I was scrolling through my Twitter feed on a gloomy Saturday afternoon. It was my way of taking a sanity break from the endless onslaught of papers and reports for graduate school. Months since the transition to online classes, I had adjusted mentally and emotionally, but so-called “Zoom fatigue” still took a toll physiologically.

As I tried to indulge myself in memes, pop culture, and local news, I suddenly scrolled past a tweet from a personal account – which will be referred to as “Carmela” for the rest of this essay – about #WritingCommissions and #HomeworkCommissions for a “budget-friendly” price.

Curious, I perused the thread and found a long list of prices for various writing activities. The tweet started with a plea for help, explaining Carmela’s need for an additional source of income to cope with the expenses of online classes and to help her family financially. She posted her credentials, detailing her competence to deliver excellent work, including a photo of her medals and academic achievements. She then assured her prospective clients of maximum confidentiality, and that the prices for her services were negotiable. Then, the price list went like this:

•  Reflection Paper = P20 for 250 to 600 words
•  Movie/Book/Song Reviews = P30 to P40
•  Academic Paper with Citations = P100 per page
• Poetry = P20 for 4 to 12 lines
•  Speech = P30

The tweet had 30 retweets when I saw it, and several replies with inquiries. Determined to find out more, I sent Carmela a message in the guise of an interested client. She told me that she was a BS Secondary Education student from one of the private universities in Laguna, and that she handled 7 clients per week at most. She disclosed that it was difficult to juggle both her academic work and her writing business, but she needed to hustle to earn extra money. 

Paying someone else to do your homework is not a new concept; it is academic dishonesty in the form of collusion. There is a large market for this kind of activity in other countries, and academes are struggling to address it. Some websites that offer “tutoring services” are actually offering to do homework for a few bucks. Strict school policies barely help as this scheme requires extremely confidential transactions. 

Carmela is only one of many students in the country that have engaged in this kind of activity since the COVID-19 pandemic began, selling their ideas and intellect, and allowing someone else to take credit for their work. For a measly few hundred pesos, or even less than a hundred pesos, these students sell their time and original thoughts like cheap commodities.

This is in light of the pandemic’s impact on students, who have switched to online classes and bear the burden of expenses associated with this mode of education. Unfortunately, their social realities, affected further by the public health crisis, have encouraged the supply-demand chain for colluding activities. Due to their economic status, students like Carmela are coerced to commit academic misconduct just to earn money to pay for their education. 

The homework-for-sale scheme is especially marketable to and enabled by students who are having difficulties in coping with their online course work. Perhaps due to the heavy school workload; mental/emotional issues; family/relationship issues; a bad internet connection and other logistical problems; or a lack of motivation, students resort to unethical means to pass a subject.

This presents a problem for the education system in the country. When students participate in this misconduct to accomplish academic requirements, their academic and moral integrity suffers, and their education is compromised. If such a practice becomes normative among students, they will carry this perceived “acceptable” behavior into every other aspect of their life. 

What kind of people are our schools and universities producing, then? How can educational institutions accurately assess the performance of their students? How can they assure that their pedagogical methods and frameworks work and that they are producing moral, ethical, and excellent students? More importantly, how can they address this emerging problem that compromises the education of the youth?

Imposing sanctions and stricter policies in the academe against any form of academic dishonesty is not always effective, as this might push students to think of more clandestine methods to cheat. Policing the activities of students online is not an effective approach either, as this can only track what students post publicly.

What academic institutions can do is to strengthen their curriculum in ethics, good manners, and right conduct subjects. They can also research the students’ school-related causes of stress (like having too much schoolwork in a week) so that schools can adjust to the needs of their students. They can also launch awareness campaigns involving the parents of the students so that the parents can also monitor their children at home. 

Addressing this problem should be done immediately as this involves the education of our youth. To consider the youth the hope of this country is to also protect them from activities that compromise their moral and ethical standing. As our nation is embattled by corrupt and unethical practices in our government institutions, our best chance of fighting this is to produce ethical and excellent future leaders. – Rappler.com

Odeza Gayl Urmatam, 22, is a graduate student taking up her Master’s degree in Public Administration at the University of St. Louis Tuguegarao. She studied BA Communication at the University of the Philippines Baguio.