Does authentic assessment assure academic integrity? Evidence from contract cheating data

Managing the mutations: academic misconduct in Australia, New Zealand and the UK

“…This assertion is supported by Harper et al (2020) who argue strongly against invigilated exams as a solution to academic misconduct, instead suggesting that written text or oral vivas both provided academics with greater opportunities to ensure the authenticity of a student's work. While authentic assessment is often referred to as the panacea for the problem of academic misconduct, Ellis et al (2019) challenge that assertion. These authors further add that the resource intensive nature of true authentic assessment is likely unfeasible in the economic environment in which universities currently operate.…”

“…Factors that contribute to misconduct have also been investigated (Barbaranelli et al 2018;Grira and Jaeck 2019;Moss et al 2018;Yu et al 2018), including cultural or international status (Ison 2018;James et al 2019;Mahmud et al 2019;Makarova 2019). While most current research in the area of student misconduct relates specifically to plagiarism, considerable work has been in respect of contract cheating (Bretag et al 2020;Dawson and Sutherland-Smith 2018;Harper et al 2019), particularly the motivation for student use (Amigud and Lancaster 2019a;Rundle et al 2019;Sarwar et al 2018), essay mill processes (Ellis et al 2018;Foltýnek and Králíková 2018;Kaktiņš 2018;Lancaster 2020;Medway et al 2018;Rowland et al 2018) and the relationship with assessment design (Bretag et al 2019b;Ellis et al 2019;Harper et al 2020).…”

Deterring cheating using a complex assessment design: A case study

“…Frequent formative assessment has been proposed as a way to deter academic misconduct (Nguyen et al, 2020;Simonson et al, 2019). Other suggested approaches were to modify the assessment format in order to minimize cheating by focusing on novel and/or higher-order-thinking questions (Nguyen et al, 2020;Reedy et al, 2021), using writing-based and collaborative assignments, case studies, and online debates (Burgason et al, 2019), implementing authentic assessment (Ellis et al, 2020;Simonson et al, 2019), and assessing the knowledge on academic integrity and the referencing technique (Bjelobaba, 2020).…”

Technology, policy and research: establishing evidentiary standards for managing contract cheating cases

“…The volume of research into the problem of contract cheating has increased substantially in recent years and focuses both on the 'academic' side of the problem and on potential 'legal and legislative' solutions. The 'academic' side examines student behaviours and attitudes (see Bretag et al, 2019a;Bretag et al, 2019b;Newton, 2016;Rogerson, 2017), academic staff attitudes and behaviours (see Awdry and Newton, 2019;Harper et al, 2019;Maio et al, 2019), what role, if any, assessment design can play (see Bretag et al, 2018;Ellis et al, 2019), and the 'academic custom writing' industry itself (see Ellis et al, 2018;Lines, 2016;Rowland et al, 2018;Sutherland-Smith and Dullaghan, 2019).…”