“Most of us have probably come across people who have used these services,” said Patricia Kingori, the University of Oxford professor at the heart of a new film that delves into the world of “shadow scholars”, who write essays for money.
The facts make it hard to disagree with her. Conservative estimates suggest that about 37 million students have benefited from so-called essay mills.
To put this figure into context, Kingori said, there are about 20 million students in the US, and around 3 million in the UK.
The documentary, The Shadow Scholars, which will be available to watch on YouTube via Channel 4 from 30 October after premiering at several major film festivals, follows Kingori as she travels to Kenya, where the bulk of the essay writers live.
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She meets those who advertise their services online, under Western pseudonyms, and are then contracted to ghostwrite essays, assignments and even dissertations for students across the world.?
Kingori, professor in global health ethics at Oxford, said she knew “nothing about it”, until she attended a lecture on how global workers use the internet. The lecture touched briefly upon Kenya’s role in the fake essay industry, which sparked her consequent research.
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She also never intended to make a documentary about it and the film came about seemingly by chance.
Kingori and the documentary’s director, Eloise King, the former head of digital programming for Vice, first met as they worked retail jobs in London. During a catch-up, Kingori mentioned she was going to Kenya to speak to the essay writers, which sparked conversations about making the research into a documentary, and “that’s really where it started from”.
It’s a far cry from lecture theatres and “dispassionate” academic papers. While she said academics do “really brilliant work”, there can be a “missing link” in “getting people to care”.
“I don’t think every academic needs to make a documentary, but I do think that understanding how to communicate your stories so that other people can engage with?[them] is a really powerful way to move stories from these very kind of enclosed form of discussions,” she said.?
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“Some of the skills are transferable obviously between academia and making a documentary and some of the skills are absolutely not transferable. Academics aren’t very good at actually talking about their work in a really pithy and sound bitey way.”
Governments in Australia and the UK have looked to crack down on essay mills, with the UK’s former skills minister, Alex Burghart, calling it an “”.
The documentary challenges narratives around contract cheating and questions just who the “shadow” is within the contract cheating industry. One of the essay writers tells the documentary: “Shadows are a result of light which is being shone upon an object. And I believe we are not the shadows, we are the light that is shining.”
The Kenyan essay writers describe how they had been unable to secure jobs and research opportunities as they did not have the right qualifications, despite writing essays for students at institutions including Oxford, while others describe how they had seen people they had written essays for celebrate on social media that they had graduated from elite institutions.
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Kingori said, for her, this is the “injustice” of contract cheating. While it may be “transactional”, she noted these practices “are completely reshaping our future”. There will be people who are graduating now as doctors, nurses and lawyers “getting their qualifications through Kenyan writers – and that to me is really the violence of it”.?
She compared the situation to that of women who wrote historically under men’s names, and said “so much is lost” when people are unable to work under their own names and for their own society.?
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“We have bought for a really long time that what we need to do in Africa is build capacity, and actually I’m saying what we need to do is just allow people to be visible. The capacity is already there,” she said.
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