I don't understand how somebody could actually hand in a PhD dissertation from one of these places. Are there really schools where nobody would be suspicious that the student hadn't been working on this particular dissertation before they handed in the final version?
I suspect this to be in the genre of the ask-for-something-impossible-on-rentacoder-and-see-what-happens experiments. Don't PhD candidates have to get their proposals accepted by their advisors and then have periodic reviews during the process?
Even at many top grad schools, hardly any dissertation will be rejected. If you spend a long time there, grad schools will often be eager to hand you a PhD for a junky dissertation just to get you out the door.
Really? From what I've seen, if it's that junky that will request major revisions in the hope to either deter you enough just to quit, or to encourage you enough to clean it up.
There are some "diploma mills" where the only qualification for your phd is a large check and a dissertation sized paper. It doesn't surprise me that these are farmed out to essay mills.
On a side note, I looked into writing for essay mills before, but the money wasn't worth it for me.
