What to Do About Contract Cheating
Contract cheating — the use of essay writing services to manufacture coursework — is on the rise, along with other forms of academic dishonesty. Here's how technology can and can't help.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 09/26/18
When 13 undergraduate engineering students were booted out of the program at Australia's Deakin University in May 2016 for taking part in "contract cheating," it may have looked like just another round in institutional efforts to combat academic dishonesty, akin to reducing plagiarism or stamping out the use of term paper mills. However, some experts view this specific form of deceit as more pernicious because it can be so hard to detect by the usual tools and methods.
Wendy Sutherland-Smith, a longtime scholar of academic integrity, doesn't hold back: "Contract cheating companies are really insidious, evil, nasty beasts," she declared. As this director of teaching and learning in Deakin's School of Psychology described, these operators promote themselves as "legitimate, authorized writing help services." Their message: "We know the university hasn't got time to really help you. We know that you're struggling with timelines. We're here to help you with writing. We're available 24/7, which your university professors are not. We can talk to you anytime." As a result, "naïve, gullible, desperate students just get sucked in," said Sutherland-Smith. (One site, UnemployedProfessors.com, suggests to potential customers that it provides the only reasonable alternative to intractable professors who won't give extensions due to active military missions, accidents that put students in the hospital or English learners struggling to keep up in class.)
Thomas Mays, an associate professor at the Middletown Campus of Miami University in Ohio, would likely agree with Sutherland-Smith's assessment. In "Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Courses," a recent Online Learning Consortium session, he told attendees, "[Contract cheating is] very difficult to catch. It takes faculty members who have academic dishonesty on mind and are actually looking for these things rather consistently. It's easy to gloss over it and totally miss it."
More broadly, Miami U has seen the cases of academic dishonesty increasing year over year. While there were 460 cases identified during 2015-2016, that grew to more than 500 cases in 2016-2017, Mays reported. And, the institution is "on track to go beyond that this year," he said.
What May can't say for certain is whether the growth is because "students have less integrity or that we're just better at reporting it."
The Nature of the Beast
Contract cheating takes place when a student has somebody else do all or part of the work and then hands it in as his or her own. It could be a specific paper or some other assessment task, or it could involve getting somebody else to take an entire course on behalf of the student (more easily accomplished in an online class). The cheating could be for pay or it could be performed by a supportive friend or family member. Standard plagiarism checkers don't catch these incidents because, frequently, the providers promise "all original work" with "0 percent plagiarism." (For proof, suggested Mays, just look up "research paper" on Twitter and follow the responses students get when they tweet complaints about their latest assignments.)
By posing as help services, many of the companies operating in this space tap into the desperation students feel when they're overwhelmed. As Mays observed, schools have to get at "the heart of why students cheat. In many cases it's because they're stressed out. It's not because they don't necessarily know what plagiarism is."