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.

by Thomas Lancaster -

Contract Cheating Goes Beyond Essays And Programs

Initially, when we first started looking at contract cheating, the type of requests made by students to get work completed for them invariably fell within two categories.

Either, they were the standard type of essay, created using an essay mill or auction site.

Or, they were some kind of Computing related assignment, usually programming. Presumably, this was because the main types of auction sites used were particularly geared towards this cheating activity.

But, the world of contract cheating has moved on.

Today’s students are much more sophisticated and they know other ways to use these tools to their advantage.

For instance, it’s very easy to go out and to get someone to prepare a presentation for you. That includes all the slides that you need to give the presentation, ready to go. A script can also be provided.

That’s a ready made service offered now by different essay companies.

There are also larger assignments submitted in stages. The kind of thing where a student has to supply an outline, then a draft, then a final version.

These are easy to fool. Just hire someone to work with you all the way throughout that assignment process. Get them to write the outline, the draft and the final version and then pass the feedback after each stage back to the hired writer.

That kind of thing is particularly crucial where a Final Year Project or Dissertation is involved, which can be considered just like a very large assignment, submitted in stages.

The academic world needs to be smarter with the type of assignments that are set to students and the ways in which these are made contract cheating proof.