by Thomas Lancaster -

Upcoming Introductory Contract Cheating Workshop

There has been a lot of call recently for an introductory workshop to contract cheating, taking things slowly and from the basics.

We have one date arranged at present, in conjunction with the Higher Education Academy (more dates can be added if there is demand).

The workshop takes place on Thursday, 13 March 2014, at Birmingham City University.

Booking Information On The Contract Cheating Workshop Is Available Here

We are also available to deliver customised versions of this HEA at other academic institutions, should the interest be there. These workshops are delivered in association with the HEA. Just contact us for details.

The workshop is supported by the Computing subject centre of the HEA, but the materials will be largely accessible for all the disciples for whom contract cheating is a problem.

by Thomas Lancaster -

Materials Added

In order to bring ContractCheating.com up to date, I’ve gone through and added copies of the slides from all the talks in this area in 2013, as well as details of the main papers we’ve published in this area. There are some papers by other authors which need to work through and add the details of.

One area we’ve been doing a lot of recently is delivering talks and research seminars on contract cheating. These can be aimed at particular audiences; for instance, we’ve delivered for particular academic disciplines and types of institutions, as well as lighter talks for academic institutions like the British Computer Society. We can aim these at academics, or aim those at people who set university policies which include student cheating and plagiarism. These sessions are always well received, can get very lively and can easily have discussions and activities included. If you are interested in us speaking for your particular area, just let us know.

by Thomas Lancaster -

Commercial Aspects Of Contract Cheating

Clarke, R. &amp Lancaster, T. (2013). Commercial Aspects Of Contract Cheating, 8th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2013), University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, July 2013.

The process of contract cheating, the form of academic dishonesty where students outsource the creation of work on their behalf, has been recognised as a serious threat to the quality of academic awards. Unlike student plagiarism, this cheating behaviour is not currently detectable using automated tools.

This paper analyses the monetary value of contract cheating to the different parties who play a role in the contract cheating process. The main analysis is based on a corpus consisting of 14,438 identified attempts to cheat. The corpus was collected between March 2005 and July 2012. The corpus was formed as part of a manual contract cheating detection process identifying students using online agencies. These online agencies are web sites which enable students to contract cheat. The agencies usually benefit from this by receiving a percentage cut of the money raised from the contract cheating that they facilitate. This corpus is used as the basis of an attempt to quantify the monetary value of contract cheating to online agencies.

Other parties exist who benefit from the contract cheating process. The paper gives examples of the monetary value of contract cheating to each of them. Most notably this includes the contractors who bid for the opportunity to produce work on behalf of the students. Further, the paper identifies the role of intermediary contractors. These are people who post assignment requests on agency sites but who are not themselves students. These intermediary contractors appear to benefit by first receiving requests to complete work for students and then re-outsourcing this work at a much lower cost than they were paid. The group of frequent workers, that is people who regularly work on student assignments and hence benefit financially, is also identified.

The paper concludes by presenting the changing trends in contract cheating that the authors have observed since they started working against this form of academic misconduct in 2005.

Commercial Aspects Of Contract Cheating