Contract cheating: a new challenge for academic honesty?

Abstract

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

How Prevalent is Contract Cheating and to What Extent are Students Repeat Offenders?

“…Contract cheating is a breach of academic ethics in which students enter into an agreement to pay another person to complete assessments on their behalf (Clarke and Lancaster 2006;Walker and Townley 2012). Typically, this involves paying the other person to write an unsupervised assessment such as an essay, report, or computer code (Clarke and Lancaster 2006;Walker and Townley 2012).…”

“…Typically, this involves paying the other person to write an unsupervised assessment such as an essay, report, or computer code (Clarke and Lancaster 2006;Walker and Townley 2012). Contract cheating appears to be a subset of the form of plagiarism defined by Walker (1998) as "ghostwriting".…”

“…Unfortunately, the prevalence of contact cheating can appear to be overblown with the media's focus on raw numbers; one thousand students cheating makes a better headline than 3 in every 1000 students cheating. And, such media reports may cause the kind of panic over contract cheating that academic authors on the topic suggest is unwarranted (Walker and Townley 2012). …”

“…Busy academics in massified higher education systems have limited time to investigate suspected academic misconduct, and often rely on text-matching software to assist in the detection of plagiarism (Walker and Townley 2012). However, automated methods for detecting contract cheating are not well-formed or in widespread use, partly because these require, but lack, data on the prevalence of contract cheating.…”

Exploring Students’ Perception and Experience of Ghostwriting and Contract Cheating in Nigeria Higher Education Institutions

“…Hence, the opportunity for them to engage in the practice exists because of the inadequacies of the NHEIs institutional framework for deterrence. These inadequacies are unfortunately complemented by the natural elusive and problematic nature of the practice as highlighted in the paper by Walker and Townley (2012).…”