Contract cheating can be a student who exchanges a pizza for a completed assignment. On a large scale, it can be a student who hires a “client writing site” to complete an entire academic program. This presentation will address identifying and preventing contract cheating and other academic dishonesty.
Cheating is an eternal problem. Every teacher has had to deal with issues of academic integrity. In the good old days the teacher just had to keep an eye out for that student slipping the answers out of her purse during the exam. Today, students automatically create a “GroupMe” for every course, and often it is misused for purposes of academic dishonesty. Unless an instructor can proctor every assignment, online courses present limitless cheating temptations. In addition to trying to design exams that are not “Google-able,” and using anti-cheating technology to keep students from surfing the web during an online exam, teachers also have to be on the lookout for the newly prevalent (although not new) bad wolf in academic dishonesty, contract cheating. The definition of contract cheating, according to Cath Ellis, is “A student procures a third party (who knows about and benefits from the transaction) to produce academic work (that is usually but not always assessable work) that the student then submits to an educational institution as if it were their own” (1) The benefit does not have to be money—it can be a mutual benefit in some way. Contract cheating can be a student who exchanges a pizza for a completed assignment. On a large scale, it can be a student who hires a “client writing site” to complete an entire academic program.
Contract Cheating: The Not New ProblemAs early as 2006, Clarke and Lancaster identified contract cheating and the use of the RentACoder site as a vendor for such services. Clarke and Lancaster called websites that offered contract cheating opportunities “non-originality agencies” (2). In the instance of RentACoder, it looked like 12.3% of coding requests were from students in computer programming classes who were attempting to have the RentACoder services complete their assignments for them (4).
However, contract cheating has been at the forefront of teacher concern today because in 2015, a scandal in the Australian university system broke, with the revelation that many students were hiring a company called MyMaster to take online courses—and complete online programs—for them (Ross). In the 12 years since the RentACoder problem, contract cheating has become much more sophisticated—and the marketing campaign for such services is shameless. Unfortunately for us, this problem is not limited to Australia.
One main response to the MyMaster scandal was awareness—and many schools and programs, such as Curtin Business School in Perth, instituted academic honesty training for students (Atkinson, Nau, Symons 197).
General Cheating Prevention and Cheating Strategy AwarenessWhat are some easy ways to prevent cheating? One is, like Curtin Business School, to have clear expectations—what an instructor or an institution considers to be cheating—and remind students of those expectations before an assessment (Barthel). In fact, schools with honor codes have fewer cases of cheating. If a school doesn’t have an honor code, a teacher can create one for his or her course--or even have students work together to create an honor code for a course.
It’s also important to know about the strategies students use to cheat—the ubiquitous GroupMe, the sacrificial lamb strategy, slugging, and others. At Kennesaw State University, the GroupMe policy states that any students who view material intended to assist them in cheating, and do not report it, are as guilty as the person who posts it. This policy has assisted in making sure honest students don’t turn a blind eye toward cheating.
Also, another important step is for faculty to eschew publisher assessments and create their own. It is important for teachers to Google their assessment questions. A teacher might find that his or her original questions that he or she started using a year ago have been uploaded to a cheat site. It’s unfortunate, but it happens more often than one might think. Another helpful suggestion is for teachers to use the randomizing feature available in most learning management systems. It foils one of the popular cheating strategies—the sacrificial lamb strategy.
A common idea is that students cheat because they are lazy or dishonest. However, Jared Stein hypothesizes that students cheat because they feel stressed, and if teachers are mindful of that, and create, for example, staggered assessments that support the building of skills, students are less likely to cheat than if they are provided a few high stakes assessments throughout the course.
Contract Cheating: Do Teachers Really Not Know?Can we stop students from contract cheating? Unlike students buying a single essay, where most teachers could tell the student’s work took a drastic shift, contract cheating means the same fake student is in the class the entire time. The work remains consistent, and teachers are hard pressed to see which students are fake and which are real. In 2015, researchers at Western Carolina University were “unsettle[ed]” to realize that students could pay a company to successfully take an entire online course for them, and in the process give the teacher an excellent impression of the “fake” student (Wolverton). The only challenge was a video presentation assignment, and the cheating company was able to workaround it so that the fake student was successful.
DiscussionLong ago, when I was first hired at Kennesaw State University to help faculty put high quality courses online, one of the main challenges to online learning was the assumption that all online students were cheating. I would ask the indignant faculty member “When was the last time you checked IDs in your face to face course? How do you know those students sitting in front of you are who they say they are?” Teachers can check IDs in online courses using one of the many online proctoring services where students must show picture ID. Even using Respondus Webcam, teachers can require that students show their IDs before they begin the exam.
As one can see, there are many methods of cheating and some strategies teachers can employ for cheating prevention.
This session will outline some of the most common cheating techniques and prevention strategies and encourage discussion of how we can work together to make cheating a thing of the past.
Works CitedAtkinson, Doug, S. Zaung Nau, Christine Symons. “Ten Years on the Academic Integrity Trenches: Experiences and Issues.” Journal of Information Systems Education. 27.3 (2016): 197-207.
Barthel, Margaret. “How to Stop Cheating in College.” The Atlantic. April 20, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/how-to-stop-cheati...
Clarke, Robert and Thomas Lancaster. “Eliminating the Successor to Plagiarism: Identifying the Usage of Contract Cheating Sites.” (2006): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c76/1e6f528a3c0f963d2d5c37bd9a723dcef115.pdf?_ga=2.164140732.203768832.1528141301-1579372272.1528141301.
Ellis, Cath. Ian Michael Zucker, and David Randall. “The Infernal Business of Contract Cheating: Understanding the Business Processes and Models of Academic Custom Writing Sites.” International Journal for Educational Integrity. 14.1 (2018): 1-21.
Ross, John. Times Higher Education. “Contract Cheating ‘Ripe to Explode.’” April 23, 2018. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/contract-cheating-ripe-explode.
Stein, Jared. “The Cheatability Factor in Online Education.” Jared Stein’s Blog: Education, Technology, Nerd Stuff, Culture. August 8, 2008.
http://jaredstein.org/blog/2008/08/08/pres-cheatability/
Wolverton, Brad. “In a Fake Online Class with Students Paid to Chat, Could Professors Catch the Culprits?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. December 22, 2015. https://www.chronicle.com/article/In-a-Fake-Online-Class-With/234687