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Eiko O’Shea

Professor Garneau

English 100 Essay 6

29 November 2017

In Light of an Academic Black Market

We’re all lazy—there’s no denying that fact. The more the world advances, the more that

becomes accessible to us, the less work we have to do ourselves. Innovation, however, is both a

blessing and a curse; because the less work we have to do, the more we find ourselves lacking

the proper work ethic we owe to responsibility. In life, we move with haste, and we expect

everything else to follow. Time is stretched thin, and people find themselves searching for a way

to get it all done. Students are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. After all, when you’re

attending college full time and working to fill the gaps, who has the time to churn out a five page

essay? Luckily, in the current era, one can buy anything for the right price—even essays. A

purchase such as so isn’t uncommon; it’s low risk, high reward, and almost impossible to be

caught. Ethics in the field of academic integrity have been skewed by modern accessibility and

entitlement, resulting in an inadvertently detrimental effect on higher education.

All it takes to find a writer, or better put, all it takes to get your essay done, is a single

google search and a working credit card. According to Shawren Singh, over 4.6 million

references can be found from a single search (3). This isn’t a service that has surfaced in modern

times, however. The concept of ghostwriting can be dated back to ancient and medieval times, as

Shulun Zheng and Jie Cheng write in their article, “Academic Ghostwriting and International

Students.” Leaders and public figures who lacked the skills to compose letters and speeches

themselves hired others to do it for them, creating a practice that continued into current times,
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unchanged save for the fact that it is now much easier to get away with (124). However, the

circumstances now are a world away from what they used to be; we have much more opportunity

than those of the past did, and we make the conscious choice to wallow in our indolence rather

than to learn and advance our own skills. Handing assignments off to another for completion

negates the original purpose of the work—to aid in academic growth, therefore hindering the

student’s growth and preparation for the future. Writing is staple in life, it always have been, and

the importance of learning and mastering the skill is unparalleled. You cannot hire someone else

to write for you for the rest of your life; sooner or later, you’ll need to learn, and the use of

ghostwriting only adds to the staggering pile that will inevitably fall, given time. Although in the

eyes of many students, paying someone else to do their work is mutually beneficial (Zheng and

Cheng 127). Despite the many cons to ghostwriting—on the client’s end—the writer themself

isn’t necessarily in the wrong.

When opportunity knocks, it’s only natural to open the door. To make a living off of

something you’re good at, that’s a goal we all strive for; and with such a willing market, it isn’t

surprising that many turn to ghostwriting as a profession. While the practice may be seen as

unethical from one point of view, others may see it as a “collective effort”, per se, an opinion

that goes hand in hand with the student perspective mentioned in Zheng and Cheng’s article.

“While what I do is not illegal, it does enable others to break rules and suffer the consequences if

they are caught,” a ghostwriter accounts in the work of Shawren Singh and Dan Remenyi,

contributors to the University of South Africa’s Journal of Science. They operate within the law,

although the moral side of the job varies from worker to worker. Some are students themselves,

others freelance writers out to make some extra cash (White). Ghostwriting diverts from the

inherent definition of plagiarism—the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and
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passing them off as one's own, an act of theft—instead implying that there is no stealing involved

in ghostwriting, rather “a question of misrepresentation or lying about the authorship of the

work” (Singh and Remenyi). They offer services, and students are the ones who come flocking.

The reason as to why lies in the behavior and cognition of our current generation. Daniel

Luzer, a writer for the Washington Monthly, brings up a strong point:

Students today are characterized by a "sense of entitlement, a constant need for

validation, and a mediocre work ethic." At the same time, they expect fast and easy

entertainment. They have short attention spans, and they've been constantly receiving

gratuitous praise for minor accomplishments from their parents. Together with the

convenience and power of the Internet, we've created students very eager to have

someone else do their work. (Luzer)

With so many distractions nowadays, we’ve grown to adopt the attention span of a goldfish.

There’s a plethora of things to do that are much more enjoyable and fulfilling than homework,

which is often the bane of any student’s existence—my own included. There are other reasons,

too. International students and those who typically have English as a second language are also

known to frequently turn to ghostwriting in hopes of receiving a better grade writing in a

language they aren't grammatically familiar with, Zheng and Cheng observe. We should

recognize this problem when it arises, rather than allowing them to suffer on and search for other

options. Because if students are not assisted should they have difficulty in writing and

comprehension, they have the potential to be left in a loop of overall loss, both academically and

financially. Insisting that “. . . Once those students start to hire ghostwriters and receive a high

grade, they become satisfied by the ghostwriters’ works, and they start to hire ghostwriters
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continuously,” an important point is brought up that we must extend our hands to those who need

help before they resort to seeking it out by illegitimate means (6).

The most harrowing part about the issue is that it’s virtually impossible to detect. In the

beginning, Singh and Remenyi evaluate, the essays were relatively unsophisticated and could be

distinguished through means of anti-plagiarism software. This was back in the early years of the

internet, however, and things have progressed significantly since then. As stated in the article,

original work written by these ghostwriters is not often detected via anti-plagiarism software:

“Although there are programs that claim to be able to identify authors by their style using the

principles of stylometry, a competently-produced piece of work by a ghostwriter would be

original and thus would not be detected by software alone” (3). All of this meaning there is no

easy solution to the problem. It is not an industry that can be stopped, as what they’re doing isn’t

illegal, but it can be monitored in an academic setting. Anti-plagiarism programs lack the ability

to recognize discrepancies between writing style, comparing pieces side by side and evaluating

the voice behind the works. Technology lacks the human touch that would be needed to detect

this kind of advanced cheating, and that’s what makes ghostwriting such a pain; as such,

improving anti-plagiarism software is not the answer as it would then strike in an arms-race

mentality, and would then simply force the facilitators to up their game as well.

Adequate change should take place in the academic environment itself, improving on

education rather than spending time fighting an industry that will likely never back down. For

example, the New Zealand Government created a new set of guidelines in which it is a necessity

for academic staff to “Engage continually with their students and to be on the lookout for any

surprising changes in their performance,” therefore getting to know the students themselves

better. This allows for better recognition of significant stylistic changes in writing, and detecting
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red flags that may point to plagiarism and ghostwriting; however, such changes in academic

setting are taxing both in terms of time and finances (Singh and Remenyi 5). Zheng and Cheng

also offer the concept of teaching students that “ learning is more important than a grade,” which,

while true, contradicts with the high requirements of graduate schools and other academic

opportunities. From a young age, we are taught that good grades are rewarded and bad grades

give punishment, and as such we strive for a high grade point average rather than reflecting on

what we’ve learned. Due to this, it’s difficult to implement the concept that learning is the

ultimate goal. Thus, something along the lines of New Zealand’s recent changes would be the

best solution to the issue of ghostwriting, even if it’s just the addition of freewriting for faculty to

get a better grip on the student’s actual standing in writing. Change is difficult, but not

impossible.

Ultimately, the student clients of these ghostwriters are our future. They are our future

scientists paying for their research papers. They are our future doctors buying their medical

dissertations. They are a generation driven towards the easy way out; the enablers of an academic

black market. Ghostwriting has the potential to have an incredible detrimental effect on higher

education, and it’s an issue that cannot be avoided or opposed in a half-hearted manner. We’re

all lazy one way or another, but that does not have to be our downfall. We must strive to do

better, to be better than the future professional with false credentials. Success is earned through

the efforts of the indefatigable—not written by a phantom hand.

Works Cited

Brandt, Deborah. “Deborah Brandt on Ghostwriting.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison

Writing Center, May 2008. https://writing.wisc.edu/podcasts/transcripts/wc_brandt1.pdf

Goldschmidt, Jona. "In Defense of Ghostwriting." Fordham Urban Law Journal, vol.29,
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no. 3, 2001. FLASH, http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu.

Luzer, Daniel. "Memoirs of an Academic Fraudster." Washington Monthly, vol. 44, no.

11/12, Nov/Dec2012, pp. 49-50. EBSCOhost,

ezproxy.library.kapiolani.hawaii.edu:8080/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/

login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=83391518&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Singh, Shawren and Dan Remenyi. "Plagiarism and Ghostwriting: The Rise in Academic

Misconduct." South African Journal of Science, vol. 112, no. 5/6, May/Jun2016, pp. 36-

42. EBSCOhost, doi:10.17159/sajs.2016/20150300.

White, Jeffry L. "Shadow Scholars and the Rise of the Dissertation Service Industry: Can

We Maintain Academic Integrity?" Journal of Research Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, Jan.

2016, pp. 1-9. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.library.kapiolani.hawaii.edu:8080/login?

url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=a9h&AN=121449296&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Zheng, Shulun and Jie Cheng. “Academic Ghostwriting and International Students.” Young

Scholars in Writing, vol. 12 (2015): 124-133.

https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

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