https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-01-...business-kenya

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.”

“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.

Professor Christian Moriarty, who teaches ethics and law at St. Petersburg College in Florida, remembers when he caught one of his own undergraduate students cheating in a mandatory ethics class. “The plagiarism software did not come up with anything,” he said.

“But I was highly suspicious. I invited her to my office, and I just asked plainly, ‘Did you write this?’” said Moriarty, noting that the student’s essay was of a higher standard than assignments she had submitted previously. “She said ‘no.’”

When Moriarty worked with the student to redo the assignment, he realized that while she didn’t set out to cheat on the assignment, she didn’t feel confident about completing it herself. “The student didn’t want to cheat, and she knew cheating was wrong. But at the time, she didn’t see an alternative,” he said.