Helping Western Students Cheat is Big Business in Kenya

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Doing Western students' homework is big business in Kenya

It was 5 p.m. on a Thursday in Nairobi, Kenya, and the streets were crowded with people rushing to get home for dinner. But Philemon, a 25-year-old science researcher, was just getting ready for his second job as an academic writer.

Philemon is part of the global industry of contract cheating in which students around the world use websites to commission their homework assignments. He asked that his full name not be used for privacy reasons due to the sensitive nature of his work.

Service providers like Philemon don’t like to call it “cheating” — they prefer the terms “academic writer” and “online tutor.”

“My clients have been coming from various regions in the world,” Philemon said. “I have worked for a client in Australia, in the US. In Kenya? Very rare.”

Philemon began academic writing in 2017 when he was a university student seeking a flexible part-time job. Today, Philemon can make as much as $1,000 a month — as long as he gets good grades for his clients.

“You have to make sure he gets an A, so that in the future he will refer his or her friends to you,” Philemon said.

In recent years, contract cheating has become a lucrative, albeit informal, business in Kenya, which has become one of the largest sources of academic writers in the industry.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-01-24/ ... ness-kenya

I used to be a student at a university. I became a paid tutor for a programming class. I was so easy to manipulate that I often stayed twice as long as I was being paid to stay because the students used me. When 21 students submitted the exact same file, some of the blame was put on me. The university now uses MOSS (https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/).
Later, a female student got me to do a lot of her work for her. I later learned that she pays people online to do her work for her as well. She takes loads like 25 credit hours per semester by taking some at my university and some at other schools, which she will transfer into my university eventually. Students are not allowed to take more than 22 credit hours at my school, and more than 19 requires permission.
It takes skills to cheat. Those skills are what makes people fit for academics. School is a test of one's ability to work the system.

Interesting field. Never really thought of it as a business. Makes sense to outsource to where the cheap labour is, though. No way I would do that work here for “up to $1000/month.” That’s even below minimum wage, never mind what I earn.

I could get A’s on other people’s work - and I have I used to edit my deaf friend’s marketing course work.. he was studying programming anyways, and I was studying business at a different school. He would have passed just fine but grammar and such wasn’t his strong suit. So I would edit and add things and he would get A’s.

Not allowed more than 22 credits/semester and need permission for over 19? Silly. The business & industrial engineering program I did was 130.5 credits in 2 years, so averaged 32.6 credits per semester. No other school here is that compressed or intense.

I could probably do enough homework to make more than $1k/month but it still wouldn’t be worth it compared to how much I can earn plying my trade.

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

If only Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin had known about this stuff

I once taught a student how to write a five-point essay by actually writing one with her, step-by-step.  She got an A.  Then she came back and asked me to write another.

"The first one's free", I said.  "What do you think is a fair price for the second?"

Maybe it was the audacity of the question, or maybe it was the way I slowly looked her up and down, but her only reply to me was a harshly-whispered "Bastard!" as she turned and stomped out.

...

"If anything worth doing is worth doing well, then it follows that anything worth doing well is worth being paid well to do." -- Me

I wrote an essay for an ex on Toni Morrison's book "Belloved" without having read it, last minute and free if charge

We're outsourcing that now, too?

When I was a grad student in math and took Calculus of Variations one semester, the class was mostly engineering students.

We had homework due every Monday. An hour before class, one of the engineering students stopped by my office and asked if he could compare his answers to mine. I had no problem with that and handed him the homework. I thought that he was going to compare them in the hallway. Instead, he went to an empty room down the hall and sat and copied my homework and then brought my paper back.

I did have a problem with that.

So the next Monday, he stopped by to repeat his performance and was astonished to learn that I hadn't done it yet. Every Monday morning he would stop by and find that I hadn't done it yet. Toward the end of the semester he was getting real concerned.

Then the last weekend before the last homework was due, I did all the homework for the semester, took it up to the mailroom, and put it in the prof's mailbox.

On Monday morning, the engineering student came in and asked if I had done the homework yet. I smiled and said that I had. He then looked very relieved and asked if he could borrow it "to compare answers". His look of relief disappeared when I told him that I turned it in the night before.

I made an A in the class, but have no idea what he made.

Online learning systems have the capacity for time limited assessments with browser lockdown and eye tracking invigilation software that only open for a short duration to prevent cheating.