by Thomas Lancaster -

Dirt Cheap Contract Cheating On Fiverr.com

This video blog posts looks at a method that students are using to get essays written on their behalf, often for as little as 1c per word. This technique for contract cheating uses the micro outsourcing site, Fiverr.com which has seen little coverage in the research literature.

As well as services for writing outlines, proof reading, creating programming code, solving Maths problems and the like at $5 a time, the video also shows an essay writer with 251 positive reviews from previous work. That’s at least 251 essays, assuming that not everyone leaves feedback.

500 Word Essay For $5 On Fiverr.com

Job Details For 500 Word Essay For $5 On Fiverr.com

There’s some very good feedback about the service and it’s interesting to see how the seller can sometimes produce multiple essays in a single day. That suggests that the quality may be lacking (and there is a suggestion in some of the feedback that there may be some plagiarism), but there are also some very high marks showing, including students with 95%.

One piece of recent feedback stood out to me, with a student noting $100 of repeat business (around 10,000 words in total across multiple essays).

Repeat Business With Contract Cheating Using Fiverr.com

This suggests that students are continuing to cheat regularly and to get away with it, especially when using dirt cheap contract cheating opportunities as is facilitated using sites such as Fiverr.com.

And that’s just one person using one seller on a single site.

There is certainly room for continued investigation of Fiverr.com and other low cost micro outsourcing sites for other instances of contract cheating.

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 -

Cyber-Pseudepigraphy Or Contract Cheating

Here’s an interesting aside from the wider literature relating to student cheating which had totally passed me by until I saw the phrase used in a media report.

The term pseudepigraphy is used within some literacy and linguistic fields to describe a piece of writing where the author is not the person listed. For instance, a lot of ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies could fall within the field of pseudepigraphy.

The term cyber-pseudepigraphy was proposed to largely mean pseudepigraphy which was facilitated using the Internet. Some aspects of contract cheating could overlap with that definition. However, I haven’t seen the term fall into widespread use, or make it much beyond a 2004 paper.

Likewise, the paper mentions the term cyber-plagiarism, but that has also largely fallen out of favour. Most people just use the term plagiarism, which is dominated by what would have been called plagiarism in the past.

The paper itself is useful as it raises some early issues related to contract cheating, from around the same time as the initial body of contract cheating research was being published. In fact, a number of less-specific terms exist also, as the idea of someone writing an assignment for another student dates back for decades, but it would be useful exercise for someone to carry out a literature review looking at this development, and how the terminology has changed across different fields.