This paper explores contract cheating from the perspectives of researchers at three post-secondary institutions in Alberta, Canada, describing their efforts to develop and advance awareness of, interventions against, and responses to contract cheating at their respective institutions. Contract cheating is when a third party produces or completes academic work for a student, and the student then presents the work as their own. The student might have personal connections to the third party, or the student might pay a fee and outsource the academic work to the third party. All three institutions are experiencing an increase in the incidence of contract cheating, which is consistent with trends at colleges and universities across Canada and the world. Contract cheating is not a new phenomenon, but it is a growing one, due in part to students having access to thousands of online companies offering to help them with their academic work. This paper examines personal narratives from four researchers and identifies five key themes: types of contract cheating, students, awareness, evidence and policy implications, and educational development.

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This article presents results from a self-report survey of misconduct behaviours and the stress students ( n = 916) experienced at one Canadian community college. Results showed that students engaged in a variety of contract cheating behaviours, and experienced a myriad of stressors both in and outside the college context, including traumatic life events. Those who engaged in commercial contract cheating and inappropriate sharing behaviours experienced significantly higher levels of stress. This result differed by type of stress suggesting that not all stress may lead to violation behaviour. Results also suggest that some students are exposed to more stress than others, which could put them at higher risk for engaging in contract cheating. Understanding contract cheating using the stress process framework draws our attention to how a student’s location in the social institutions of work, family, and school, how their positions of advantage or disadvantage, and their involvement in social relationships may produce stress which we have found to be associated with contract cheating. Seeing stress in this way allows post-secondary institutions to address the structural conditions which lead to stress through the development of policy, procedure, and supports for students as they navigate academic integrity throughout their programs.

The entropic time cycle and meditational means: Some musings Just a few days after Ron Scollon had passed on, Sigrid visited Hawaii. Walking through the rainforest, gazing at some very old trees, her mind wandered to Ron, who had studied in Hawaii many years earlier. There in Hawaii, he had learned to be a linguistic anthropologist, with Li Fang-Kuei as his mentor. Afterwards, he had gone to Fort Chipewyan Alberta and to Alaska, where he had made a substantial difference in the way Native Americans were treated, before he moved to Hong Kong, then to Georgetown, then back to Alaska. Looking at a particularly old tree, Sigrid's thoughts drifted to the many weekend walks Ron and Suzie had taken together with his students and the students' friends and families when he was a Professor at Georgetown University. They had made a point to take groups of students to the Blue Ridge Mountains or to Maryland to hike. One of Ron's favourite hikes was Old Rag, the biggest mountain in the area. There in the wilderness, he had conversations with his students about theory, methodology and life in general, while everyone was enjoying the fresh air and building strong bonds. Watching a waterfall, Sigrid thought about rhythms and cycles of time. Ron had developed the idea that there are at least six time cycles that each action needed to be considered in. The largest cycle, usually the entropic cycle, had resulted in the decay of Ron's body, but now Sigrid could see that there was another cycle that Ron had not mentioned, namely the cycle of thought. Thought, when expressed in meditational means that have a longer lifespan than an individual's body, lives on. No news there. Aristotle, Socrates or Goethe come to mind. But then there is another thought cycle, and this one appears to be located in the minds of social actors who knew and understood a social actor's thoughts before he passed on. All of Ron's students are now part of this thought cycle. This type of remembrance is built on relationship and decays as the bodies of the