Lancaster, T & Clarke, R (2007) The Phenomena of Contract Cheating, in Student Plagiarism in an Online World: Problems and Solutions, Roberts, T. S. (editor), Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA: Idea Group Inc.
This chapter discusses the issue of contract cheating. This is where students have work completed on their behalf which is then submitted for academic credit. A thorough background to this phenomena is presented. A list of the main contract cheating Web sites is also given. These contract cheating sites are placed into four classifications: auctions sites, discussion forums, essay mills and feed aggregators. Approaches are proposed for tutors to set assigned work that is less susceptible to contract cheating than standard assessments. The chapter concludes by arguing that urgent attention needs to be paid to contract cheating to avoid it becoming an educational problem of the same scale as plagiarism.