Sleepless nights and venomous snakes: Behind the scenes of a new contract cheating paper
15 June 2020
A few weeks back my first solo-authored paper was published, ‘Assignment outsourcing: moving beyond contract cheating‘. In it, I argue that it’s time to move on from the term ‘contract cheating’ and suggest ‘assignment outsourcing’ is a more suitable term as it covers a broader range of outsourcing behaviours.
I started work on the paper over a year ago, so it was great to see it in print!
It came after two years of work on a large international research project which saw me lose sleep, work at highly unsocial hours to get quick responses from people in different time zones, and come to understand the difficulties of an international collaboration. In that time I also changed PhD supervisors, changed institutions, changed my job and moved cities. Once we had the data I needed to collapse in a heap for a while, so there was some delay until I started analysing my data.
While it was exciting in itself to start digging around in the responses received, it also reminded me how un-statistically-minded I am. Numbers and data can leave me cowering in a corner, much as I would if a venomous snake crept out from under my sofa. So, the first thing I did was refresh my mind on basic statistics definitions and approaches from an online course I did whilst collecting data. I then commenced the arduous task of working out what I had in the data that might interest readers, and in fact it ended up with the opposite problem – how to narrow it down! After a couple of presentations, one with a project member (Veronika Kralikova) at the International Conference on Academic Integrity in Turkey (2018) and one a Turnitin webinar expanding the initial descriptive statistics, it was time to dig deeper into the data.
In my PhD time, I absorbed myself in nothing but stats and my data for four months until I really knew what was there. The writing of the paper was fairly straightforward after that; less ‘snake under the sofa’, more ‘needy puppy’ – always there needing attention, but bringing joy when it receives the time and love it deserves.
I was actually surprised by the speed of turnaround by the journal. I submitted it in February, it was accepted rapidly and then, after some minor edits, found its way out to the public. Despite the publication, and the hard work that went into it and the project itself, I still suffer from PhD student imposter syndrome from time to time; at least the feeling is lessening. I wonder if any PhD student ever loses that feeling?
I am proud of getting the publication out and of managing a difficult international project. It has certainly taught me a lot of lessons – which I guess it the point of a PhD!
To learn more, check out Rebecca’s paper, ‘Assignment outsourcing: moving beyond contract cheating‘.
