Grant success for CRADLE Fellow to fund world-first study

26 November 2018

Hot on the heels of a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for her work in developing contract cheating awareness and detection strategies, CRADLE Fellow A/Prof. Wendy Sutherland-Smith – together with Dr Penelope Pitt of the Deakin University Student Association (DUSA) – has been awarded a joint Coventry University (UK) and Deakin University grant to further her research into contract cheating.

Bringing together various areas of research expertise, the study will investigate the student experience of contract cheating allegations in partnership with student unions at both Coventry and Deakin. By exploring the decision-making processes behind contract cheating with students who have been through the formal allegation process, the study aims to discover what factors contribute to students’ actions, as well as any interventions that might have prevented them from taking this path. The study will examine what student bodies can do to assist each institution to better educate students about contract cheating and its consequences and, more broadly, how institutions can enhance support so that students ultimately avoid contract cheating.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind in the world,” says Wendy. “There haven’t been any previous studies where university staff have partnered with student unions to examine students’ experiences of the contract cheating allegation process. Such knowledge is critical to institutional understandings of how to leverage existing resources to better support students’ ethical learning and integrity choices.”

This project builds on Wendy’s CRADLE research in the area of contract cheating, beginning in 2016 with a project exploring student advocates’ perceptions of contract cheating (conducted with CRADLE’s A/Prof. Phillip Dawson and Dr Helen Walker). Since that time, Wendy and Phill have undertaken two further empirical research projects around markers’ abilities to detect contract cheating (both published in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education – see below for more information), and continue their contract cheating research into technological responses to identifying contract-cheated work.

Dawson, P. and Sutherland-Smith, W. (2018). Can markers detect contract cheating? Results from a pilot study. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(2), 286-293.
Dawson, P. and Sutherland-Smith, W. (2018). Can training improve marker accuracy at detecting contract cheating? A multi-disciplinary pre-post study. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.