A fair dice has six sides, numbered 1 to 6. After it is rolled, five of the numbers can be seen. What is the probability that one of these five numbers is 2?”

I have a confession to make: I’m terrible at maths. Questions like this one used to bring me out in a cold sweat, but now, thanks to so-called “homework help” websites, I can quickly find the answer.

I know this because I submitted the dice question to one such website and was told that, for a monthly subscription fee, I could gain access to myriad educational materials, including an “ask the expert” option that promises to deliver answers to questions, just like the one above, in a little over half an hour.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that during successive lockdowns over the past year and a half, the number of requests for help submitted to these sites has soared.

But at what point does “help” tip over into plain old “cheating”?

The answer to that question could soon become a lot clearer, as the government has recently announced that it plans to make “contract cheating” - the practice of students engaging a third party to complete assignments - illegal as one of a number of measures being introduced to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill.

This move comes not before time, according to Thomas Lancaster, a higher education professional who specialises in computer science, academic integrity and contract cheating. He explains that, while Covid lockdowns might have fuelled the recent boom in visits to homework help sites, this type of academic information sharing has been around for decades.

“Even 20 years ago, university students had worked out that the same questions and assignments would be used repeatedly and they would create archives of materials to share between different years,” he explains.

“What happened then was that companies saw this as a good business model and started to set up sites to archive solutions, marketed at students from different universities.”

While some of the more successful homework help sites have been around for a decade or more, “it’s really only the past three or four years where the major players have really pushed their marketing and tried to get inroads into every university”, says Lancaster.

Earlier this year, Lancaster and Codrin Cotarlan, from Imperial College London, published a paper in the International Journal for Educational Integrity that reported on a surge in requests to homework help websites and the rapid growth of online “essay mills” - sites that provide full essays to download for a fee.

While the researchers’ work focused on the activities of university students, Lancaster says one of the problems he has witnessed at university level is that students are “bringing with them the bad habits they picked up at school”.

As he suggests, a quick search on some of these sites for GCSE maths or chemistry help reveals “no shortage” of questions posted and answered.

“I was actually sent an example recently of a UK school resource guide, which was referring students to one of these sites for revision, not perhaps realising that this same site sells ‘homework help’ solutions to students,” he says.

Keeping ‘bad habits’ at bay

While Lancaster has only anecdotal evidence that school-age children are using homework help sites, he strongly believes that the use of these sites is increasing across the age spectrum.

“I talk to a lot of people working in the academic-integrity field and universities worldwide are finding more cases of homework help sites being used by students,” he says.

“My own research suggests that the number of questions posted has gone up by almost 200 per cent from before the pandemic. We can’t easily say if the questions are at university or school level. My impression is most are university level but there’s evidence of both.”

Offering essay-writing services to students for a fee is set to become a become a criminal offence. But for now, how worried should teachers be about all this? And what, if anything, could they do to prevent pupils from relying too heavily on homework help sites?

Perhaps the biggest concern is that we simply have very little evidence at the moment about how many pupils may be accessing the sites, how often, and the long-term impact of regular access. It stands to reason, though, that if pupils are increasingly relying on them for all their answers, their learning is bound to suffer.

Lekha Sharma, a former primary teacher and vice-principal who is now a curriculum designer at the Teacher Development Trust, admits that while she has not had much experience of pupils using homework help sites, she has had “lots of experiences of internet resources being used, and sometimes overused, for home learning”.

This is something that she believes requires intervention to prevent pupils from getting into those “bad habits” that Lancaster mentioned earlier.

“That line between ‘help’ and ‘plagiarism’ is often something I’ve had to discuss with pupils, particularly at [key stage 2] in primary, where they become increasingly tech savvy,” says Sharma.

Laura Webb, head of English at Churchdown School Academy, in Gloucestershire, reports a similar situation at secondary level - and agrees that there can be a fine line between “encouraging independence and encouraging cheating”.

“Completing research and copying and pasting is one thing, but copying and pasting into a piece of coursework or an essay is frustrating,” she says.

“I find it quite easy to detect when a student does this - voice changes, style changes, Spag (spelling, punctuation and grammar) changes - so a quick Google [to check if it’s been lifted] and then a conversation, and it never happens again. But, of course, students do try it.”

Webb believes that the “real trick” to tackling plagiarism of this kind is to take a proactive rather than reactive approach by telling students about it early.

“The truth is we teach the ideas behind plagiarism probably too late, often at A level. For me, I first encountered the concept at university but, then, there were far fewer sites of this type available,” she says.

The good news is that a lot of sites charge for access and, as Webb says, “not many students would spend their money on an essay”.

Lancaster agrees that while school-age children might be aware of the existence of these sites, which are “so well optimised, they are going to appear prominently” in search results, they may not have the financial means to pay for access. Yet a lack of money is not always a deterrent. He says he has detected lots of discussions online between children “about how to get around the paywall, and people looking to trade accounts”.

Unfortunately, it sounds as if Covid lockdowns have added fuel to these discussions. With pupils spending more learning time sitting in front of a computer, it’s only natural that they might use the internet to search for answers to questions they have been set, Lancaster says.

Webb agrees. “I think that the pandemic has indeed opened up their eyes to what is available on the internet,” she says.

So, what can be done, besides teaching pupils about plagiarism at an early age and better educating children about appropriate sources of online support?

Lancaster points to a number of ways educators could combat the problem. For instance, he notes that schools often recycle questions that have been asked in previous exams - the answers to which are already floating around on the internet. By ending this practice of “recycling”, schools could reduce the risk of cheating.

Webb suggests there is another approach that, while it might not cut out cheating altogether, could help teachers to circumnavigate it. “Coursework aside, I never assess anything that is not done in the classroom in front of me - for this very reason,” she says.

“I recognise that students have always been able to [cheat at home] and so I set limitations that prevent them from being able to use that to prove their level of attainment; any research tasks are for the sole use of them gaining knowledge. I rarely check the copy-and-paste sheets they create.”

Taking this advice on board would go some way towards lessening the impact of these practices. And there is always the hope that requests to these sites will tail off now that pupils are back in classrooms. Without the temptation that comes from sitting at a computer all day, the cost of homework help might become more of a deterrent again.

To find out the answer to my dice probability question, the homework help site wanted to charge me a monthly subscription fee of £11. The probability of my stumping up this amount to address my mathematical blind spots is zero. Let’s hope most children feel the same way.

Simon Creasey is a freelance journalist

None of the homework help sites contacted for this article responded to interview requests

This article originally appeared in the 15 October 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Cheating”