by Thomas Lancaster -

Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective

Lancaster, T & Clarke, R (2007). Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective, 8th Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Information and Computer Sciences, University of Southampton, August 2007

The paper studies the use the RentACoder Web site to contract cheat by Computing students. RentACoder is an outsourcing service for computer work which operates under auction principles. Contract cheating is where students have assessed work completed for them on their behalf. The work is original, so not will be detected by the regular anti-plagiarism mechanisms that look for shared commonality. The paper describes the background to contract cheating and discusses a catalogue of 910 bid requests collected by the authors over two and a half years. The UK is seen to supply them with over 25% of contract cheating bid requests. This is largely composed of students outsourcing Java programming assignments; substantial projects are highlighted as a concern. Trends are seen to exist for other countries but are not the same as those identified for UK students.

Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective

by Thomas Lancaster -

The Phenomena of Contract Cheating

Lancaster, T & Clarke, R (2007) The Phenomena of Contract Cheating, in Student Plagiarism in an Online World: Problems and Solutions, Roberts, T. S. (editor), Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA: Idea Group Inc.

This chapter discusses the issue of contract cheating. This is where students have work completed on their behalf which is then submitted for academic credit. A thorough background to this phenomena is presented. A list of the main contract cheating Web sites is also given. These contract cheating sites are placed into four classifications: auctions sites, discussion forums, essay mills and feed aggregators. Approaches are proposed for tutors to set assigned work that is less susceptible to contract cheating than standard assessments. The chapter concludes by arguing that urgent attention needs to be paid to contract cheating to avoid it becoming an educational problem of the same scale as plagiarism.

The Phenomena of Contract Cheating

by Thomas Lancaster -

Eliminating The Successor To Plagiarism? Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites

Clarke, R & Lancaster, T (2006). Eliminating The Successor To Plagiarism? Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites; 2nd Plagiarism: Prevention, Practice and Policy Conference 2006 – organised by JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service, Newcastle, UK, June 2006.

The paper identifies a growing problem, referred to as contract cheating, considered to be the successor to pure plagiarism. Contract cheating is defined as the submission of work by students for academic credit which the students have paid contractors to write for them. The usage of one particular site, RentACoder, known to be used for contract cheating is manually monitored. RentACoder is a site where computer solutions are written to contract for legitimate uses but can also be used for students to cheat. An exhaustive study shows that 12.3% of bid requests placed on RentACoder are identified as contract cheating. The primary study reported in the paper quantifies and discusses these contract cheaters. Out of 236 identified contract cheaters only 8.1% of these have made only a single bid request. Over half of the 236 cheaters have previously requested between two and seven pieces of work. The paper argues that this shows that this form of cheating is becoming habitual. The primary study identifies that as well as the usual types of individual students using the services of RentACoder non-originality agencies also appear to be working as subcontractors offering to complete student assignments. This adds an extra layer of complexity to methods of tracking cheating students. The paper concludes by advising that more automated detection techniques are needed and advises that assessments and academic policies need to be redesigned to remove the potential for contract cheating to be committed.

Eliminating The Successor To Plagiarism? Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites