Research Into Contract Cheating And Student Plagiarism
I’ve begun to deliver a lot more workshops on contract cheating than I used to do. That is a very positive development as it’s essential to get students involved as partners working to create a culture of academic integrity.
These slides are from a workshop I delivered at the University of Northampton.
You can see the slides for the student presentation on my SlideShare account. They are also embedded below.
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:
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.