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ASIA SENTINEL
Surrogate Scholars are Big Business in Vietnam
Ghostwriters, plagiarism abound
Our Correspondent
At 4 am recently in Ho Chi Minh City, a woman who identifies herself
only by the name Nguyễn tried her best not to wake up her newborn son.
She had an online exam on Business Fundamentals in an hour in Australia
– not her own, but rather a final exam she had been paid to take. In an
hour, a stranger would copy and paste all his exam questions onto a
Google doc file and send them to her. Nguyễn would have two and a half
hours to send back the answers.
Nguyễn is one of an army of ghostwriters that make academic fraud a big
business in Vietnam, one going far beyond routine cheating and bribery –
and, through the electronic voodoo of the internet, also going far
beyond Vietnam’s borders not only to Australia but to the United States,
the UK and to other destinations where students and academics prefer to
shell out rather than swot -- wherever there are students whose language
skills are weak and whose parents are wealthy.
Hiring someone else to write an apparently authentic term paper or
thesis is easy and seems to be almost foolproof, but it isn't cheap.
Vietnamese media have reported lately that the market for “buying and
selling grey matter" has been unprecedentedly dynamic. It's said that
PhD graduates, finding it hard to make a living as researchers at public
institutions, are increasingly turning to ghostwriting. Clients will pay
from US$1,400 to US$9,000 for a report that's published in an academic
journal.
The cheating isn't unique to Vietnam, of course. I have often been told
"Oh, it's much, much worse in China." A colleague shared a Singapore
ghostwriter's detailed defense of his "profession". A friend in Europe
wrote that "organized cheating…is especially strong in the Middle
East/West Asia."
But part of it is cultural. Many, if not most, Asian students simply
don't consider plagiarism unacceptable. As a
Voice of America article pointed out, too often, students come to
the United States without an understanding of plagiarism and how to
avoid using another's work. The percentage of Chinese international
students expelled specifically because of academic dishonesty and
plagiarism has increased every year, reaching 33.5 percent in 2017,
according to the WholeRen Education Research Center.
Nguyễn had skimmed through the textbook and all the slides sent to her
by the student via her online agent. It was at short notice, so she'd
been paid almost double the usual rate. The client had promised a bonus
if he scored 75/100 or better.
“I was even more stressed than when I took my own college exams 10 years
ago," she said.
Professional ghostwriting is a flex-time job. Later that day she would
analyze a British play in 2500 words for students majoring in English
literature at a prestigious university in Hanoi. The challenge was to
write five different versions because her five clients were all in the
same class. Enabling bad students in quest of good grades is now her
major source of income. She receives orders by email from various agents
that she has never met.
Nguyễn graduated from the National University of Economics in 2013. Six
years later, pregnant with her second child and needing extra income,
she recalled a college classmate who had advertised for “writing
tutors." Although she imagined she would support struggling students by
proofreading and editing their work, or perhaps doing online tutoring,
she learned that her former classmate was an intermediary between the
agents who take orders from students and ghostwriters.
Nguyen now works for several different agents. Some days she writes
5,000 words in English. Although she would not disclose her income from
ghostwriting, Nguyễn insists that contract cheating is less stressful
and better paid than her previous nine-to-five administrative job.
On professional networks or Facebook groups, agents look for contract
cheaters under the guise of assignment support, with promises of totally
remote work, high compensation, and an opportunity to shore up English
skills. Nguyễn once posed as a potential client to inquire about the
real price for an article. “Even though the agents take 30 percent of
the fee, or sometimes even more, the money is too good for me to give
up,” she concluded.
The vast majority of clients are enrolled in chương trình tiên tiến,
so-called 'state of the art' degree programs in Vietnam that charge much
higher fees than at state universities, follow a foreign curriculum,
have foreign teachers and are mostly taught in English. Other clients
include Vietnamese students at Australian universities and Vietnamese
students at North American high schools.
First study in the US
Hưng started as a ghostwriter during his study in the USA and then, back
home in Vietnam, launched his own Facebook-based ghostwriting agency 10
years ago. Every month on average he receives 100 orders. Sometimes he
cooperates with other agents in order not to lose any clients. Most of
his orders, he says, come from regular clients. Some order a whole
semester's assignments for one or more subjects.
“Once they make the first order, those clients typically come back again
and again until they graduate,” Hưng said. He's working himself on an
MBA thesis ordered by a Vietnamese student in Taiwan, managing
everything from the research proposal to the final text. It's his last
assignment for a client who has hired his service for four years. Hưng
said his client even gave him his email account so that he could
exchange directly with the student’s supervisor.
“I am about to put an English version of my website on Facebook," Hưng
added, saying his client base has expanded by word of mouth. He is
already filling four orders from Chinese students.
Acting as an agent, Hưng sets his price depending on his familiarity
with clients, their nationality, the level of urgency and difficulty of
assignments, and the availability of writers who are capable of
completing the assignments meticulously and punctually. “An assignment
on international politics surely costs more than a marketing essay,” he
said. Most of his writers and collaborators have a background in finance
and business, majors that are very popular among Vietnamese students.
Hưng assigns tasks to collaborators only when core members are unable to
keep up with demand. He makes a point of rewarding writers who earn high
grades for clients and complete many assignments. Writers who allow
clients to fail receive fewer orders or are paid less.
The agent who assigns work to Nguyễn told her frankly that she's in
competition with other ghostwriters who work for his agency. They
forward clients' orders to all writers. The first to reply and confirm
availability will be selected assigned to do the task.
Rarely do ghostwriters have time off. They have to stay connected to
receive new orders and to be at old clients' disposal to revise
assignments, based either on the feedback of clients' teachers or
clients' own requests. An order is not completed until the client
receives a grade.
“The agents are never on the side of writers. They are afraid of being
exposed online by clients and losing their customer base,” said Nguyễn.
Sometimes clients pretend to fail in order to claim their money back.
Once, Nguyễn related, she wrote an assignment on early child education
development. It required a lot of reading and research. Her client
refused to take it, saying that it was not up to par and insisting on
getting her money back. Nguyen's agent promptly issued a full refund. A
few months later, another client from the same university requested
exactly the same assignment. Nguyễn gave her the one that had been
rejected. It soon turned out that the previous client, the one who'd
been refunded her fee, had in fact submitted the ghostwritten
assignment. Later, when Nguyễn's agent reached out to the cunning
client, he found that her e-mail account had been deleted.
Reliance on ghostwriters by foreign students is reportedly rampant in
Australian universities. Kathryn Powley, who manages media relations at
La Trobe University in Melbourne, says all entering students – including
international ones – are required to complete academic integrity
training and are regularly reminded of the risks associated with
cheating in all forms.
"Contract papers can be identified by assessment of variations in style
or capability," she says, "or by detecting recycled papers and content.
Penalties range from failing the subject to expulsion."
Nguyễn admits that she has benefited intellectually from her low-risk
and profitable ghostwriting job. "It has given me a lot of insight into
education systems that differ greatly from Vietnam's. When I was at
university," she explained, "I was never taught how to create a list of
references or to cite an article. I just copy-pasted or rephrased
materials without knowing that I was actually committing plagiarism.
Now, writing for clients, I have to make sure that the similarity index
is no more than 15 percent."
Nguyễn prefers multimedia assignments. Powerpoint presentations or
videos aren't subject to the automated plagiarism checks that are
standard in the Australian universities where most of her clients are
studying. She claims to have no moral qualms about ghostwriting
students' work. She'll keep doing it, that, she says, until she can find
a better-paid full-time job. After all, it's nothing new; she's been
seeing academic fraud ever since she entered college.
Vietnam's schools and universities are rife with plagiarism of various
kinds. The saying
học thật, bằng giả (real study, fake degrees) refers to
people who overcome the burden of poor grades by presenting fake degrees
when they apply for jobs, while học giả, bằng thật (fake study, real
degrees) alludes to real credentials acquired by nominal enrollment and
frequent payments to a ghostwriter.
Plagiarism also rife in officialdom
Vietnamese media frequently feature reports of high-ranking officials
and scholars whose plagiarism has been exposed. In 2018, hundreds of
students accused the head of the Academy of Linguistics, Nguyễn Đức Tồn,
of committing plagiarism. They said he'd published a book made up of
students' work as his own and had accused those same students of citing
his work without giving him proper credit. Even so, Tồn was promoted to
the rank of full professor, not for his scholarship but for
“humanitarian cause and altruism." Although his peers urged a thorough
investigation in a public letter to the Prime Minister, Tồn's only
punishment was discontinuation of his contract with the Academy.
National high school graduation exams decide which fortunate few will
win admission to the nation's elite public universities. It's a tightly
guarded process, but in 2018 some 347 exams in three northern border
provinces were found to have been tampered with, prompting a massive
uproar. Eleven Education Ministry officials were arrested.
Also in 2018, Minister of Education Phùng Xuân Nhạ was himself
accused of plagiarism and bogus citations by a University of
Toulouse (France) professor, Dr. Nguyễn Tiến Dũng. Dũng sent a 10-page
report to the Vietnam's State Council for Professorship. It circulated
on the Internet, leading to calls for Minister Nhạ's resignation.
In late 2020, Đắc Lắc City Communist party chief Bùi Văn Cường was
accused by a former lecturer at Tôn Đức Thắng University of plagiarism
in his PhD dissertation. Later on, rather than refer the matter to an
independent expert group, an arm of the Party's Central Committee
dismissed the accusation as completely groundless. Bùi Văn Cường was
later promoted. Cường's accuser, meanwhile, reportedly sent some 200
letters denouncing him to news media and official agencies. Early this
month, he was arrested on a charge of defamation.
By and large, the Vietnamese public hears of these matters and shrugs.
In education as in other spheres, such scandals are a familiar story. |