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February 4, 2020 03:21 pm

Doing Western Students' Homework is Big Business in Kenya

An anonymous reader shares a report: 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. "If we look at where writers are based, Kenya is at the top of the list," said Thomas Lancaster, a professor at Imperial College London who studies the industry. "There are incredibly qualified people in Kenya. Very high levels of English. Very able to write essays quickly and when they want to, to a high standard," he continued. [...] By contracting original homework assignments, students could bypass the detection of anti-plagiarism software developed in the 1990s.

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