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Contract cheating


Contract cheating is a form of academic dishonesty in which students get others to complete their coursework for them by putting it out to tender.

The term was coined in a 2006 study by Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke at the University of Central England in Birmingham (now known as Birmingham City University).

The first published material detailing the extent of contract cheating is a study by Robert Clarke and Thomas Lancaster. The study presented three main findings:

Whereas the quality of solutions to assignments sold by essay mill has been questioned, a study by Jenkins and Helmore showed that work obtained through the use of an auction site was of sufficient quality to gain good marks and remain undetected by the module tutor.

A more recent study examined over 900 examples of contract cheating by students studying computing subjects. The published results categorise the assignment types (e.g. Programming, Database, Web Design) and are analysed by country. One new concern identified by this study was the number of major projects (both final year undergraduate and postgraduate) being posted onto auction sites.

In July 2007 a paper proposed a systematic six-stage process that tutors can use to detect students who are contract cheating.

From a study of 4,000 suspected cases of "contract cheating" some interesting patterns of behaviour have been observed. A summary was presented at the HEA Workshop on Contract Cheating (March 2008).

At the Aske conference held in June 2009 a paper detailing a "multi-faceted" approach to dealing with the problem of "contract cheating" was presented.

A paper presented at the STEM conference (April 2012) was a study of over 600 assignments in subject areas ranging from "Anthropology to Theology".

The Commercial Aspects of Contract Cheating are examined in a paper given at ITiCSE '13. This paper analyses the monetary value of contract cheating to the different parties who play a role in the contract cheating process. The main analysis is based on a corpus consisting of 14,438 identified attempts to cheat. The corpus was collected between March 2005 and July 2012.

Although non-originality engines (like Turnitin) are unlikely to detect "outsourced" assignments submitted by students, there has been some success in using it to identify the source of assignments detected on auction sites.


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