Academic Integrity for Faculty

In Assiniboine's Policy A25, contract cheating is defined as:

• “a deliberate act of academic misconduct in which students outsource their work to third parties (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016). These third parties can be commercial contract cheating sources such as paper mills and websites, or non-commercial sources such as classmates, friends, or family members of students” (Assiniboine Community College, 2023).

Examples of contract cheating include, but are not limited to:

• accessing or purchasing an assignment from a commercial source and submitting it as one’s own for marks
• having another person complete an assignment and submitting it as one’s own for marks
• outsourcing test or exam questions

Contract cheating, essay mills, and auction platforms are collectively called the Industry (Hersey, 2019) in academic integrity research. All of these formats are sources from which students are able to outsource their work to third parties (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016).  Newton (2018) specifies the act of payment as the factor which makes contract cheating “deliberate, pre-planned and intentional” (p.2).

Outsourcing work, however, does not always involve formal contracts or the exchange of money (Bretag et al., 2019). At Assiniboine, cheating has involved students asking or allowing the following people to write their assignments:

• classmates
• parents
• siblings
• former students
• tutors
• students in similar programs at other educational institutions

This has been done in exchange for favours or stopping bullying. 

Contract Cheating at Assiniboine

Canada is currently tied for second place among “countries where students engage in contract cheating” (Toye et al., 2019). Assiniboine is no exception.

An initiative to first track then block access to websites offering contract cheating and plagiarism websites showed that Assiniboine students:

• accessed and uploaded assignments and tests to websites such as coursehero, oneclass, and studocu
• accessed sites marketed as “paraphrasing tools” which allow them to either plagiarize small sections of text or entire assignments.
  • Here, things escalate to cheating when students knowingly use one of these sites to rewrite one student's assignment which is then submitted as the "original"assignment of another student.

A cross-institutional study on this site blocking initiative between Assiniboine, Red River College, and University of Manitoba was published in 2020 (Seeland et al., 2020). 

Students using these sites risk:

• not learning the skills and gaining the knowledge their programs require
• violating copyright law by uploading Assiniboine materials
• being blackmailed by the contract cheating service provider that they pay to complete their assignments for them (see Yorke et al., 2020)

Contract cheating sites are businesses whose concern is profit, despite marketing themselves to students as “study guides” and “homework help”. They're not concerned about students:

• learning with integrity
• having representative credentials
• adhering to school policies.

Assiniboine Supports

The Learning Commons works to bring awareness about contract cheating to the Assiniboine learning community throughout Manitoba in various ways, including:

• in-class or online workshops for students
• professional development opportunities for staff and faculty

Contact the Assiniboine Library for more information.

The differences between contract cheating and plagiarism may seem confusing and are the source of debate within the academic integrity community.

In some ways, contract cheating could also be viewed as plagiarism in Policy A25:

• "Using another's words, ideas, theories or images without crediting the source" (Assiniboine Community College, 2023). 

This would, after all, apply to situations where students are handing in something completed by another person.

Examples

Plagiarism

• Students have been accused of plagiarism because they have either missed a citation or a reference.
• A student who does correctly cite and reference the majority of their sources, but forgets one, could be accused of plagiarism.

In both of these cases, the student has interacted with their sources and worked on their assessment.

Contract Cheating

• A student simply has another person complete the assessment for them.

In this case, there is no learning at all, hence contract cheating being a more serious form of academic misconduct.

Intent

We can see the differences in intent by looking at the two situations below:

• A student actively seeks to have their assessment completed by someone else.

versus

• A student has plagiarised - either accidentally or intentionally - in an assessment they've completed themselves.

In the first situation, the student intentionally had someone else complete their work. However, in the second situation, the student plagiarsed, but completed their own work.

As Newton (2018) describes, contract cheating is “deliberate, pre-planned and intentional”, regardless of whether a formal contract or payment is involved.

A Google search for something like “write my essay” will return thousands of results from contract cheating providers. Below is a few examples.

Example 1

Figure 1. Website screenshot. (Eaton et al., 2019).

Example 2

Figure 2. Website screenshot. (Eaton et al., 2019).

Example 3

Figure 3. Contract cheating advertisement. (Kaktins, 2018).

Example 4

Figure 4. Contract cheating advertisement. (Kaktins, 2018).

Example 5

Figure 5. Twitter exchange. (Hendricks, 2019).

Example 6

Figure 6. Website screenshot. (Eaton et al., 2019).

Example 7

Figure 7. Contract cheating advertisement. (Kaktins, 2018).

Many of the same assessment design techniques which can help reduce plagiarism also work to reduce contract cheating. The Learning Commons has compiled and delivered extensive research on ways to reduce academic misconduct, including contract cheating, through assessment design, including:

• discuss academic integrity with your students
  • Parallels Between the Contract Cheating Industry and Organized Crime - this resource can be used to discuss this type of academic misconduct with your students.
• use academic integrity checklist
• integrate course learning materials
• avoid using test questions and exercises from commercial textbooks
• require writing outlines
• implement assignment scaffolding with multiple drafts
  • provide ongoing feedback and build on prior knowledge
• use shorter, in-class assignments to help identify skills/abilities
• assign and assess higher order thinking skills
  • The internet is killing homework and lowering students' grades, study suggests - This article discusses the effects of finding quick answers to right/wrong questions online.
• use individualized topics
• provide examples of expected standards in academic integrity and citing
• require that students provide research notes if requested
• limit student access to marked assessments to help prevent them being uploaded
• require use of references to in-class activities
• assign live presentations or demonstrations in person or on digital platforms such as Zoom
  • Akimov & Malin (2020) list some of the advantages of oral examinations as being an increased desire to learn, reduced academic misconduct, and being faster to mark than written exams, with another consideration being that they are best suited for smaller classes of more experienced students.

Just as with plagiarism, knowing your students and their language abilities/style is the best way to identify contract cheating. If something suddenly sounds like it was written by a different person with a different vocabulary, it may have been. Unlike simple plagiarism, however, assignments completed through contract cheating will often have correct citations and references, so will elude many of the ways to identify plagiarism.

Prevention methods mentioned in the previous section, such as seeing outlines and scaffolded drafts before final submission, will reduce the chances of you reaching the identification stage. Simple mistakes in citing or even small plagiarized passages can be corrected before submission, allowing students to build their academic writing skills with integrity.

Eaton (2018, 2021) also offers the following methods to identify contract cheating:

• citations which draw from abstracts rather than full articles
• citations which draw from online book previews/excerpts
• citations which do not match references
• research topics which have been suspiciously broadened
• references to material written in languages unknown to student
• references to sources which are out of print
• contents of assignment do not match instructions
• writing is vague and imprecise
• writing and analysis do not match student’s skill level
• metadata does not match

The Academic Misconduct Procedures Manual which accompanies Policy A25 will point staff towards procedures and resources to help gather information for the identification of potential academic misconduct. Contact the Manager of Library Services for more information.

Videos

Additional Identification Methods

References

Akimov, A., & Malin, M. (2020). When old becomes new: a case study of oral examination as an online assessment tool, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(8), p. 1205-1221.

Assiniboine Community College. (2023). Policy A25. https://assiniboine.net/sites/default/files/documents/2019-08/a25.pdf

Australian Government: TEQSA (2017). Good practice note: addressing contract cheating to safeguard academic integrity. https://www.teqsa.gov.au/latest-news/publications/good-practice-note-addressing-contract-cheating-safeguard-academic

Awdry R., & Newton, P. M. (2019). Staff views on commercial contract cheating in higher education: A survey study in Australia and the UK. Higher Education, 78(4), 593-610. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00360-0 

Baporikar, N. (2019). Preventing academic misconduct. In D.M. Velliaris (Ed.). Prevention and Detection of Academic Misconduct in Higher Education. IGI Global.

Bretag, T., Harper, R., Burton, M., Ellis, C., Newton, P., van Haeringen, K., Saddiqui, S., & Rozenberg, P. (2019). Contract cheating and assessment design: exploring the relationship. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(5), 676-691.

Clarke, R., & Lancaster, T. (2007). Establishing a systematic six-stage process for detecting contract cheating, in 2nd International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Applications, 2007, (New York, NY: ICPCA 2007), 342–347.

Eaton, S.E. (2021). Plagiarism in higher education: tackling tough topics in academic integrity. Libraries Unlimited.

Eaton, S.E. (2018). 15 strategies to detect contract cheating. http://connections.ucalgaryblogs.ca/2018/10/01/15-strategies-to-detect-contract-cheating/

Eaton, S. E., Chibry, N., Toye, M. A., & Rossi, S. (2019). Interinstitutional perspectives on contract cheating: a qualitative narrative exploration from Canada. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 15(9). 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-019-0046-0

Ellis, C., Zucker, I., & Randall, D. (2018). The infernal business of contract cheating: Understanding the business processes and models of academic custom writing sites. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 14(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-017-0024-3

Hersey, C. (2019). The struggle is real! #Ineedapaperfast. Presented at the Canadian Symposium on Academic Integrity, Calgary, AB.

Hendricks, M. (2019). Picture of Twitter exchange. https://threader.app/thread/1113430487924711425

Kaktins, L. (2018). Contract cheating advertisements: What they tell us about international students’ attitudes to academic integrity. Ethics & Education, 13(2), 268-284.

Lancaster, T., & Clarke, R. (2016). Contract cheating: the outsourcing of assessed student work. In: Bretag, T. (ed.) Handbook of academic integrity. Springer.

Morris, E. J. (2018). Academic integrity matters: five considerations for addressing contract cheating. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 14(15), https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0038-5

Newton, P. (2018). How common is commercial contract cheating in higher education and is it increasing? A systematic review. Frontiers in Education, 3(67), https:/doi.org//10.3389/feduc.2018.00067 

Newton, P. M., & Lang, C. (2016). Custom essay writers, freelancers, and other paid third parties. In: Bretag, T. (ed.) Handbook of Academic Integrity. Springer.

Rogerson, A.M. (2017). Detecting contract cheating in essay and report submissions: process, patterns, clues and conversations. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 13(10). https:/doi.org//10.1007/s40979-017-0021-6

Seeland, J., Stoesz, B., and Vogt, L. (2020). Preventing online shopping for completed assessments: Protecting students by blocking access to contract cheating websites on institutional networks. Canadian Perspectives in Academic Integrity. (Submitted).

Toye, M., Rossi, S., Chibry, N., & Eaton, S.E. (2019). Contract cheating: a view from three Calgary post-secondary institutions. Presented at the Canadian Symposium on Academic Integrity, Calgary, AB.

Whitley, B.E., & Keith-Spiegel, P. (2012). Academic dishonesty: an educator's guide. Psychology Press.

Yorke, J., Sefcik, L., & Veeran-Colton, T. (2020). Contract cheating and blackmail: A risky business? Studies in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1730313