Multilingual Essay Mills: Implications for Second Language Teaching and Learning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considering increased availability of online companies offering academic work in a number of languages, we conducted a rapid review of websites which might offer online contract cheating (e.g. “essay mills”) to better understand how prevalent these services are in additional languages and to what extent they are available to K-12 students. Our results included eighteen online sites offering academic work in ten languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese and Welsh. Two thirds of the websites marketed directly to K-12 students, with one offering explicit services to students in grades six and up. A resulting implication is that K-12 second language teachers need to be aware that such online services are available to their students and take steps to enhance academic integrity among young and adolescent learners. Keywords: Contract cheating, essay mills, second language, Canada, K-12 Note: The Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) is the publisher and copyright holder of this article. It is shared in this repository with their permission.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it