by Thomas Lancaster -

Commercial Aspects Of Contract Cheating

Clarke, R. &amp Lancaster, T. (2013). Commercial Aspects Of Contract Cheating, 8th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2013), University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, July 2013.

The process of contract cheating, the form of academic dishonesty where students outsource the creation of work on their behalf, has been recognised as a serious threat to the quality of academic awards. Unlike student plagiarism, this cheating behaviour is not currently detectable using automated tools.

This paper analyses the monetary value of contract cheating to the different parties who play a role in the contract cheating process. The main analysis is based on a corpus consisting of 14,438 identified attempts to cheat. The corpus was collected between March 2005 and July 2012. The corpus was formed as part of a manual contract cheating detection process identifying students using online agencies. These online agencies are web sites which enable students to contract cheat. The agencies usually benefit from this by receiving a percentage cut of the money raised from the contract cheating that they facilitate. This corpus is used as the basis of an attempt to quantify the monetary value of contract cheating to online agencies.

Other parties exist who benefit from the contract cheating process. The paper gives examples of the monetary value of contract cheating to each of them. Most notably this includes the contractors who bid for the opportunity to produce work on behalf of the students. Further, the paper identifies the role of intermediary contractors. These are people who post assignment requests on agency sites but who are not themselves students. These intermediary contractors appear to benefit by first receiving requests to complete work for students and then re-outsourcing this work at a much lower cost than they were paid. The group of frequent workers, that is people who regularly work on student assignments and hence benefit financially, is also identified.

The paper concludes by presenting the changing trends in contract cheating that the authors have observed since they started working against this form of academic misconduct in 2005.

Commercial Aspects Of Contract Cheating

by Thomas Lancaster -

The Application Of Intelligent Context-Aware Systems To The Detection Of Student Cheating

Lancaster, T. (2013). The Application Of Intelligent Context-Aware Systems To The Detection Of Student Cheating, 3rd International Workshop on Intelligent Context-Aware Systems (ICAS 2013), Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan, July 2013.

Student cheating and plagiarism present a combined threat to the value of academic awards. The technological age has increased the ease with which students can cheat. Although some computerised solutions exist to detect plagiarism and cheating in its other forms, many of these are easily fooled. For other types of cheating, technical solutions are not yet widely available. This suggests that students are receiving awards that they do not deserve. This paper presents three different examples of student cheating, all of which provide academics with a problem. These issues include: (1) plagiarism of documents through automated essay spinning, (2) social media facilitated student cheating groups, and (3) contract cheating using agency and auction web sites. Each of these problems is shown to benefit from the provision of intelligent context-aware systems. The context behind each problem is explored and suggestions for technical implementations of intelligent context-aware systems for each are provided.

The Application Of Intelligent Context-Aware Systems To The Detection Of Student Cheating

by Thomas Lancaster -

Dealing With Contract Cheating: A Question Of Attribution

Lancaster, T & Clarke, R (2012). Dealing With Contract Cheating: A Question Of Attribution, 1st Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Imperial College, London, April 2012.

The issue of attribution, identifying the institutions which students who attempt to outsource work are from, poses a major difficulty for detectives monitoring online sites used for contract cheating. This form of academic misconduct occurs when students get other people to complete assessed work for them. Previous studies on contract cheating have focused on student use of Internet-based outsourcing services. The studies have demonstrated that those sites primarily provide students with work for subjects falling within the computing spectrum.

This paper focuses on a study of 627 sample postings made on EssayBay, a commercial site aimed at providing assignment writing solutions for students. The study identifies that students across a range of academic subjects and levels of study, far beyond the computing field, are using EssayBay for purposes of contract cheating. Only 23.7% of the postings investigated are found to be attributable, that is, they can be traced back to the academic institution to which the assignment specification belongs. This suggests that there are issues across the sector with the way that assignments are set and made available for detectives.

Based on the study, two factors for measuring the attributability of a posting on a contract cheating are proposed, namely searchability and individuality. Searchability measures how easily a posting can be found using a search engine. Individuality measures how unique an assignment specification is. Generally, both searchability and individuality are necessary to allow assignment specifications to be attributed. The paper concludes by making recommendations detailing how academic departments can combat contract cheating by improving the attributability of the assignment specifications that they release.

Dealing With Contract Cheating: A Question Of Attribution