by Thomas Lancaster -

Here’s What Happens When The Wider Community Hears About Contract Cheating

This is a post I made on my personal blog about a particular case of contract cheating using Freelancer.com.

The Contract Cheating Saga Of Crazylarry23

It’s interesting to me as it illustrates that people outside the core academic discipline involved with contract cheating are not aware how common this type of academic misconduct is.

The article discusses the case of Crazylarry23, his attempts to outsource work using Freelancer.com and the detective work carried out by the community to ensure that he did not succeed.

More detective work of that type around the contract cheating community would always be welcome.

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 -

We Can Write It For You Wholesale – Times Higher

The Times Higher Education and David Matthews have undertaken
a detailed look into the world of contract cheating and custom essay writing, in which Thomas Lancaster features prominently.

We Can Write It For You Wholesale

The article attempts to quantify the scale of the contract cheating and custom essay writing problem. This is difficult because it is largely underground, although estimates are obtained from official company figures and FOI requests from universities.

An interesting comments relates to students submitting their work in a format other than the one that an academic intended. This may be an indication that this uses a standard format pulled instead from an essay writing company.

Worth a read.