Paid Academic Writing Services: A Perceptional Study of Business Students

It seems challenging to detect the beneficiary students of the Academic Paid Writing Services, which refers to a practice in which authors or students appoint professional writers to produce scholarly work (including research papers,  university assignments, research reports, and so on)  with a predefined style. This study aimed to explore the factors leading the students in higher education to choose the paid Academic Writing Services (PAWS), which affects their performance and personal development due to contract cheating and make them realize that learning is better than grades as through self-explorations only a person can get something better. By employing quantitative approach to obtain information associated with PAWS, data was gathered from 117 business students enrolled in six Higher Education Institutes in Karachi, Pakistan, using adopted questionnaire having close-ended questions with 5-point Likert scale, measuring students’ attitude towards class assignments, their awareness about plagiarism, and their attitude about academic paid writing services. The results revealed that male students were more inclined towards paid writing services than their counterpart female students were and the increase in Students’ Attitude towards Assignments brought the increase academic paid writing services. Therefore, academic professionals servicing in universities are recommended to take due care of the two factors to prevent the increased paid academic wiring services

Ghostwriting as a Critical Lens: Authorship and Attribution in Professional and Academic Contexts

This dissertation exposes the inherent deceit within the practice of ghostwriting, considers ways that business applications of writing de-value the labor of writing, and, finally, argues for a composition pedagogy that moves past the emphasis on single-author documents so that students can critically view corporate authorship as an alternative. This dissertation engages in mixed-methods research that included surveys of blog readers and interviews of professional ghostwriters to include voices too often excluded from discussions about the impacts of professional ghostwriting. After establishing the layers of silence placed around the practice of ghostwriting, I then argue that perpetuating this practice de-values the labor of writing despite the integral role writing plays in creating value in our current world. After discussing the ethical and professional implications of ghostwriting in corporate settings, this dissertation argues that students in First-Year Composition (FYC) programs occupy a role similar to the professional ghostwriter in terms of limited agency, pay-off, and potential. As with the context of professional writing, this study challenges the status quo of single-authored texts as assessments in FYC and argues for the benefits of students composing in digital genres such as wikis and social media to critique the benefits of single-authored, collaborative, and corporate writing in and out of the classroom

Contract cheating and academic literacies: Exploring the landscape

The phenomenon of contract cheating in higher education is complex and a growing concern for those invested in the delivery of high-quality education and positive educational outcomes. This research explores the academic literacies practices, exchanges, and tensions between and among academic ghostwriters, students, and teaching staff, within the Canadian post-secondary sector. Dominant approaches to academic misconduct have not addressed the institutional and sociocultural factors underlying the growth of the contract cheating industry. Academic institutions lacking a coherent, holistic strategy will continue to undermine the public confidence, and teaching and learning frameworks. Given the dominance and prioritizing of reading and writing in higher education, this study adopts an “academic literacies” conceptual approach (Lea & Street, 1998), which foregrounds literacy as a social practice (Street, 1984). This approach provides a lens that includes the social, cultural, and institutional, while supporting a critical gaze on the literacy practices of students, ghostwriters, and teaching staff. This qualitative study used a multiple case studies orientation, and conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 ghostwriters, 7 students, and 8 faculty members to provide the data for analysis. Texts such as advertisements, and sample ghostwritten assignments were also considered. Through the rigorous coding of literacy social practice building blocks (e.g., practices, events) (Hamilton, 2010) the data were used to create a “Literacies Landscape Map.” This map explored the “scape” (Appadurai, 1990), or “eduscape” (C. Luke, 2006) of how multiple literacies are practised and reflected in the phenomenon of contract cheating. In addition, drawing from Bourdieu’s (1972/1977, 1979/1984, 1983/1986, 1984/1988) notions of capital, habitus, and field, the study revealed findings around the practices of collaboration and literacy brokering, arguing that some students and ghostwriters are engaging in “assessment brokering” within a “fourth space” (Thacker, in press-a). This study offers a more nuanced view of contract cheating, finding a tension of exchange beyond the financial, and having implications for higher education policy. The study concludes with a call for academic institutions to consider the development of transformative, institutional strategies to support academic integrity

Preventing And Detecting Plagiarism In The Written Work Of College Students

Plagiarism abounds on American college campuses.  This paper first examines reasons that college students cheat, using both the perspective of student respondents and the observations of the faculty authors.  Next, the paper examines the two strategies which can be taken to combat student plagiarism: prevention and detection.  Specific strategies are offered for each approach.

Chatting and cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT

The use of artificial intelligence in academia is a hot topic in the education field. ChatGPT is an AI tool that offers a range of benefits, including increased student engagement, collaboration, and accessibility. However, is also raises concerns regarding academic honesty and plagiarism. This paper examines the opportunities and challenges of using ChatGPT in higher education, and discusses the potential risks and rewards of these tools. The paper also considers the difficulties of detecting and preventing academic dishonesty, and suggests strategies that universities can adopt to ensure ethical and responsible use of these tools. These strategies include developing policies and procedures, providing training and support, and using various methods to detect and prevent cheating. The paper concludes that while the use of AI in higher education presents both opportunities and challenges, universities can effectively address these concerns by taking a proactive and ethical approach to the use of these tools

A comparison of the linguistic encoding of artificial-intelligence-generated academic essays and academic essays written by MSc ALSLA 2022-23 students

Background The aim of this study was to establish whether artificial-intelligence (AI) generated essays can be differentiated reliably from human written essays in terms of linguistic features and n-gram word sequences. It also aimed to assess the quality of AI-generated essays compared to essays written by humans, and whether expert raters can differentiate between both types. Through generative AI, people can input parameters into online software to generate different types of discourse within minutes. Though these discourses include songs, graphic art, and computer codes, one of the main concerns for educational boards globally is the use of generative AI for academic essays. Using generative AI to create essays and submitting it as one’s own undermines the fundamentals of assessment, authorship, and academic integrity. Hence, it is important to conduct research on such discourse to analyze the style in which AI can write, and how similar or distinct it is from students’ work. Methods A corpus of essays responding to a typical graduate-level essay prompt (seven written by MSc students and seven generated by AI) was analyzed for textual and authorial features that might help differentiate between the two. Specifically, (1) the Jaccard’s Index (a measure of linguistic similarity and difference) was calculated for each set of essays; (2) n-grams analysis was performed to determine the frequency and purpose of reoccurring long word sequences; (3) adaptive comparative judgment of the essays by university lecturers was undertaken to assess the relative quality of the essays; and (4) a ‘Turing test’ by university lecturers was performed to assess whether they can identify which essays were AI generated and which were human written when they have been told that the corpus contains the two. Results All essays varied in terms of linguistic features, references, length, errors, subheadings, and stylistic markers. AI-generated essays contain more 5-gram word sequences than essays written by students, despite being shorter. Lecturers tend to rate student essays as better and of more depth than AI essays; and in most cases, lecturers can differentiate between AI-generated and human written texts when they know that a corpus contains both types

El uso de inteligencia artificial y sus desafíos para la evaluación académica: una revisión de la literatura

El procesamiento de lenguaje natural (NLP) ha sido estudiado en la industria de la computación durante mucho tiempo.  Entre los constantes avances tecnológicos se ha logrado  el desarrollo de complejos modelos de inteligencia artificial (IA), incluyendo Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT chat) cuyo uso, puesto a disposición desde noviembre de 2022, ha mostrado la tendencia de irse expandiendo. Los modelos desarrollados tienen un potencial preocupante para la evaluación académica porque pueden llevar a cabo una gama de actividades lingüísticas y generar reacciones humanas. Considerando esta problemática, el objetivo de este artículo es examinar las potenciales ventajas y desventajas del uso de ChatGPT y otras tecnologías NLP en la escritura y su evaluación, según la revisión de la literatura, para llamar la atención  sobre las preocupaciones éticas planteadas por su uso. Para ello, se realizó una búsqueda en la literatura que incluía artículos en Google Académico y el resultado de la búsqueda aportó 12 artículos con un alto número de citaciones. Se utilizó  metodología cualitativa para el estudio, lo que implica la lectura y el análisis de las fuentes para encontrar información pertinente, en interés de responder a los objetivos de la investigación. Las palabras clave como "GPTChat", "contenido generado por IA", "escritura académica" y "procesamiento de lenguaje natural" “fraude (ética) en las evaluaciones” guiaron la búsqueda. Los  hallazgos de este análisis preliminar apuntan a que el ChatGPT y otras técnicas de NLP podrían aumentar la eficiencia de la escritura académica y la investigación. Sin embargo, su uso también plantea preocupaciones sobre cómo puede afectar la fiabilidad y la validez del trabajo académico. El estudio subraya la necesidad de explorar minuciosamente las posibles aplicaciones, peligros y limitaciones de estas tecnologías e, igualmente, enfatiza el valor de debates en profundidad y preocupaciones morales en torno a su aplicación