by Thomas Lancaster -

External Blog Posts On Contract Cheating

As part of my wider professional presence and continued publicity into contract cheating, I’ve written several blog posts which have been posted on other sites.

To make it easy for people visiting ContractCheating.com to find these, I thought it would be useful to include a single post with the main links.

First of all, here are some discussions about contract cheating from my personal blog:

My First Experience Of Contract Cheating

 

This was a post where I discussed a personal issue which got me particularly involved with the contract cheating field.

The Best Way To Take Notes At Conferences And Workshops

There are some discussions from the Contract Cheating Special Interest Group included here (more are available using the main Contract Cheating SIG archive).

Who Are You Paying For Assignments?

 

Here’s a short discussion post with a forum contribution which caught my eye, showing a way that a student was caught contract cheating.

Rescuing Academic Research

 

In this post, I discuss some research that I’ve completed but which hasn’t been published. There are some holes in the contract cheating area, and Robert Clarke, in particular, has compiled a lot of research as part of his role as a contract cheating detective.

How To Create A High Value Web Site In A Day

 

This is a bit of background about how ContractCheating.com came to be here.

There’s also a section related to contract cheating on my main professional presence:

Contract Cheating Research On ThomasLancaster.co.uk

 

This is slightly superseded by this site, although the information is still valid. That single link alone contains a lot of visitors from Google, so I hope that they end up redirected to this site.

Here is a guest post about contract cheating which I made on the Higher Education Academy STEM blog:

Why Aren’t We Winning The Contract Cheating Battle?

 

I spent a week as a guest blogger for the HEA, showcasing many of the useful resources that they’ve developed. I do hope that the STEM blog continues to be developed and used, as there is plenty of useful material on there. At this one, I provided a more general introduction on to some of the research that we’ve conducted into EssayBay, complete with examples (and also used the opportunity to promote the HEA Contract Cheating SIG).

The Future Of Contract Cheating Blog Posts

Whilst I intend to make most of my posts on contract cheating on this site, it is important to not just restrict them to this site (this creates a wider interest for Google and continues to grow my professional presence in this area).

It’s also worth noting that these are blog posts, so they form part of a modern wide research profile, but these aren’t explicitly peer reviewed academic research. The main literature sources should still be considered the main definitive sources in this area.

It is interesting how the world of academic research is changing and I feel that blogs and social media will have a growing role in this area.

One thing that constructing this site has done is that it has demonstrated several “holes” in the wider contract cheating research fields that do need to be filled with published academic papers. For now, the likes of blog posts and presentation slides can fill some of these gaps, but they aren’t a complete solution.

As always, there is lots of potential for undergraduate project students, MSc students, PhD students and other researchers and practioners to become involved in the investigations into the contract cheating area.

by Thomas Lancaster -

When Essays For Sale Become Contract Cheating – BBC News

Here is one of the more interesting contract cheating media studies of 2012, provided by BBC News and looking at essays for sale and contract cheating (a video version of the same news story is also available).

When Essays For Sale Become Contract Cheating BBC News

The story discusses the wide range in which students become knowledgeable about contract cheating opportunities, including advertisements placed in the window of shops.

Most usefully are the type of assignments received back from such services. This is something that is very difficult for academics to test due to the ethical implications.

This revealed a £70 and £125 assignment, both of which were of a low standard, but good enough to pass. A third assignment, also costing £70, was judged to be of a 2:1 standard.

This does demonstrate a variety in the quality of assignments received across different subject areas, showing that there are some elements of “pot luck” involved with picking essay writing companies, but if students are just aiming to pass an assignment, spending this money could be worthwhile.

And, our other contract cheating research involving auction sites have shown that there are ways to spend far less than this.

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.