The Threat Of Contract Cheating – Examining The Paid For Assignment Solutions Unduly Populating The Computing Discipline

What can the Computing discipline do about contract cheating? After all, these are the academics with the technical skills to design solutions to prevent and detect contract cheating and plagiarism.

This research presentation, delivered at University of West London, looked particularly at issues relating to Computing, as well as the developments that would likely prove useful to academics within this field.

The slides, from this contract cheating talk are available on SlideShare account for Thomas Lancaster. They are also included here.

Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective

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