Work is due on tomorrow (1/27/20) at 1600 hours (4pm eastern time zone). Work needs to be completed according to the Turabian writing style. 

See attachments and Complete assignment In around 100–300 words.

Openly discuss Singh, Shawren, and Dan Remenyi’s article “Plagiarism and Ghostwriting: The Rise in Academic Misconduct” and Wolverton’s “The New Cheating Economy” that you have read. In your discussion, address the following:

What is the main point or thesis of each article?

What is the strength of each article?

What points in each article need further discussion and why?

Compare and contrast the two articles.

The New Cheating Economy

Author: Wolverton, Brad

Abstract:   Business is booming right under colleges’ noses. It’s not just papers and assignments anymore. Now it’s the whole course. Fifteen credits were all he needed. That’s what the school district in California where Adam Sambrano works as a career-guidance specialist required for a bump in pay. But when he saw the syllabus for a graduate course he’d enrolled in last year at Arizona State University, he knew he was in trouble. Among the assignments was a 19-page paper, longer than anything he’d ever written. The idea of that much research worried Mr. Sambrano, who also spends time serving in the Army National Guard. Before the class started, he went on Craigslist and enlisted the service of a professional cheater. For $1,000 -less than the monthly housing allowance he was receiving through the GI Bill, he says — Mr. Sambrano hired a stranger to take his entire course.

Full text:   Business is booming right under colleges’ noses. It’s not just papers and assignments anymore. Now it’s the whole course. Fifteen credits were all he needed. That’s what the school district in California where Adam Sambrano works as a career-guidance specialist required for a bump in pay. But when he saw the syllabus for a graduate course he’d enrolled in last year at Arizona State University, he knew he was in trouble. Among the assignments was a 19-page paper, longer than anything he’d ever written. The idea of that much research worried Mr. Sambrano, who also spends time serving in the Army National Guard. Before the class started, he went on Craigslist and enlisted the service of a professional cheater. For $1,000 -less than the monthly housing allowance he was receiving through the GI Bill, he says — Mr. Sambrano hired a stranger to take his entire course. He transferred $500 upfront, “From Adam for ASU,” according to a receipt obtained by The Chronicle. Then he just waited for the cheater to do his work. On any given day, thousands of students go online seeking academic relief. They are first-years and transfers overwhelmed by the curriculum, international students with poor English skills, lazy undergrads with easy access to a credit card. They are nurses, teachers, and government workers too busy to pursue the advanced degrees they’ve decided they need. The Chronicle spoke with people who run cheating companies and those who do the cheating. The demand has been around for decades. But the industry is in rapid transition. Just as higher education is changing, embracing a revolution in online learning, the cheating business is transforming as well, finding new and more insidious ways to undermine academic integrity. A decade ago, cheating consisted largely of students’ buying papers off the internet. That’s still where much of the money is. But in recent years, a new underground economy has emerged, offering any academic service a student could want. Now it’s not just a paper or one-off assignment. It’s the quiz next week, the assignment after that, the answers served up on the final. Increasingly, it’s the whole class. And if students are paying someone to take one course, what’s stopping them from buying their entire degree? The whole-class market is maturing fast. More than a dozen websites now specialize in taking entire online

courses, including BoostMyGrade.com, OnlineClassHelp.com, and TakeYourClass.com. One of them, NoNeedtoStudy.com, advertises that it has completed courses for more than 11,000 students at such colleges as Duke, Michigan State, even Harvard. As cheating companies expand their reach, colleges have little incentive to slow their growth. There’s no money in catching the cheaters. But there’s a lot of money in upping enrollment. Two professors at Western Carolina University were so concerned about the encroachment of cheating that they set up a fake online class to learn more about the industry’s tactics, and see what they could detect. About a dozen students agreed to enroll in the introductory psychology course, including John Baley, then a graduate student in clinical psychology. They were provided with fake names, email addresses, and ID numbers, plus a pot of money for cheating services. Half were asked to cheat, and they did so in a variety of ways, collaborating inappropriately with classmates, buying papers, and paying others to take tests. Mr. Baley went looking for a company to take the whole class for him. He typed a few words into his browser -“cheat for me in my online class” — and turned up dozens of results. Many sites seemed untrustworthy: Their content was misspelled or grammatically incorrect, or their customer-service reps had trouble with basic English. Some requested confidential banking information or asked him to enter it into a website with no security protection. But one company impressed him. Its representatives responded promptly, explained how their colleagues would complete the course, and guaranteed a B or better — or his money back. He agreed to pay the company $900, half upfront, and handed over his course username and password. Over the next 10 weeks, the company, which Mr. Baley declined to name, to protect any further research, passed him from the customer-service staff to the management team to the person who took his course. At each stage, he says, he dealt with people who were efficient, responsive, and reliable. In fact, the cheaters performed better than he thought they would. They completed every assignment without prompting, at one point providing a written script for a video presentation with less than 36 hours’ notice. The instructors, Alvin Malesky, an associate professor of psychology, and Robert Crow, an assistant professor of educational research, used Turnitin and Google to check students’ work for plagiarism and monitored them to see if groups were taking exams at the same time. The professors caught several students plagiarizing material. But they didn’t spot the paid test takers, purchased papers, or coordinated assignments. And they had no clue that a person in New York to whom Mr. Baley had mailed his books was behind the A’s they were giving. Even when professors knew that students were cheating, and were trying to catch them, they came up short. Mr. Baley’s only frustration was with the barrage of marketing he got. His Facebook and Instagram feeds were saturated with ads for cheating companies, he says. That didn’t let up for months. Two years after the company took his class, its representatives are still trying to enlist him to refer other students as clients. Like any underground industry, academic cheating has its share of sloppy opportunists and savvy operators. Most work in the shadows. Click on a website that offers academic work for hire, and you’ll probably find little information about the people or company behind it. The owners often use aliases and mislead prospective customers with fake addresses and exaggerated claims. No Need to Study LLC lists its corporate address as 19 East 52nd Street, in New York,, but complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau say that address does not exist. A representative for the company said in an email that it is a virtual business offering services exclusively online and does not have an office open to the public. A dissertation-writing service that claims to be based in Chicago seems to operate out of Pakistan. “In order to create a best academic assignment that rank #1 among other assignments,” its website says, “then you will seek for a dedicated and experienced writer’s help.” Even more-established companies can be difficult to track down. The headquarters of one, Student Network

Resources, appears to be in the middle of a New Jersey cornfield. A half-mile away, in a generic strip mall, it maintains a post-office box in a packing-and-shipping store. The owner of the store says he forwards the mail to Florida. It goes to the company’s founder and president, Mark DeGaeta. Mr. DeGaeta got the idea for Student Network Resources in the late 1990s, when he was still in high school, he says in an email to The Chronicle. Over the years, he has registered more than a dozen domains, including PaperDue.com and HelpMyEssay.com, which funnel work to his company, whose name is relatively unknown. When students place a request through one of the sites, they enter their name, email address, and as much information about the assignment as possible, including due date and level (undergraduate, master’s, or doctoral). That information goes into Student Network’s system, where a price is set based on the difficulty of the assignment. The job is posted to a private board for writers, stripped of any personal details about the student. From there, a willing writer picks up the order and corresponds with the client through a private channel in which students often disclose personal information about themselves and their courses. Then the writer delivers the completed assignment. Mr. DeGaeta is mum about the revenue he has brought in, but the business appears to be lucrative. Two longtime writers say they’ve earned as much as $10,000 a month. At peak times, the company says on its website, most of its 150 writers earn more than $1,800 a week. Writers typically pocket half the price of an order; the company gets the rest. If those numbers are accurate, annual revenue for Student Network Resources would be in the millions. The company has only two employees. The founder has made a good living, according to public records. He owns an apartment in a tony neighborhood of New York, near the United Nations building, and seems to reside near Miami Beach. But his business has fallen off in recent years, he says, as the industry has expanded overseas. The company emphatically denies that it is a cheating service. It says it tells customers that they may not use its material for academic credit — and requires them to acknowledge as much before purchasing papers, during the research process, and before receiving the work. “We vehemently protect our copyright,” Mr. DeGaeta said in a written statement. “If the customer decides to use our material as a reference they must cite Student Network Resources Inc.” Several current and former writers told The Chronicle that they had believed that. Amelia Albanese, a former community-college tutor who worked for the company in 2010, says she thought she was writing sample papers for tutors and teachers. When she realized she was doing students’ work, she quit. “I worked at a college,” she says, “and if the students I worked with had cheated, I would have been furious.” The company’s business depends on covering its tracks. A memo it sent to writers last year gives step-by-step instructions for wiping the metadata from documents they produce. “Every document that you submit must have 100% blank ‘Summary’ properties,” the memo says. “You can make the ‘Author’ field (and other fields) blank by default for all new documents by going to ‘Preferences’ ‘User Information’ and replacing the content of the ‘First:’ and ‘Last:’ fields with a blank space.” According to Mr. DeGaeta, the memo was aimed at preventing writers from poaching clients. But if there’s no trace of a cheater on a document, a college has no way of knowing — or if an instructor suspects something, no proof — that the student didn’t do the work. Cheating has become second nature to many students. In studies, more than two-thirds of college students say they’ve cheated on an assignment. As many as half say they’d be willing to purchase one. To them, higher education is just another transaction, less about learning than about obtaining a credential. The market, which includes hundreds of websites and apps, offers a slippery slope of options. Students looking for class notes and sample tests can find years’ worth on Koofers.com, which archives exams from dozens of colleges. And a growing number of companies, including Course Hero and Chegg, offer online tutoring that attempts to stay above the fray (one expert calls such services a “gateway drug”). Many students turn to websites like Yahoo Answers or Reddit to find solutions to homework problems. And

every month, hundreds of students put assignments up for bid on Freelancer.com and Upwork, where they might get a paper written for the cost of a few lattes. It’s not uncommon for students to disclose personal details in their orders, which anyone online can see. This spring a student from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte included an attachment to his Upwork order that identified his institution and the introductory philosophy class he was looking for help in. A few days later, a Ph.D. candidate in Britain went on the same site to solicit help with his dissertation. A document he attached to his order included his name and his adviser’s. Some of the most explicit exchanges happen on Craigslist, which has become a hub of cheating activity. Over two days in April, The Chronicle analyzed Craigslist posts in seven cities in which a cheater or cheating service offered to complete whole courses for students. The search turned up more than 200 ads. In many cases, the same ads ran in multiple cities, suggesting a coordinated marketing effort. Craigslist posters appealed to students by acknowledging how little time they had for busywork. “Online classes are a pain in the ass,” said one Chicago-area ad. Others outright asked students to hand over their online credentials. “You can trust us with your login and password information,” said a Phoenix post. “We will do every section of your online class including discussion boards, tests, assignments, and quizzes.” The Chronicle exchanged messages with several Craigslist posters to inquire about the cost of their service and how it worked. One person who has posted regularly in the Los Angeles area said he had been in business for 10 years and had a staff of “over 20 experts.” His prices, he said, depended on the number of hours it would take to complete a class, not how well a student wanted to do. “We always get A’s and B’s,” he said in a text message. “Calculation based classes are $750. All others are $600. Anyone quoting different is not a pro and doesn’t know what they are doing. Cheap quotes = F grades. “Oh,” he added, “and you can split up the payments.” Another poster said his prices depended on the institution. “A course from Penn State World Campus requires more effort than a course from Post University,” he said in an email. “Previously, I completed a remedial English course for a client at Kaplan University. This person requested a ‘B’ for $90/week for eight weeks. Another client at a Cal State University required an ‘A’ in a four week upper division Asian Studies course for $300/week.” The most common way students cheat is through a simple web search — typing, for example, “essay,” “essay help,” or “write my essay.” As many as half of the visits to some sites used for cheating come through search engines, The Chronicle found. The companies that have made the biggest strides in the business have mastered the search game. Searchengine optimization efforts have helped Ultius, founded in 2011, grow fast. The Delaware-based company, with a call center in Las Vegas, has hired more than 40 employees, including engineers and customer-service representatives, according to job ads. It has contracted with more than 1,400 writers. That growth has coincided with a surge in traffic. Over a recent three-month stretch, the site drew about 520,000 visits, according to a Chronicle analysis of data compiled by SimilarWeb. Thirty to 40 percent of Ultius’s traffic comes from students’ web searches, according to estimates on Alexa, which measures internet usage. Ultius is the No. 1 or No. 2 search result that pops up when someone Googles “buy a term paper,” “buy a research paper,” or about a dozen other phrases that indicate an intent to purchase a completed assignment, according to a Chronicle analysis of search data compiled by Spyfu, a search-engine optimization tool. Boban Dedovic, 27, the company’s chairman, helped start it after three semesters as a student at the University of Maryland at College Park, during which he worked as a tutor. To him, Ultius is a technology company that connects customers to writers, he says via email. He denies that Ultius is part of the cheating industry, referring to it as a “doc prep service.” In a written statement, the company says it works hard to ensure that its customers don’t misuse its services, informing them of its fair-use policy (that its work is meant for reference only and must be properly cited) at least three

times and requiring them to accept it. When the company suspects a problem, it conducts an investigation, drafts an internal report, and, if it finds a violation, disables the customer’s account. However, the company says, it cannot individually monitor every one of its orders. Ultius protects its business by keeping those orders private. When a student posts an assignment on Craigslist or other sites, looking for someone to pick it up, Google indexes that text, making it visible in searches. But the customer experience at Ultius occurs behind a wall, in the same way a bank keeps its clients’ information private. Because Google can’t create a record of those pages, professors wouldn’t be able to find them. The company’s dealings with one Ph.D. candidate illustrate the increasingly complex work that students are outsourcing, while faculty members remain in the dark. Last year, Ultius contracted with a student who described herself as a “single active duty parent” to help write a concept paper for her doctoral program, records show. The job included revisions requested by the chair of her dissertation committee. The Ph.D. student requested that Ultius complete a literature review and produce a theoretical framework for her dissertation. The order required the company to find data on migration patterns and economic growth in Jamaica, and to apply advanced economic theory. The company did the work, but the customer was so displeased with it that she filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. That complaint details the case. Ultius considers customer service a top priority, and despite 19 complaints in the past three years, mainly minor beefs over papers and assignments, it maintains an A+ rating from the BBB. The Ph.D. student threatened to go public with her story, but more often it’s the paid cheaters who make threats. After Mr. Sambrano, the high-school guidance specialist, transferred $500 to have the whole course at Arizona State done for him, he stopped hearing from his Craigslist cheater and filed a PayPal claim against him. The cheater advised him to drop the claim or he’d hand over evidence of the arrangement to the university. Mr. Sambrano, afraid he’d be expelled, dropped the charge. He says he ended up doing the class himself. In another case, if not for a cheater turning a student in, a college may never have known that the student was paying someone else to log in to the course and complete the work. In May an undergraduate at Colorado State University-Global Campus, dissatisfied with the quality of the work done for him, filed a PayPal claim. Angered, the cheater gave the student’s name to the instructor, along with text messages, screen shots of the student’s portal, and payment records detailing how the student had arranged to have the entire course done for him, says Jon M. Bellum, the provost. CSU-Global, an online institution with about 15,000 students, had its information-technology department look at the IP addresses used for the student’s coursework and found more than one. Mr. Bellum would not disclose the penalty the student faced, citing privacy law, but says such abuses can result in expulsion. Often, though, the university is not aware of the violation. Colleges have tried technology to combat cheating. Several thousand institutions around the world use the antiplagiarism software Turnitin, which says it has a database of some 600 million papers. But a recent study found that custom work is “virtually undetectable.” Coursera, an online education platform employed by dozens of prominent colleges, uses webcams and “keyboard dynamics,” which attempt to verify students’ identities on the basis of their typing patterns. But that doesn’t do much good if the cheater is always typing. CSU-Global says it spends about $60,000 a year administering random identity checks on its students. The tests require them to provide answers to personal questions like what banks service their loans or what streets they’ve lived on. If they don’t answer accurately, they can’t log in to their classes. About 2 percent of identity checks result in students’ getting locked out of the CSU system. Other institutions have blocked access to sites that help students cheat. Victor Valley College, in California, has prevented anyone on a campus computer from accessing the website of Student Network Resources. But students can turn to their own laptops or other devices. The biggest key to fighting the problem is faculty engagement, says Tricia Bertram Gallant, a former president

of the International Center for Academic Integrity. She often speaks with professors about the business, she says, and finds them surprised that someone else could be doing students’ work. “When I tell them about contract cheating, they’re shocked,” she says. “They basically say, ‘What? That goes on?'[226 128 137 ]” Others are in denial that it could happen in their classes. And even those who know about it and want to stop it say they’re too busy, or feel that the fight is futile, with new cheating companies popping up all the time. But some professors are catching on. Last fall, Megan Elwood Madden, an associate professor in the School of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma, spotted a suspicious passage in a student’s paper. She ran it through Turnitin, finding several plagiarized sources but no match for the bulk of the text. So she Googled the student’s research topic and found the assignment posted on Course Hero with the student’s request for help. A web search did not turn up the text the student had handed in, because it was hidden in Course Hero’s system. But once Ms. Elwood Madden had logged in to the site, she could see communication between the student and a contractor suggesting that the student had had the work completed for him, the professor said in an email. She discovered that the student had used Course Hero to arrange work in at least four other classes as well. The revelations led the university to expel the student. Such stories are rare, academic-integrity officers say, because there are so few would-be enforcers in pursuit. After The Chronicle published an article about the Western Carolina experiment, two federal law-enforcement officials contacted the professors, eager to hear more about the business. William Josephson, a former assistant attorney general in New York who has investigated fraud, says companies that assume false identities violate federal laws governing interstate commerce. Laws in at least 17 states prohibit students from using cheating services to complete their assignments. But prosecutors aren’t enforcing them. Faculty members on the front lines are no more active. That’s also true in other countries where the cheating industry has developed. This spring, Marcus J. Ball, a higher-education reformer in Britain, came across an advertisement for academic cheating services on the wall of a London subway station. The ad offended Mr. Ball, who began emailing college administrators and professors, trying to persuade them to sign a petition for the British government to debate the issue of contract cheating. His goal was to create a “unified block” of people willing to stand up to the cheating companies, with hopes of taking the fight to Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. In May, Mr. Ball contacted more than 250 college officials, including academic-integrity leaders in several countries. Only five responded. “Academics are constantly complaining about the essay-mill problem,” he said in the email. But when presented with a “practical way forward to potentially solve the problem, they don’t engage.” Last year, Ms. Bertram Gallant, who is director of the academic-integrity office at the University of California at San Diego, organized a dozen international experts to study the growth of contract cheating and how to stop it. The group laid out a series of big goals. Chief among them: Mobilize faculty members and students to demand laws making it more difficult for cheating companies to operate. It is creating a tool kit to help professors detect and prevent cheating. And it is organizing an international awareness day to bring more attention to the problem. But the group can only muster so much fight. “There’s just not enough of us who care,” says Ms. Bertram Gallant. “It’s a very small cadre internationally who really dedicate our lives to working on this issue, and that’s just not enough people.” College leaders haven’t helped, she says. Many have failed to make the issue a priority. Few colleges have academic-integrity offices, she says, or devote dollars to the problem.

“There is a lot of money to support these companies, but not a lot of money to support our research,” she says. “All the money is going to the illegal part of the industry, and none of it is going to combat the industry.” Colleges also might need to rethink their approach, says Ms. Bertram Gallant. As online education continues to grow, and cheating companies have more opportunities to infiltrate classes, institutions would do well to enlist people with the skills to ferret out violations, she says. While educators may be equipped to catch plagiarism, they don’t have the tools to track a paid cheater who is assuming someone else’s identity. Instead, colleges continue to rely on proud traditions to fight the scourge of cheating. This fall, as students return to campus, some colleges will require them to sign an honor code. Others will spell out for them the potential consequences of academic dishonesty. In October, academic-integrity officials at the University of Oklahoma plan to hold a session to warn new students about paper mills. The tool they’re using to combat cheating? Tea bags. To remind the students of the importance of ethics, the university is encouraging them have a cup of “integri-tea.”

36South African Journal of Science http://www.sajs.co.za
Volume 112 | Number 5/6

May/June 2016

Review Article Plagiarism and ghostwriting
Page 1 of 7

© 2016. The Author(s).
Published under a Creative
Commons Attribution Licence.

Plagiarism and ghostwriting: The rise in academic
misconductAUTHORS:

Shawren Singh1

Dan Remenyi1

AFFILIATION:
1School of Computing, University
of South Africa, Roodepoort,
South Africa

CORRESPONDENCE TO:
Shawren Singh

EMAIL:
singhs@unisa.ac.za

POSTAL ADDRESS:
School of Computing, University
of South Africa, Cnr Christiaan
de Wet Road and Pioneer Ave,
Florida 1710, South Africa

DATES:
Received: 12 Aug. 2015

Revised: 12 Oct. 2015

Accepted: 21 Dec. 2015

KEYWORDS:
academic integrity;
contract cheating; essay mills;
university cheating

HOW TO CITE:
Singh S, Remenyi D. Plagiarism
and ghostwriting: The rise
in academic misconduct.
S Afr J Sci. 2016;112(5/6),
Art. #2015-0300, 7 pages.
http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/
sajs.2016/20150300

The aim of this paper is to review the current situation regarding plagiarism and ghostwriting, and to stimulate
debate about how universities should respond to the rise in these forms of academic misconduct. The
apparent upsurge in academic misconduct means that universities today face one of the greatest challenges
to academic integrity they have had to deal with ever since the university system came into existence some
800 years ago. Plagiarism and ghostwriting are undermining the integrity of university degrees to an extent
not seen before. Academia and fraud are not strangers. Universities have a long history of cheating of one
sort or another, often associated with examinations, but also with research. In the past this cheating involved
activities such as smuggling notes (commonly called ‘crib sheets’) into examinations, and consulting them
even under the watchful eyes of invigilators. It also involved students obtaining sight of an examination paper
in advance. The fraudulent creation of research results has also been an issue. However, in the 21st century,
the opportunities for cheating have exploded. This has resulted in universities becoming more concerned
about ensuring the integrity of their examination processes and the degrees they award. Our paper focuses
on cheating in the writing of dissertations or theses required at undergraduate or postgraduate level, with
an emphasis on plagiarism and ghostwriting. We do not propose a simple solution to these problems, as
preventing or stopping cheating is not just a matter of catching the wrongdoers. Cheating is endogenous
to the current university education system, and needs to be addressed in terms of not only prevention and
detection but also how people who are found to engage in such misconduct are treated. We suggest that
creative ways of promoting learning would help to minimise cheating at universities. It is also important to
ensure that the issue is discussed openly among students and faculty staff.

Introduction
There have been some dramatic instances of academic fraud at universities.1-3 Professors have been found to
have no credible academic credentials, having either exaggerated or outright lied in their curriculum vitae.4-6 Vice-
chancellors have been accused of plagiarism7,8 or been found to have plagiarised their theses.9 Laboratory directors
have been involved in the falsification of research findings.10-12 However, such dramatic events, although interesting
and often newsworthy, are fortunately quite rare. What is more concerning is the mundane matter of fraud or
cheating at the routine examination level. The main form of cheating at university is inappropriate assistance in
examinations, or in the preparation of written work submitted for evaluation.13

The extent of cheating at universities is hard to gauge.14-17 This is largely because the most common reaction once
cheating is exposed is that the institution becomes secretive. Over the years, students have been found consulting
crib sheets or notes written on their skin, or hidden in pencil boxes or even sandwiches – to mention only a few hiding
places. Students struggling to answer a question might also try to glance at the answer sheet of a fellow student.

Another form of cheating occurs when students have been informed about examination questions in advance.
Perhaps more seriously, students have sometimes employed other people to actually sit their examinations. The
most famous culprit of this offence was the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who paid a co-student and friend to
sit a Spanish examination in his place. The university spotted the substitution and both students were expelled.18

However, despite the wide range of nefarious ways in which students have been known to cheat the system, academics
often argue that traditionally there has been a low occurrence of this type of behaviour. An accurate estimate of the
number of such incidents is almost impossible, as the only cases reported are those in which individuals are caught.

Cheating in examinations is difficult. It is hard to smuggle items into an examination hall and consult them unseen
– despite the watchful eye of an invigilator. Nonetheless, some students try to do this. To counter the problem,
at certain universities some subjects are examined in ‘open book’ exams, where the student may bring into the
examination room any texts he or she might like to consult. This practice allows the student to refer to any material
he or she wishes during the examination. In such exams, the application and interpretation of knowledge is tested,
and for this reason open-book exams are often regarded as a superior form of test.

In many universities there has been a substantial increase in the use of term papers, assignments, and dissertations
to evaluate the progress or knowledge development of students. Such documents are produced by the student
outside of an examination environment. One reason for this system is the now widespread belief in the value of
ongoing assessment instead of simply an end-of-term examination. However, when this type of written work is
used for assessment, the system is especially vulnerable to cheating.19 Because of this vulnerability, some older
academics insist that formal examinations remain the only reliable method of student evaluation.

All forms of academic cheating are highly detrimental to any university. Academic cheating undermines the good
name of the institution and calls into question the integrity of both the faculty and students. There is every reason
for a university to take all forms of cheating seriously, and to eliminate it wherever possible.

This paper focuses on two specific types of academic misconduct, namely plagiarism and ghostwriting.

http://www.sajs.co.za

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5038-0724

mailto:singhs@unisa.ac.za

http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2016/20150300

http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2016/20150300

37South African Journal of Science http://www.sajs.co.za
Volume 112 | Number 5/6

May/June 2016

Inappropriate assistance in preparing written
work
There are several ways in which students can cheat in the preparation
of written work. The two offences addressed in this paper are plagiarism
and ghostwriting. Plagiarism has affected the academic community
for centuries,20 and allegations of plagiarism have been made against
certain famous academics, including Galileo and Newton.21 By contrast,
ghostwriting in academia appears to be a relatively modern phenomenon,
perhaps only a few hundred years old.

Stavisky22 states that there has been a long tradition of plagiarism in
American universities, fostered by fraternity groups and dating back to the
19th century. Fraternity files have been used to recycle written academic
work. Stavisky also states that in the 1940s, advertisements appeared
weekly in a prestigious New York newspaper, advertising ghostwriting
services – which included producing dissertations, theses, and term
papers. Stavisky goes on to describe how this practice proliferated in
the 1960s and 1970s. With the arrival of the Internet, ghostwriting has
become a global industry. The terms ‘paper mill’ and ‘essay mill’ are
often used to describe this industry.

Plagiarism and ghostwriting, although different, have the same outcome: the
student presents fraudulent academic work that is purportedly his or her
own. In fact, it is the creation of another person or persons. The sections
below discuss plagiarism and ghostwriting separately and in greater detail.

Plagiarism
Plagiarism refers to the use of other people’s ideas and words without
giving the original author appropriate acknowledgement.23,24 If ideas are
used in an essay or dissertation that have been found in the published
work of another author, it is academic misconduct not to specifically
acknowledge the original source. The acknowledgement must follow the
rules of the referencing system employed in the work. Although the use
of ideas without acknowledging them is an offence, it is even worse if the
actual words of other authors are copied without acknowledgement. This
principle sometimes leads to debate about how many words can be cited
without incurring an accusation of plagiarism. Guidelines such as three,
four, or five words are sometimes quoted. However, there is no simple
answer to this question, and it is generally agreed that even a small
number of words reproduced from another text need to be attributed.

There are several reasons why plagiarism is unacceptable in academic
writing. The Penn State University website25 lists a number of reasons,
which include:

• Plagiarism committed intentionally is an act of deceit and may even
constitute fraud.

• The plagiarist denies him or herself ‘the opportunity to learn and
practice’ the skills of academic research.

• A plagiarist does not avail him or herself of the ‘opportunity to
receive honest feedback’ on his or her academic skills.

• The plagiarist opens him or herself to future enquiry into his or her
‘integrity and performance in general’.

Clearly plagiarism is unacceptable. Universities generally state in their
regulations that plagiarism is a disciplinary offence.26 However, it is not
always easy to ascertain what sort of penalty will be imposed on authors
who are found to have plagiarised.

In recent decades, the Internet has become a common tool for academic
research, and this has enabled plagiarism to flourish on a large scale.27-29
It is impossible to estimate the exact extent of online plagiarism, but
there are regular reports of students’ work being found to contain large
passages copied from other people’s works by cut-and-paste methods,
without any attribution. In 2015, Adams reported that in the United
Kingdom, ‘in the past 4 years more than 58 000 undergraduates have
been investigated by their universities for plagiarism’30. Some of these
cases involve whole essays being copied and fraudulently presented
under the name of the student being assessed.

Because of this situation, computer-based plagiarism detection methods
and tools have become extremely popular with university faculty and
administrative staff.31 The market leader, Turnitin.com, claims to have
10 000 clients working in 135 countries, and this product alone is
estimated as being used to check 40 million academic papers each year.
Using anti-plagiarism software makes it relatively easy to detect and
quantify how much plagiarism appears in a piece of academic work.
However, this type of checking may be considered to be a ‘band aid’ or
‘sticky plaster’ placed on a wound when perhaps a more medical and
surgical intervention is actually required.32

When plagiarism is suspected and this suspicion is supported by
the software results, the issue arises of how to deal with the offence.
University regulations specifically forbid plagiarism and may prescribe the
need to refer such behaviour to a disciplinary procedure. However, such
disciplinary action does not always happen.33 Sometimes plagiarism is
treated by giving the student a mark of zero for the work submitted.
Sometimes the student is required to resubmit a new version of the work.
In other words, formal disciplinary action is not automatically invoked.34
The process of university disciplinary action can be a long and costly
procedure, and universities are often reluctant to follow this course on
the grounds of the resources a formal plagiarism enquiry would require.
Mathews35 quotes an academic, who wished to remain anonymous, as
saying, ‘I’m ashamed to admit it but you simply don’t have the time to
launch a plagiarism case.’

If this is indeed the case, is the university not implicitly condoning
plagiarism? In any event, plagiarism is frequently regarded more as a
misdemeanour than a felony. Nonetheless, the practice of plagiarism
undermines the integrity of the academic process, and calls into
question the quality of education that is said to be evident in the holding
of a degree.

It has been suggested that plagiarism is rife in certain cultures, and in
developing countries in particular.36 This may be true, but the challenge
is certainly not absent from western culture or universities.

Ghostwriting
Ghostwriting is the practice of hiring a writer (or writers) to produce a
piece of work that follows a predefined style, and none of the original
writing credit is attributed to the ghostwriter. The practice of ghostwriting
has long existed in the field of literature. Related practices occur in
other forms of the arts, including music composition, singing, and the
visual arts. In the university context, all subjects are to some extent
vulnerable to plagiarism. But with regard to ghostwriting, computational
sciences are particularly vulnerable. Specialist websites can produce
programming code for computer science students.37 Undergraduates
have been known to pass on, or indeed sell, their laboratory journals to
other students – which in some cases have been copied verbatim the
following year.

Ghostwriting has traditionally been associated with famous individuals
who have contracted someone else to produce a work in the field of
literature, perhaps an autobiography, because they do not have the time
or skills to complete the task themselves.38 The ghostwriter produces
the work for an agreed fee. This is a legal and sustainable business,
and many ghostwriting agencies have a substantial history of success.39

In pre-Internet days, a student struggling to complete an essay or
assignment might have asked a friend or family member (or another
individual) to help write a piece of the work. Sometimes money changed
hands, but not always. It would generally have been difficult to find
someone to do this type of work and the incidence of such collusion
would have been low. The Internet has changed things, and a large
number of essay-writing services are now offered on the web.40

Some providers offer a full range of services, from writing a simple essay
to producing a doctoral thesis. Furthermore, the purchaser is able to
specify if he or she wants an essay to be written to a particular standard
of excellence, such as being good enough to obtain a first class or a
second class grade. Some of these services respond quickly, offering a
24-hour turnaround time for an essay. Of course, the fee asked for the

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production of one of these essays depends on the standard required
and the time-frames for delivery.27 The academic networks these
organisations purport to have established suggest that a large number
of competent academics are willing to earn money from the process of
defrauding, or at least undermining, the examination process.

When ghostwriting services first appeared on the Internet, they were
relatively unsophisticated and a number of ghostwritten essays were
caught by anti-plagiarism software. However, today the suppliers of
these essays claim they can produce work that will not be detected
by such 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.

The range of organisations offering ghostwriting services is impressive.
A recent Google search produced over 4.6 million references to these
services in less than half a second. A number of these organisations
claim that they employ graduates and faculty members from the best
universities. It has been estimated that in the United Kingdom alone,
more than GBP200 million is spent annually on these services.41

The classification of this type of academic misconduct is not always easy
to define. Ghostwriting differs from plagiarism, although this point is not
universally agreed on. For example, University College London (UCL) states
that plagiarism includes ‘turning in someone else’s work as your own’.42
Plagiarism is sometimes defined as theft, and the word ‘plagiarism’ comes
from the Latin word for kidnapping. But ghostwriting is different; there is
no direct theft involved. It is rather a question of misrepresentation or lying
about the authorship of the work. However, this type of offence could be
considered an extreme form of plagiarism at least. Some academics feel
that ghostwriting is considerably more serious than plagiarism with regard
to the degree of violation of academic trust.

Tomard39 suggests that there are three distinct categories of students
who employ ghostwriters. The first are students whose command of
the English language is not sufficient to be able to write a competent
research report. The second group includes students who have not
been able to grasp the detail of the processes involved in academic
research methodology, and therefore need an expert in the field of study
to write up the research. The third group consists of students who are
both uninterested in their studies and sufficiently well-funded to be able
to afford the high fees asked by ghostwriting agencies. Being able to
identify these groups should facilitate the university in creating policies
to counter this type of academic misconduct.

When a dissertation is presented to a university, traditionally it has
to be accompanied by a Certificate of Own Work.43 This certificate is
sometimes a simple one-sentence statement, signed by the student.
If it transpires that the statement was false, that renders the work null
and void and a degree would not be awarded. If a degree has already
been awarded and it is subsequently found out that the student did not
perform the work, the degree may be withdrawn. However, certification
of authenticity has generally not been required for other work submitted,
such as essays or term papers. Perhaps such certification should now
become a routine requirement.

If a piece of academic work has been ghostwritten, this can generally be
detected only if the evaluator is personally acquainted with the student’s
level of subject knowledge and his or her natural writing style.

Extent of cheating
As noted earlier, it is difficult to give an estimation of the extent to which
cheating occurs. However, it is clear that the ghostwriting industry is
highly active and appears to be expanding. This trend is certainly cause
for concern.

Universities are often quite secretive about issues concerning discipline, or
in fact any legal action in which they are involved. Documentary filmmakers
have suggested that there are a growing number of students taking action
against universities on a wide range of issues. Most of these cases have to
do with universities not living up to promises they made to students before
the students registered. However, in at least one case on record, a student

sued a university after he was accused of plagiarism.44 He argued that
the university had not appropriately informed him that plagiarism would
be regarded as academic misconduct, and therefore he could not be held
responsible for an activity he did not realise was regarded as misconduct.
It is hard to imagine how anyone could have come through schooling in
the western world, including the early years of university, without having
the issue of plagiarism fully explained to them.

The special case of dissertations
Formerly, dissertations and theses were an academic activity that was
required only at the level of masters and doctoral degrees. However, this
has changed, and dissertations are now often required at undergraduate
level.45,46 As a material piece of work that is researched and written
almost wholly by the student, sometimes without much direct assistance
by academic staff, the dissertation has become an important part of
many degrees.

Students often struggle with their dissertations, which can be a signi-
ficant challenge. Ranging in length from perhaps as few as 5000 words
at undergraduate level to as many as 50 000 words at masters level
and 80 000 words at doctorate level, the dissertation requires a material
amount of focused worked over an extended period of time.

Sometimes at master’s level, and even more so at doctoral level, many
universities experience a high rate of non-completion of this type of
work.47-49 For a number of reasons, students are not able to complete
all the work required for a dissertation. This happens more frequently
among part-time students, especially at doctoral level. For this reason
it has been suggested by some academics that a doctoral degree
candidate could outsource some of the work required. However, this
leads to some challenging questions and issues.

Attitudes towards outsourcing differ considerably from university to
university. Some universities take the stance that virtually nothing should
be outsourced, whereas others are far more relaxed. The reality is that
students have long outsourced certain aspects of their dissertations. For
many decades and probably for most of the 20th century, students have
had their dissertations typed by others, normally professional typists.
When word processors became commonplace and desktop typesetting
became available, students had their work professionally produced
without any questions being raised.

However, there are a number of other aspects of the research work
that outsiders now offer to undertake for students, and which are not
as acceptable as typing and typesetting. For example, it has been
proposed that compiling the literature review, collecting the data, and
analysing the results are all activities that could be outsourced. These
are important doctoral-level activities, and as such are central to the
intellectual development of the student. Having these tasks performed
by anyone other than the student (i.e. the degree candidate) undermines
the objective of acquiring the degree. It is difficult to see how this level of
outsourcing could be acceptable to the academic world.

Another aspect of dissertations also presents a major problem,
although it might not be regarded as so obviously problematic as the
issues described above. That is the actual writing of the dissertation.
Frequently students are not accomplished academic writers, and the
way they attempt to present the arguments behind their research can be
difficult to understand. Traditionally a supervisor would give the student
guidance with regard to academic writing style, and in some cases
supervisors would actually edit the text of the dissertation. However,
some universities explicitly forbid supervisors to do this, and the result
has been that students now tend to hire freelance editors. In some cases,
the amount of work undertaken by these editors has amounted to having
the dissertation ghostwritten.

At the same time, as mentioned earlier, the ghostwriting industry now
offers the writing of an entire dissertation as part of its product range.
Some of the claims are startling, as they suggest an entire dissertation
can be produced within a matter of weeks – if not days. It is hard to
imagine what calibre of university would accept a student who presents
a dissertation, even at undergraduate level, without having had a number

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of consultations with his or her supervisor. In the case of masters or
doctoral degrees, universities require a number of years of supervised
research before a final dissertation can be submitted or considered.
Nonetheless, the fact that dissertations are being offered for sale
by ghostwriting enterprises strongly suggests that there are indeed
universities that accept this type of written work and award degrees on
the basis of ghostwritten dissertations.

The ethics of the ghostwriter
It does not appear that ghostwriters have much, if any, ethical concern
about the work they do. Ghostwriting agencies boast that they hire only
writers with the highest qualifications from the best universities, and
judging from the apparent satisfaction of their clients this does seem
to be the case. One ghostwriter who decided to write anonymously for
The Times Higher Education50 stated:

I don’t justify the work I’m doing on ethical
grounds. While what I do is not illegal, it does
enable others to break rules and suffer the
consequences if they are caught. The agencies
maintain the image of legitimate businesses:
many do not even refer to ‘cheating’. You are
simply ‘helping’ with an assignment (making up,
as one agency argues, for the university’s failure
to provide adequate tuition). While I’m happy
to acknowledge that I am dependent on clients’
continued cheating, this doesn’t mean I am not
conscious that my job is a symptom of an illness, a
fracture, in our universities.

It is challenging not to sympathise with the argument that the university
system is ‘fractured’. However, the argument used by many essay mills
– that they are only ‘helping’ students – is at best disingenuous.36 This is
a for-profit industry that operates within the law but exhibits little concern
about the morality of its activity.51

Interestingly, the same ghostwriter quoted above50 also commented that:

I stay away from applied fields – it is my only ethical
standard as a ghost writer. I will not help a nurse to
qualify on false pretences: who knows, it might be
my parents who find themselves in their care.

This is an interesting admission of the impropriety involved in the act
of ghostwriting.

The reaction of the universities
The issue of plagiarism and ghostwriting is of critical importance to
universities for at least two reasons. The first is that these types of
misconduct discredit the degrees that are awarded. If plagiarism and
ghostwriting are perceived as being rife at a particular university, this is
a disincentive to anyone who desires a robust qualification to attend that
institution. The second reason is that it is unfair for a student to obtain
credit for work he or she did not actually do. Having the money to buy
completed academic work does not enhance the intellectual capability
of the student – as the holding of a degree is supposed to indicate.
Furthermore, the consequence of such misconduct is that honest
students are placed at a disadvantage.

With regard to plagiarism, in general universities have reacted rather
slowly and with some trepidation. A few years ago, when plagiarism
was suspected in a master’s degree dissertation by an examiner and the
use of anti-plagiarism software was suggested, the student’s supervisor
might have exclaimed, ‘Are you impugning the integrity of my student?’
Fortunately, those days are past and most universities now require
dissertations to be submitted both electronically and in hard copy (i.e. on
paper). Nonetheless, the question of what action to take against people
who are found to be plagiarists has not been answered.

Ghostwriting is, in a sense, a more difficult issue than plagiarism. The
outright purchasing of essays, term papers, and dissertations is clearly
an act of fraud. It would be unwise for a university to do anything less than
take the most severe disciplinary action. But in some cases, obtaining

help from an informal mentor could come quite close to ghostwriting,
and penalising this activity could present difficulties. Perhaps the real
issue is that universities have been, and still are, focused on catching
misconduct after it has occurred instead of preventing it. Is there really
any way of preventing these types of cheating? The answer is an
unreserved ‘yes’. How this can be done is addressed below, under the
subheading ‘Prevention and detection’.

The university as a fractured institution
In discussing how universities have become fractured, it is necessary
to bear in mind the exceptional pressures these institutions have had
to face in recent years. Since the mid-1990s many universities have
been expected to deliver what is sometimes referred to as ‘mass
education’.52,53 This term is not well defined but its general meaning is
clear: education has to be made available to large numbers of students.

At the same time, the resources made available to universities have
not correspondingly increased. Class sizes have increased, with a
concomitant unfavourable shift in the ratio of students to lecturers. In
some cases, lecturers no longer grade the work of their students and
this task is sub-contracted to either teaching assistants or even to
outside contractors. In addition, a greater number of students from
other countries, who may have inadequate command of English, are
being admitted to degree courses at English-medium universities. These
factors have made the relationship between faculty and students more
challenging, as illustrated by the following remarkable statement made
by the anonymous ghostwriter50:

I operate on the assumption that the student
I’m working for will have little or no personal
interaction with academic staff. This means there
is only a small likelihood that the lecturer who sets
and marks the questions will be familiar with the
student’s style of writing.

If this is a correct assessment of the situation, and there is prima facie
evidence to suggest that it is, then the universities for which this is true
are not performing their expected function.

The American publication The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed
a ghostwriter who remarked as follows54:

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good
chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a
hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic
mercenary. My customers are your students. I
promise you that. Somebody in your classroom
uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t
defend against, that you may not even know exists.

Matthews similarly reflected on ghostwriters’ services as follows35:

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.

It is clear that universities are not addressing this subject with the energy or
commitment one might expect when such important issues are at stake.

The function of universities
The purpose of a university is not only to communicate and test students’
knowledge but also to inspire them to become lifelong learners.55,56 This
means there should be an onus on the university to help students realise that
engaging with the subject matter is interesting, enjoyable and rewarding. If
these positive experiences are achieved, learning should occur naturally and
students should become well-informed in their fields of study. If this were the
case, there would be little (or less) motivation for anyone to cheat.

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Although some academics would argue that they already take this
approach to teaching, in reality most lecturers present fairly routine
material, and students are expected to learn and to reproduce it in rather
unimaginative ways – either during examinations or in essays, term
papers, and even dissertations. This means the evaluation processes in
universities are often a test of one’s memory of material that has been
offered for the purposes of learning in a relatively structured fashion.
When this approach is combined with large numbers of students, the
temptation to engage in plagiarism or use ghostwriters appears to offer
a solution to some students.

Prevention and detection
Some universities have taken the view that plagiarism and ghostwriting
can be prevented by adequate detection methods and the imposition
of appropriate penalties. For this reason, anti-plagiarism software has
become a large business sector. The penalties imposed by unive-
rsities range from requiring the student to resubmit the piece of
work to suspending or even expelling him or her from the university.
However, universities do not easily impose suspensions and expulsions.
Students sometimes face only a rebuke and have to resubmit their
work. Countering plagiarism in this half-hearted manner may, however,
produce an ‘arms-race’ mentality, so that those who facilitate students’
cheating will try to create increasingly clever ways of avoiding anti-
plagiarism software. A better approach is to reassess the university’s
attitude to teaching and learning.

The New Zealand Government has produced an interesting set of
guidelines for the effective prevention and detection of academic fraud.57
The approach is intended to create awareness of the potential problems
of academic fraud, and to continually remind students about how
unacceptable the practice is. It is then necessary for staff to engage
continually with their students and to be on the lookout for any surprising
changes in their performance. This means getting to know the students
well. All of these suggestions are welcome, but they are time-consuming
to put into practice. In general, academics regard themselves as having a
full workload without taking on any extra engagements or responsibilities.

Implementing the types of policies suggested in the New Zealand
guidelines represents a significant move away from present general
practice. The cost of such a transformation would be regarded by
many to be a heavy burden on the financial resources of educational
institutions. In addition, not all academics would necessarily welcome
such a change. There is little doubt that many academics are largely
comfortable with the present system.

With regard to ensuring the integrity of a dissertation, the issue is one of
adequate supervision. If a programme of careful supervision is in place,
there should be relatively little opportunity for plagiarism to escape
unnoticed in the writing of a dissertation. To a large extent, a dissertation
should be almost co-created by a student and his or her supervisor, with
the student doing the work and the supervisor keeping a close eye on
what is happening step-by-step.

With regard to ghostwriting, there should be almost no opportunity for a
student to pass off a piece of work produced in this way. If the supervisor
does not know the student well enough to be able to immediately detect
that a written submission is inauthentic, the supervisor is not actually
doing the job adequately. Unfortunately, some universities do not
allocate sufficient time to supervisors for them to be able to get to know
their students well enough; consequently, they may indeed be unable to
detect if the work submitted has been written by someone else.

Summary and conclusion
This paper has reviewed the current situation with regard to plagiarism
and ghostwriting at university level. The objective of the discussion
was to stimulate debate as to how universities should react to these
types of academic misconduct. (The paper has deliberately avoided
addressing how these problems may be exaggerated in distance learning
or e-Learning university programmes.)

The number of students who plagiarise or use ghostwriters appears
to be on the increase. Although as a percentage of the entire student
population, the number of those who engage in academic misconduct
is believed to be small, even that small percentage represents a large
number of students in absolute terms. This is cause for concern. If
cheaters manage to ‘beat the system’ and obtain a degree they have not
earned through their own academic performance, these fraudsters would
represent a significant threat to the integrity of the relevant department,
faculty, and university – indeed, to the whole notion of higher education.

Plagiarism and ghostwriting must be eliminated to the fullest extent
possible, because these practices are fundamentally unfair to honest
students who rely on their own intellectual abilities to create the academic
work required of them.

In general, plagiarism is a substantial and unwelcome misconduct, but
it tends to be relatively easily identifiable. However, as it is regarded
a form of academic fraud, there should be a material penalty paid by
those who are found to engage in this behaviour. Although universities
are in a position to impose such penalties, they do not appear to do so
adequately and effectively, or often enough.

The use of a ghostwriter is an offence for which a greater penalty should
be paid. Although ghostwriting is not illegal, lying about the authorship
of a piece of work is potentially fraudulent. Ghostwriting cannot be easily
detected by software in the same way as plagiarism can. There are some
products that employ stylometry, and these may be of help and could
be utilised by universities. However, ghostwriting is best detected by
lecturers having personal knowledge of the capabilities of their students.
Introducing a greater number of oral examinations could quickly and
easily eliminate the entire issue of ghostwriting. Unfortunately, it
would also create a substantial workload, which the current university
examination system is ill-equipped to deal with.

Nonetheless, the overall approach of identifying academic misconduct
and imposing penalties is unlikely in itself to solve the problem. What
is really required is a new attitude to prevention. This would involve
creating learning environments in universities that would invite students
to become highly engaged with their subject material, and to express their
creativity in such a way that it would be apparent who has succeeded
in the learning process and who has not. Students who have succeeded
should be valued and rewarded with an appropriate degree, whereas
those who do not master the process will be deemed to have failed.

With regard to misconduct at the dissertation level, it should not be a
major problem for supervisors who are sufficiently engaged with their
students to be able to detect misconduct. Most supervisors have access
to anti-plagiarism software, and it is a simple matter to pass submitted
work through such an analysis. On the question of ghostwriting,
although a supervisor should expect the writing style of a student to
improve significantly during the course of producing a dissertation, an
extraordinary level of improvement should become the subject of an
enquiry and maybe even an investigation. There needs to be a severe
penalty for those who engage in this type of misconduct; the treatment
of serious academic misconduct must be sufficiently firm to tackle the
problem effectively.

Finally, it is also important for the issue of plagiarism and ghostwriting to
be discussed more openly and regularly within universities. There might
even be certain proven or known incidents where the transgressors
should be named and shamed.

Authors’ contributions
Both authors contributed equally to the manuscript.

Acknowledgement
The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of Dr Filistea
Naude from the Unisa Science Campus Library.

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