Contract cheating' has recently emerged as a form of academic dishonesty. It involves students contracting out their coursework to writers in order to submit the purchased assignments as their own work, usually via the internet. This form of cheating involves epistemic and ethical problems that are continuous with older forms of cheating, but which it also casts in a new form. It is a concern to educators because it is very difficult to detect, because it is arguably more fraudulent than some other forms of plagiarism, and because it appears to be connected to a range of systemic problems within modern higher education. This paper provides an overview of the information and literature thus far available on the topic, including its definition, the problems it involves, its causal factors, and the ways in which educators might respond. We argue that while contract cheating is a concern, some of the suggested responses are themselves problematic, and that best practice responses to the issue should avoid moral panic and remain focussed on supporting honest students and good academic practice.Contract cheating has recently emerged as a form of academic dishonesty, where students contract out their coursework to writers or workers, usually found via the internet, in order to submit the purchased assignments as their own work. While the prevalence of contract cheating is unknown, some of the available information is alarming, and detecting contract cheats is difficult. In addition, the phenomenon of contract cheating highlights a number of systemic issues within higher education, challenging academics to consider the ways we might contribute to the environment in which such practices emerge and proliferate. As such, it is timely to discuss what educators can do about this problem, what its effects might be, and why students may be tempted to resort to it. As we aim to show below, however, it is also important to avoid overreactions to this issue which may be counterproductive.The aims of this paper are to provide an overview of the available literature relating to contract cheating, to point out some of the pedagogical and ethical issues it raises, and to provide some recommendations for how higher education institutions can best respond. In "Definition and Overview" we examine definitions of contract cheating and how it is located in relation to other forms of academic dishonesty. We also provide an overview of what is

Plagiarism is the misuse of and failure to acknowledge source materials. This paper questions common responses to the apparent increase in plagiarism by students. Internet plagiarism occurs in a contextusing the Internet as an information tool -where the relevant norms are far from obvious and models of virtue are difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to find. Ethical responses to the pervasiveness of Internetenhanced plagiarism require a reorientation of perspective on both plagiarism and the Internet as a knowledge tool. Technological strategies to ''catch the cheats'' send a ''don't get caught'' message to students and direct the limited resources of academic institutions to a battle that cannot be won. More importantly, it is not the right battleground. Rather than characterising Internet-enabled plagiarism as a problem generated and solvable by emerging technologies, we argue that there is a more urgent need to build the background conditions that enable and sustain ethical relationships and academic virtues: to nurture an intellectual community.

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The development of nonoppressiwe ways of knowing other persons, often across significantly different social positions, is an important project within feminism. An account of epistemic responsibility attentive to feminist concerns is developed here through a critique of epistemophilia-the love of knowledge to the point of myopia and its concurrent ignoring of ignorance. ldentifying a positive role for ignorance yields an enhanced understanding of responsible knowledge practices.Many feminist theorists have criticized paternalistic, appropriative, colonialist, exclusionary, and other oppressive ways of knowing (see, for example, Code 1987Code , 1991Code , 1995Smith 1999), grounding their criticisms in ethical and political insights. In this article, I use epistemic considerations to show that such practices involve epistemic irresponsibility. In doing so, I will assume, but not argue, that getting epistemology right can shape our understanding of moral requirements, and vice-versa.Mainstream epistemology (as standard introductory texts and syllabi present it) has had little to say in response to feminist concerns about problematic knowledge practices (Rooney 2004), focusing instead on the analysis of knowledge mostly by seeking its necessary and sufficient conditions but sometimes also paying attention to testimony (see, for example, Coady 1992)' Knowledge acquisition has been the exclusive focus of academic inquiry and collecting knowledge is assumed to constitute the unique epistemic obligation and ideal for agents. Some manifestations of this acquisitive epistemology could be called Right-wing epistemology, since they are characterized by an endorsement of individualism and a recommendation of knowledge accumulation, which, in practice, tend to reinforce established patterns of dominance and privilege. In almost all epistemologies, ignorance is understood simply to be the absence of knowledge or information, and the fact that this ignorance could be remedied Hypatia vol. 21, no. 3 (1991). Moreton-Robinson indicates that she takes parties to the debate to include conference participants who were not necessarily signatories to this letter.