by Thomas Lancaster -

Contract Cheating An Academic Offence – London South Bank

Whilst not all universities seem to be seriously tackling contract cheating, it’s good to see that some are making their interest in his problematic area public.

Here’s an example of a notice posted by London South Bank University and indexed by Google which clearly shows the seriousness of contract cheating.

Contract Cheating An Academic Offence London South Bank

Dismissal from a course represents a serious risk if found to be cheating and goes far above the penalty that it sometimes applied of simply having to repeat an assignment (many would say that that almost makes the risk of contract cheating worth taking).

It is also good to see the push toward “self-satisfaction” which should be evident after degree level studies.

It is hoped that more institutions will follow the lead of London South Bank University and post similar messages to show that they are taking academic integrity seriously.

by Thomas Lancaster -

Contract Cheating Through Friends And Family

One of the areas in which there’s still much scope to carry out more research is to analyse the role that friends and family play in the contract cheating process.

There is certainly anecdotal evidence that friends and family are often happy to help out when an assessed piece of work is due. In some cases, this might even be expected.

Given access to someone who has completed a course before, or who is experienced in an area, a piece of coursework can often be completed quickly. And, that’s where the availability of friends and family come in.

Unlike many of the sources that we’ve looked at to analyse the extent of contract cheating, there’s very little of an evidence trail left for this. And, for various reasons, money does not usually change hands. But, this is still work that a student is handing in for academic credit and which they have not produced for themselves. They’ve missed out on the learning and practice opportunities that should be associated with this piece of work and the opportunity at university that they have invested in.

There are many difficulties with getting hold of such information in an accurate fashion, but identifying the role that friends and family play in the learning and contract cheating processes would be a useful piece of research for someone to carry out.

by Thomas Lancaster -

A History Of The Main Contract Cheating Tag Cloud

In the absence of any substantial graphical ability, the main header image used for ContractCheating.com is simply a tag cloud related to contract cheating.

A copy of it is included here in case the tag cloud has been updated:

Contract Cheating Main Tag Cloud Logo

The tag cloud represents the first paper that we published on contract cheating (Eliminating The Successor To Plagiairsm? Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites) and was generated using wordle.net. It provides a visual representation of the different terms used within the paper based around their proportion of usage.

The only styling involved was making sure that this was in black and white (to match the colour scheme of the site) and some resizing to fit within the space available.

You can see that the terms “contract” and “cheating” are prominent (really, this should be a phrase, but the word cloud does a good job of keeping these together). The other common phrase “bid requests” and the site we analysed, RentACoder.com, are also well represented, as is the main focus of the investigation “students”.

Wordle.net provides an interesting way to think about the content of a written source and to see what direction it focuses in on. It’s an easy way to add direction to a presentation, whether created by a student or an academic.

The focus of the contract cheating research today still very much reflects this simple word cloud.