Diplomas are uploaded for issue – Kommersant FM

Students began to order thesis writing more often. As Kommersant FM’s interlocutors note, since February, graduates have begun en masse to turn to specialists to create such works. However, it is illegal to promote services for preparing essays, coursework and diplomas. Previously, the FAS filed a case against Yandex, which placed advertisements for the company Work 5, which works with students. Now the search engine faces a fine of 100 thousand rubles. How much does a turnkey diploma cost? And how do neural networks compete with freelancers? Details from Alexander Mezentsev.

Some students order diplomas in advance, finding out prices from private specialists and reserving places in September. But there are few such graduates. This market comes to life in December, when the deadlines for submitting the first chapters to supervisors approach. The rush demand occurs at the end of winter and the beginning of spring.

And those who did not bother to write their diploma on time are forced to overpay, says Kommersant FM interlocutor Vera: “There are people who literally jump into the last car. That is, a client approached me at the beginning of May, and his defense was supposed to take place in just a couple of weeks, and I wrote my thesis in 14 days.

There are, of course, very funny episodes when a person is about to submit his final work, for example, in four days, but he has not completed the first chapter and does not have the second at all.

We also worked with these, but, of course, at a fairly high price. I have a friend who still works in this field, both as a freelancer and through an agency, and can write about 50 theses in a year.”

Paper writing services are widely promoted by specialized services. The Federal Antimonopoly Service has already begun the fight against such unwanted advertising. In particular, Yandex faces a fine for disseminating information about the company Work 5, which helps students with essays, coursework and diplomas.

However, it is impossible to control the entire market: only on the Avito service you can find over 1.5 thousand similar advertisements in Moscow and the region. At the same time, the price list for graduates of top universities starts from 150 thousand rubles, calculated Stanislav, who has been writing diplomas to order for more than 10 years: “Now all adequate, qualified specialists, let’s say, have a lot of work. After all, due to mobilization, the number of students and, first of all, graduate students increased. And right now everyone is undergoing certification.”

But it seems that concerns about students buying diplomas are fading into the background among university teachers; they are more worried about the introduction of artificial intelligence. The defense of a graduate of the Russian State University for the Humanities, who wrote a paper using ChatGPT in almost a day, caused an unprecedented resonance at the beginning of 2023.

Rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities Alexander Bezborodov does not support this practice: “In general, this is a rather scandalous case. The young man, a completely obvious loser, turned to the networks. And in the end I got a C-minus, relatively speaking. They showed me this work. It is still very noticeable that the text was generated by a machine, and not by him himself.

I don’t know how things will go from there, but it’s a disaster. Because we’re just going to lose people, we’re going to lose training, that’s what it means.”

Meanwhile, Moscow City Pedagogical University was the first Russian university allowed to use neural networks to create works. Therefore, the number of diplomas generated by artificial intelligence will only grow.

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Elena Tyuleneva