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.
Academic misconduct frequently occurs because developing academic writers lack both knowledge about the conventions for writing from sources and procedural skills for applying this knowledge. Paraphrasing is a particularly underdeveloped skill among students in higher education. This chapter illustrates how findings from existing quality assurance processes are supporting a revised approach to paraphrasing instruction by the writing strategist team at a Canadian undergraduate university. The new approach underlines the interpretive nature of paraphrasing and the agency of the student writer. By focusing less on the technical aspects of paraphrasing and more on its rhetorical purposes, we aim to foster among students a deeper level of engagement with texts, a more nuanced awareness of intertextuality, and recognition of the role disciplinary conventions play in writing from sources. Our vantage point as professionals working with students in a wide range of disciplines affords us unique opportunities to be campus changemakers. If we can encourage recognition that paraphrasing instruction must extend past first year composition courses and one-off workshops, and if we can help instructors seize opportunities to provide students with feedback on their paraphrasing, students will move beyond patchwriting and towards writing from sources with more confidence and integrity.
This presentation examined the collaboration between our Learning Development team and a community nursing course. It began with the question; “Are our demands of students concerning paraphrasing and referencing reasonable?” The assignment was a formal report on a semester-long group project where students partnered with a community agency. The coordinators worried that students (and lecturers) were over emphasising referencing and the technicalities of paraphrasing, to the detriment of engagement with the community nursing process itself. Our LD team eventually realized that the problem was not one of expectations, but rather a genre-audience mismatch. Although the assignment was called a report, the emphasis on integrating scholarly sources made it more like an academic essay, and the tone and length of the report limited its practical use by most partner agencies. Over time, by emphasizing genre, audience and purpose, we have contributed to a gradual loosening of the hold on the original report format. Last year, we provided feedback on a range of digital deliverables, including infographics, videos, and mind maps, each one designed to meet the specific partner agency’s needs. Our model of providing feedback on the report during one-hour in-person meetings has also evolved into a flexible combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration with students. We continue to guide students towards thoughtful, transparent source use, but the conversations around referencing and paraphrasing are now more holistic. In this presentation, we’ll share how our discipline-external perspective has supported meaningful student learning about authentic (and impactful) writing for different contexts.
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