whatever the number of essays being commissioned and the scale of the companies involved, information gathered by Times Higher Education under the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the number of custom-written essays being detected and officially reported is tiny.

THE asked UK universities to provide details of the number of students they had disciplined in the academic years 2011-12 and 2012-13 for handing in custom essays or assignments bought from essay mills. Among the universities that responded to the request within 20 days, just 29 students were disciplined in 2011-12; in 2012-13, 30 students from 15 institutions were penalised.

More than half the offenders hailed from outside the UK. Some argue that the high fees paid by international students and the need to write in English (if this is not their first language) create greater incentives to cheat.

Chasing plagiarists can be ‘too much effort’, Carroll says. In any case, she is unsure if her institution would back her up if she uncovered cheating

Wiss reports that for a significant number of All Answers’ customers, English is a second language. She claims that “many of these struggle to put their thoughts and ideas across, or to interpret their course material and lectures. I believe this is why they choose to use a service like ours.”

In Lancaster’s experience, both domestic and international students use essay writing services, but he believes that a particularly serious and related issue is the matter of students paying for the translation of an essay written in a foreign language before handing it in, a practice that can obscure plagiarism. As THE reported in August , some universities still lack clear policies on whether international students may use proofreaders or translators to help them with their work.

The damage contract cheating can inflict on society is clear. Graduates emerge from university with huge (and in some disciplines, potentially dangerous) gaps in their learning and knowledge. Lancaster even discovered one student who had attempted to outsource an assignment on nuclear engineering. One of the scholar’s presentations on the subject asks: “Do you want to live within five miles of this person?”

But there is also a more specific form of damage to the university. You need only one student to go “to a job and not be able to do it” for an employer to “write off” other graduates of that university, Lancaster argues. He believes that employers have long memories and will warn other companies that certain alumni are not to be trusted. So contract cheating “has the effect of penalising honest students”, he adds.

Given the ethical issues, who agrees to work for the sites? The companies advertise themselves as employing graduates with good qualifications: an anonymous essay writer who wrote for THE in August says he is a recent Oxbridge graduate who was asked to provide evidence of his qualifications and samples of his writing when applying for the job. Some companies claim to employ staff with at least 2:1 degrees, interview potential candidates and ask them to complete trial assignments.

Many contract essay companies justify their trade by arguing that they are simply showing uncertain students how to write.

“Many students just want to see how it’s done,” says Wiss, who also claims that the “vast majority” of All Answers’ customers do not hand in their purchased essays.

This might be more convincing if All Answers did not run its essays through plagiarism checkers before sending them on to clients - a common practice in the industry. Why do this unless customers want to hand them in? Wiss claims that this is to make sure that its writers are “spending the time they are paid for on the project and not cutting corners”.

In line with many in the business, All Answers tries to blame universities for the rise of the essay mill. Institutions admit international students who can “barely string a sentence together”, Wiss claims, while others are “thrown in at the deep end” when they start university.

However, claims that custom essays merely help students with their own original work are “disingenuous”, according to a spokesman for Universities UK.

“Such essays often cost several hundred pounds, will specify the grade they require [2:1, 2:2, etc] and are purchased invariably to meet clear deadlines,” he says.

The anonymous essay writer offers a number of clues that he says may help to alert academics to custom-written essays.

Essay writing agencies generally require writers to submit their work in a standard format, he explains, often including a contents page and chapter headings, regardless of length.

“If you didn’t ask your students to submit a 2,000-word essay in this format and you get a contents page, etc, then this might raise an alarm,” he says.

Ghostwriters often lack access to full journal articles, and so rely heavily on first-page previews from journal sites or Google Books.

“Really probe the references, because this is the weak part,” he advises.

Jude Carroll, an education consultant at Oxford Brookes University and a plagiarism expert , thinks academics should not be afraid to be aggressively “investigative” if they smell a rat. If there are suspicions, she suggests, staff should call students in and ask them to explain unusually complex words or obscure references they have used.

The “biggest worry” for academics who have such suspicions is that they lack proof, she says - but that is no excuse for inaction.

“There’s no support for the argument about proof. Students can’t question academic judgements. You don’t have to be [100 per cent] sure, you have to weigh the balance of probabilities - and be at least 65 per cent sure,” she thinks.

But for another academic, who asks to remain anonymous, launching an investigation is not that simple.

“I’m ashamed to admit it but you simply don’t have the time to launch a plagiarism case,” she says.

One colleague, the same academic recalls, had to “almost google every line” of a suspect essay and make several trips to the library to ascertain whether her fears about a piece of work were genuine.

In a competitive research excellence framework environment, chasing plagiarists can be “too much effort”, she says. In any case, she is also unsure if her institution would back her up if she uncovered cheating. Universities have a “real anxiety about the litigation culture” and are “anxious” about academics exercising their judgement.

When offenders do get caught, Carroll says, the punishments for handing in contracted essays are “highly variable”. She finds this worrying because penalties are a major determinant of how likely students are to cheat.

“I believe students should be thrown out” if caught, she says. “It’s fraud.”

However, according to the results of THE ’s FoI request, most students who cheat in this manner can expect to remain on their courses.

Of the 59 students who were caught handing in bought essays in 2011-12 and 2012-13, just 13 were expelled. In one case at Newcastle University , for example, an international student suspected of handing in work purchased from the site Essays.uk.com was given a “final written warning” but no other punishment.

Many believe that academics’ first line of defence against custom essays is to set assignments that are difficult, if not impossible, to outsource. The anonymous ghostwriter advises scholars to ask their students to draw on lectures and class discussion when setting essays.

“This is something that is either less visible or invisible to the ghostwriter,” he explains, and therefore much more difficult to achieve.

Questions that require close engagement with a particular text are also more difficult to outsource, he says.

“Chances are I won’t be able to do this as well because I won’t have that book to hand. If asked to, I have a problem.”

He also cautions against sending out lecture notes in electronic formats or putting them online, because this only makes it easier for ghostwriters to give the impression of having attended courses.

However, the Equality Challenge Unit points out that students with disabilities might find taking notes during lectures difficult or even impossible, and some departments require academics to provide lecture notes to all students for this reason.

Some essay questions appear time and time again, making them easier for contract writers to complete, so one obvious piece of advice from plagiarism experts is to avoid setting assignments on predictable topics such as “women in Dickens”.

Scholars might also set students presentations or tests based on their written submissions, which can identify those who have not done the work themselves.

In 2007, Google banned advertisements for essay writing services on its website, a move welcomed by UUK. Couldn’t the government introduce a blanket ban on the companies?

A spokeswoman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills suggests that this would be impossible under current law.

“Whether a student and/or ‘writing service’ have committed an offence would be for a court to decide and depend on the individual circumstances of the case,” she says. “There is no action BIS could take to address this.”

Another drastic option is suggested by the tale of a US professor, recounted by Lancaster, who set himself up as a contract essay writer to test the waters, only to find one of his own assignments out to tender. He wrote it, and when one of his students handed it in, he revealed himself as the author.

Wiss maintains that All Answers is “very keen to work with universities to provide a service that can’t be abused in the first place” - but only if universities agree that the company is “a legitimate source of academic help”.

The UUK spokesman declines to comment on this and says: “More should be done to clamp down on these essay companies.”

He adds that the body does not have any specific proposals to tackle the problem (although suggestions are welcome).

So there does not appear to be any systematic solution to essay mills on the horizon, and responsibility for detecting and dealing with the issue continues to rest with individual academics and their universities.

“If academics really want to catch these essays, they are going to have to spend more time engaging with their students’ submitted work,” concludes the anonymous essay writer. Some may be left wishing that they had more time to do just that.

Nothing to hide (except your details)

“Although using our service is not cheating, and you have nothing to hide if you use the service responsibly, we still take your privacy very seriously … We never share details of your order with your university.” Oxbridge Essays

“First class in my chemistry coursework was unbelievable!!! thanks.” - Theo, Manchester My Uni Essays

“Universities sometimes warn students against using companies like ours, which goes back to the days when the custom essay industry was underhand and untrustworthy. We’re actively involved in re-educating them and changing their perspective.” All Answers

“Just wanted to send a note to say thanks. Your paper helped me get a 2:1 for my degree!! I can now apply for my Masters! Thanks ever so much!! Do you write to Masters level?” - Lucy, Stratford-upon-Avon Ivory Research

How to exorcise the ghostwriters

• Set students short tests or presentations based on their essays.
• Ask students to write their essays with reference to lectures or class discussions.
• Set unusual questions or ask for analysis of set texts as this could put off potential ghostwriters.
• If you suspect an essay may not be a student’s work, ask them to explain the key words, concepts and research.
• Check references: ghostwriters often do not have access to full journals or books, so may be able to reference only the preview pages of online articles.
• If an essay seems overly formatted, for example, with a contents page and chapters, this could be because of a standard format used by essay companies.
• Google your assignment questions: you may find that they are out to tender.
• Click here for more on preventing plagiarism.

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3 Ways Essay Mills Make it Easy to Buy an Essay

How do online essay writing businesses attract and retain student customers?

Associate Professor Tracey Bretag* will share the 8 key findings from the Office for Learning and Teaching funded project, Contract cheating and assessment design: Exploring the connection

Contract cheating is a symptom, not the problemStudents ‘share’ their work a lot, and this can lead to cheatingStudents primarily outsource their work to people they knowThree factors influence contract cheating: Language other than English (LOTE) status, dissatisfaction with teaching and learning and the perception that there are ‘lots of opportunities to cheat’Students don’t care about contract cheating, and we’re not talking to them about itSuspected cases of contract cheating often go unreported and penalties are lenientAuthentic assessment is a good thing to do, but it will not solve the problem of contract cheatingAssessment designs that are less likely to be outsourced are rarely used

*This project is co-led by Tracey Bretag and Rowena Harper at the University of South Australia, with institutional partners University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, Griffith University and Swansea University, UK.

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Students and educators around the world know that contract cheating is a growing reality on our modern campuses. Sometimes known as ghostwriting, contract cheating is when individuals engage a third-party or service to complete their assignment or exam. At high schools and universities worldwide, students can log onto a variety of essay mill sites, offer exact details on the nuances of their assignment (including the number of pages and citations required) and the due date, then receive a guarantee that the paper will arrive on time once payment is confirmed.

Daphne Taras, the Dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, addresses the severity of contract cheating in her recent article , emphasizing that “this is a serious industry that operates in the shadows, and it is a threat to our own industry of advanced education.” As the grim implications of contract cheating on campuses worldwide increase, it is essential for students and educators alike to understand the practices that make these industries thrive and what they can do to combat them .

Here are three ways essay mills make it easy to buy an essay online:

1. Reaching students at the right time: Essay mills understand that students feel the greatest pressure at the middle and end of their semesters. These businesses have learned that a student with a looming deadline is more likely to succumb to the temptation of contract cheating than one at the beginning of a term. Essay writing businesses target students with advertising and discounts on a specific schedule, often with a countdown clock that reminds students of a term’s impending end. Vulnerable individuals at the end of a stressful semester are likely to receive a well-timed email or pop-up ad to order a paper “just in time”.

Recently, the BBC discovered that prominent YouTube stars were encouraging students to purchase essays from online businesses on their channels. Essay mills have also started crafting entire networks of potential essay sites (or “client sites” ) to give students the sense that they are shopping for the best match when really there is one master essay business at the core. Cath Ellis, the Associate Dean of Education in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW, Sydney, has conducted extensive research in the area of contract cheating and discovered that “several of these ‘client sites’ were connected together into one business. This gives potential clients an illusion of choice while maximizing market share for the academic custom writing business.”

2. Offering a “professional” and personalized experience: The overall interaction between students and essay mills often feels like a business transaction. These businesses strive to provide a “professional” experience for students in place of a nefarious one, which helps to eliminate any lingering student anxiety. Daphne Taras, from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, experienced the savviness of the essay-writing business firsthand.

Using a false student name, Taras explored what it meant to be a student purchasing an essay online for a higher education class. During her experience, she received an actual telephone call from the business itself. The person on the other end of the line assured Taras that “they are a legitimate service, and capable of doing the work that is required”. Just days after confirming her order, she noticed that her credit card statement had a different, benign name of the business in the statement. No red flags would be raised by a parent reviewing their student’s credit card bills, which would ensure that the business transaction between the student and the essay mill remained private.

Some essay mill sites have even gone as far as to post the logos of top universities in their region without permission, claiming that “students from these institutions buy their essays from us!” This misleading personalization is meant to create the connection essay businesses need with students to make their sale.

3. Following up with perseverance: Essay mills earn money by attracting loyal customers. The more they can develop an ongoing relationship with students worldwide, the more essays they are able to peddle. By personalizing the experience and relentlessly following up, they can often guarantee repeat customers.

After a student purchases one essay and the business has their contact information, an essay mill will often check in with that student at key points during the academic school year. They might offer discount codes for new orders, coupled with light-hearted graphics. Susceptible students in the throes of mid-term madness might be cheered by a colorful image, promising to resolve their woes.

In the end, essay mills have learned to meet the very particular, seasonal needs of students and have seamlessly adapted to new technologies, reaching potential and repeat customers through online advertising, emails, and even phone calls. It’s clear that students and educators alike need to understand the strategies that have helped this industry to grow and continue to find ways to fight back against the threat that is contract cheating.

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Essay mills to be banned under plans to reform post-16 education

Unscrupulous ‘essay mills’ to be criminalised as part of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill

Services offering to provide students with essays for money, known as essay mills, are to be made illegal under plans announced by the government today (5 October).

The government intends to make it a criminal offence to provide, arrange or advertise these cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at any institution in England providing post-16 education including universities.

The move is one of a number of measures being introduced to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill , to transform the skills and training landscape and help level up opportunities across the country.

The law will also be changed to give equality to technical education in careers advice in schools, so all pupils understand the wide range of career routes and training available to them, such as apprenticeships, T Levels or traineeships, not just a traditional academic route.

Minister for Skills Alex Burghart said:

Essay mills are completely unethical and profit by undermining the hard work most students do. We are taking steps to ban these cheating services. We have also announced a new measure to make sure all young people receive broader careers guidance so everyone can get the advice that’s right for them.

Banning essay mills will help to safeguard the academic integrity and standards of post-16 and higher education in England and protect students from falling prey to the deceptive marketing techniques of contract cheating services.

This follows a number of steps already taken to tackle unscrupulous essay mills, including government working alongside the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, Universities UK and the National Union of Students to produce guidance for institutions on how to combat the threat of contract cheating and guidance for students to make them better aware of the consequences, sending a clear message that these services are not legitimate.

Additional measures being introduced to the Bill include enabling sixth form colleges with a religious faith designation to become a 16-19 Academy, boosting diversity in 16-19 academies and allowing more faith school providers to open 16-19 academies with a religious character.

The Bill, which will enter its report stage in the House of Lord on 12 October, underpins the government’s transformation of post-16 education and skills as set out in the Skills for Jobs White Paper . The reforms outlined in the Bill will help to create more routes into skilled employment in sectors the economy needs such as engineering, digital, clean energy and manufacturing, so more people can secure well-paid jobs in their local areas, levelling up the nation and supporting communities to thrive.

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Meaning of essay mill in English

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• Any attempt to address students ' use of essay mills should recognize that a culture of plagiarism pervades all of higher education .
• The university makes it clear to students in its admissions brochures that they are expected not to buy from or be employed by essay mills .
• The growing number of plagiarism cases is more to do with a heightened awareness than the growth of essay mills .
• Those who run the essay mills claim they are providing a useful service which students can consult as a resource before going away and writing their own piece .
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The Hacking of Presidential Campaigns Begins, With the Usual Fog of Motives

Donald J. Trump said Iranians hacked his campaign but only obtained “publicly available” data. Microsoft said a “high-ranking official” at a presidential campaign was a hacking target.

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By David E. Sanger and Michael Gold

David E. Sanger reported from Wellington, New Zealand. Michael Gold reported from Bozeman, Mont.

• Aug. 11, 2024

For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest. But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.

On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.

By Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.

The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.

Mr. Trump’s campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Saturday that it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents indeed emerged from the Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from inside the campaign.

The New York Times received what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.

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Why are religious teens happier than their secular peers?

Here’s what we can learn from the way faith communities stay rooted in the real world — and diminish the harms of the virtual one..

S eth Kaplan, an author and lecturer, spent more than two decades traveling the world. He lived or worked in 75 countries before settling down in a small Orthodox Jewish community about an hour north of Washington, D.C. Although he was raised Jewish, Kaplan told me the faith wasn’t a central part of his identity while growing up. In fact, it isn’t even the reason he now lives in an Orthodox community. “I moved here for the lifestyle,” he says.

I laughed. I’ve always been resistant to the idea of living a religious life. It feels constraining, with too many rigid and seemingly arbitrary rules. The idea that someone would move to an Orthodox community for the lifestyle sounded, well, crazy. But as Kaplan explained his story in more detail, it began to make more sense — and it resonated with my research.

I’ve spent much of the last few years as the lead researcher for Jonathan Haidt’s recently published book “The Anxious Generation,” which explains how we’ve inadvertently deprived Gen Z (those born after 1995) of real-world community, independence, and free play, and replaced those things with smartphones and social media, contributing to a precipitous decline in their mental health. Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. The introduction of the smartphone and digital life has only exacerbated these existing problems: loneliness, lack of civic engagement, and the erosion of local communities.

But this disintegration of community did not happen as significantly for one subset of Americans: Religious conservatives continued attending faith services, and those adults and teens continued to engage in civic activities like volunteering and youth groups at higher rates than others. It seems that kids from conservative religious communities may have been less likely to lose their community- and free-play-based childhoods. This is the kind of childhood Kaplan wanted for his kids.

Kemp Mill, Md., where Kaplan lives, is not exclusively religious or Jewish, but its 1,200 Orthodox Jewish families (which are politically diverse) are especially focused on community building. The community is small enough for everyone to know one another but big enough to make sure all the amenities are there: schools, restaurants, supermarkets, synagogues, and community centers. “People are constantly doing things for each other: delivering groceries to the elderly, mentoring youth, joining park cleanups,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it volunteering. . . . It’s just what’s expected.”

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His three kids live near their classmates, and there’s no shortage of neighborhood-based camps and after-school activities. He says because the neighbors trust one another, the kids go freely between houses, to the parks, or to the pizza parlor without adult supervision. The children are also expected to be contributing members of the community from an early age, from babysitting to tutoring and becoming camp counselors. “Everyone has a role.”

Kaplan’s description of his kids’ lives in their religious community strongly reflected what Haidt and I found likely to help solve the nation’s youth mental health crisis: real-world community.

Kaplan believes, more than anyone I have ever met, in the power of strong, tight-knit communities to solve our personal and social ills. In fact, Kaplan has become one of the world’s leading experts on what makes some societies and communities thrive and others not. He has come to believe that many of the crises we face today — the youth mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the drug overdose crisis, and political polarization — can be traced back to the deterioration of local communities.

The more I have talked with him and members of other religious communities, and the more I have dug into the research, the more I think he might be onto something.

Religion protects young people’s mental health

That today’s youths are experiencing a mental health crisis is now common knowledge. Young people are struggling with higher rates of mental illness than any previous generation on record. Concerned parents, educators, politicians, and others are desperately seeking explanations and solutions.

Teens without a religious affiliation across the political spectrum started reporting that they felt lonely, worthless, anxious, and depressed at much higher rates starting in the early 2010s. However, religious teens, especially those who report being more conservative, did not.

How did this one group of young people manage to mostly buck the trend?

At first, I thought the differences could be a result of self-reporting. Perhaps religious conservatives were as distressed as others but less likely to admit it. However, the data consistently show that this is unlikely to be the explanation. Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers. People who are religious have lower rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction , and suicide (for both men and women ). We see this around the world: Nations where a larger percentage of people identify as religious tend to have lower suicide rates. This protective effect appears to be even stronger for those who are both conservative and religious.

Haidt and I took a look at how these trends apply to Gen Z. We used data from Monitoring the Future , a yearly survey conducted among thousands of American high school students since 1977. The survey asks students how much they agree with these statements: “I feel I do not have much to be proud of”; “Sometimes I think I am no good at all”; “I feel that I can’t do anything right”; and “I feel that my life is not very useful.”

Before 2010, teens agreed with those statements at similar rates across political and religious divides, with religious conservatives slightly less likely to agree. But after 2010, the gap between religious conservatives and everyone else grew rapidly. By 2019, it became clear that secular liberals were the most likely to agree with these self-disparaging statements.

In “ The Anxious Generation ” and our related posts on our Substack newsletter, After Babel, Haidt and I argue that much of the decline in mental health among adolescents since 2010 can be tied to the rapid transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015. Adolescents traded their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps, and their play-based childhoods became disembodied and placeless phone-based childhoods. The new phone-based childhood pushes out most of teens’ real-world play and social interaction and brings young people a variety of harms , from loneliness and anxiety to attention fragmentation and sleep deprivation. The transformation of childhood has made many kids more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to self-harm, especially adolescent girls .

So, what are religious conservative teens doing differently?

What religious communities are getting right

The secret is likely not any particular belief system itself but the way organized religion and shared beliefs bind communities together.

As Haidt describes in his 2012 book “The Righteous Mind,” conservatives typically value loyalty, authority, and sanctity, which tend to foster openness to religion and its traditions and structure. In contrast, liberals generally prioritize individual rights and freedoms, which can lead to a rejection of organized religion.

We see this in the data: The percentage of liberal teens who report that religion is important in their lives and who regularly attend religious services has dropped from 40 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2019. In comparison, those numbers have changed much less for conservative teens, from 50 percent in 1979 to 42 percent in 2019.

These value differences often play out in the home. I’m making some broad generalizations here, but research shows that conservative (and religious) families tend to emphasize structure and duty, providing children with clear boundaries and roles to play in the home and community. Liberal (and secular) families, however, tend to emphasize personal expression and exploration, encouraging children to discover diverse aspects of their identities. Each approach has strengths — secular liberals foster more self-expression, while religious conservatives offer more structure . Of course, either approach can go too far, leading to challenges like rigid and authoritarian parenting in conservative families or boundary-less parenting in liberal families.

These dynamics can play out with technology, too. Liberal and secular parents tend to be less restrictive about technology use than conservative and religious parents, and liberal and secular teens report spending more time on social media. At the same time, conservative teens report spending more time engaging in their local community — attending religious services, working, spending more time with trusted adults, and spending more time with their friends in person.

The difference in how teens spend their time matters. Experts have extensively documented the mental health and social benefits of strong real-world communities and the unique contribution of religion in binding such communities together (partly due to the collective rituals that are key components of religious life). As Kaplan explained to me, based on his own research, real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support. Any developmental psychology textbook will tell you that healthy child development requires these features.

Although most of us understand that community is beneficial, many have not experienced the kinds of tight-knit local communities that Kaplan describes. We often mistake social networks for communities. As he noted in an email to me, “An understanding of what community is has been lost to . . . people who have never experienced it. . . . Until very recently, human communities were always rooted in specific places — places imbued with meaning, places with history and a shared identity . Such communities may have constrained their members in various ways — limiting, as [author Alan] Ehrenhalt writes in ‘The Lost City,’ ‘privacy, individuality, and choice’ — but they provided ‘some anchors of stability to help us through times of . . . unsettling change.’”

Tight-knit communities provide a stable network of peers and adults (not just parents!) whom children can trust, collaborate with, and learn skills from. They also offer connections with supportive, trusted adults who act as guardians and mentors and can help a child through hard times during adolescence. The community features that help children thrive are much more difficult to build into the virtual world.

This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives. Religious conservative teens, on the other hand, were more likely to be rooted in their real-world communities and less likely to move their lives so deeply into the virtual world, and thus less likely to have been harmed by a phone-based childhood.

This is the key point: Virtual networks are not sufficient replacements for real-world communities.

What about kids who don’t have a real-world community?

One common objection to the claim that real-world communities are better than virtual networks is that social media platforms offer marginalized youth many social benefits — they can find the like-minded peers they don’t have in their real-world communities.

Of course, that’s a good thing. This is a major advantage of the internet and, sometimes, of social media, too. However, kids from marginalized groups are also far more likely to experience the risks of the phone-based childhood — from cyberbullying and predation from peers and strangers to being fed self-harm content by the platforms’ algorithms. Until some guardrails are put in place, I worry that this solution may, at times, be worse than the problem it is trying to solve. These online networks are often unstable, transient, and full of unknown people — and they are embedded within platforms designed to fuel outrage and keep their users online much longer than they intend. Giving our most vulnerable teens unfettered access to an unregulated world with no guardrails or support does not outweigh the meager social benefits. We can do better than this.

When Kaplan told me he moved into an Orthodox Jewish community “for the lifestyle,” he helped me see that there is more to religious life than faith itself. He showed me that even if we’re lucky enough not to suffer from economic poverty, we often suffer from social poverty, with frail and shallow social ties to friends, family, and the local community.

Now, I personally don’t want to live in a highly religious community, and I don’t expect to move into one “for the lifestyle.” At the same time, I want to give my kids — when I have them — the kind of community that Kaplan is able to provide his children.

This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with our desire to give them a stable, tight-knit community? It’s a difficult question to answer, though many organizations , like Outward Bound, Block Party USA, and the Girl Scouts, are creatively trying to do just this . My hope is that we can learn from the communities that have done this best and work together to end phone-based childhood, restore play-based childhood, and give all kids more deeply rooted, tight-knit, and loving communities in the real world.

Zach Rausch is an associate research scientist at New York University, the lead researcher for the book “The Anxious Generation,” and managing editor of the Substack newsletter After Babel.