Research Into Contract Cheating And Student Plagiarism
This presentation contains updated and enhanced versions of the very first major talk I delivered on contract cheating.
It explores how the industry has greatly developed over a 10 year period.
You can see the slides for the review style presentation on contract cheating on my SlideShare account. They are also embedded below.
Lancaster, T & Clarke, R (2007). Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective, 8th Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Information and Computer Sciences, University of Southampton, August 2007
The paper studies the use the RentACoder Web site to contract cheat by Computing students. RentACoder is an outsourcing service for computer work which operates under auction principles. Contract cheating is where students have assessed work completed for them on their behalf. The work is original, so not will be detected by the regular anti-plagiarism mechanisms that look for shared commonality. The paper describes the background to contract cheating and discusses a catalogue of 910 bid requests collected by the authors over two and a half years. The UK is seen to supply them with over 25% of contract cheating bid requests. This is largely composed of students outsourcing Java programming assignments; substantial projects are highlighted as a concern. Trends are seen to exist for other countries but are not the same as those identified for UK students.
Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective