How internet essay mills portray the student experience of higher education

Nixon, Elizabeth; Crook, C

Abstract

Higher education is under mounting pressure to confront student practices of assignment outsourcing to internet services. The scale and buoyancy of this ‘essay mill’ industry has now been well documented, including its various marketing techniques for urging students to purchase bespoke academic work. However, the inherently suspect nature of such services demands that they adopt a particularly shrewd and empathic rhetoric to win custom from website visitors. In this paper, we investigate how such rhetoric currently constructs a critical version of the student’s higher education experience. We present a thematic analysis of promotional text and images as found on a large sample of essay mill sites. Findings reveal how these sites promulgate a hostile and negative attitude towards higher educational practice. Yet these findings may also indicate where the higher education sector needs to reflect on its practice, not least in order to resist the toxic messages of essay mills.

Citation

Nixon, E., & Crook, C. (2021). How internet essay mills portray the student experience of higher education. Internet and Higher Education, 48, Article 100775. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2020.100775

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 12, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Oct 17, 2020
• Publication Date: 2021-01
• Deposit Date: Nov 11, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 18, 2022
• Journal: Internet and Higher Education
• Print ISSN: 1096-7516
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 48
• Article Number: 100775
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2020.100775
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5034260
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751620300518