What are we doing about contract cheating? CRADLE Seminar Series
23 March 2018
CRADLE’s 2018 seminar series kicked off with a fascinating seminar exploring the murky world of contract cheating in higher education, presented by CRADLE Fellow A/Prof. Wendy Sutherland-Smith. Wendy reported on the current state of contract cheating research, and discussed her own research with CRADLE’s A/Prof. Phillip Dawson into training markers to detect contract-cheated assignments. Here, Chad Gladovic (PhD researcher into work-integrated assessment) and CRADLE Fellow Dr Bhavani Sridharan (Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law) reflect on their key takeaways from the seminar.
Chad reflected on Wendy’s research into the detection of contract cheating, along with the motivations and consequences for students who engage in contract cheating:
Websites offering this type of services to students are professionally designed and on first glance may appear to offer legitimate academic support. Some are even equipped with additional features such as membership, discounts for multiple purchases and 24-hour customer support. Providers of such services claim that produced work cannot be identified by either text-matching software or markers of students work. Research conducted by Wendy and her colleagues indicated that trained markers could quite successfully identify contract-cheated works. It is, indeed, very encouraging news for the sector but the battle is not over yet. As a $300 million industry, it is most unlikely that contract cheating will vanish in the near future. Therefore, the education sector needs to invest in strategies to detect and remove contract cheating from our classrooms.
It appears that students cheat for a number of reasons. Fear and insecurity about specific skillsets, poor time management and desperation are just some of the reasons. Unless it is made explicit to students, they may not see their actions as unethical but rather as an acceptable business strategy of ‘outsourcing’. Students may also be unaware that the short-term advantages of purchasing non-original works may have damaging long-term consequences: a note on their academic transcript or expulsion from their course are just some of the consequences, but the most severe one is the lost opportunity to learn.
Bhavani was struck by the scale and pervasiveness of the contract cheating industry, and reflected on Wendy’s suggested measures to help prevent contract cheating:
The most disturbing aspects I found were the market size, the ubiquity and the gravity of the problem. I was alarmed to note that it is a $300 million industry that is pervasive across higher education. Even more disconcerting findings are: the ineffectiveness of modern technology solutions (such as Turnitin and others) in automatically detecting such proscribed practices; the apathetic attitudes of teaching staff and non-offenders towards such practices; the deceptive and authentic look and feel of these contract cheating websites; and student ignorance in thinking such ‘help’ does not breach academic integrity.
Another challenge that I foresee is the markers’ quandary as to whether or not to be the ‘whistle-blower’. While markers require the knowledge to detect contract cheating, the bigger problem I see is markers’ willingness to proactively report such practices. This issue, in my opinion, is equally challenging in reducing the incidences of contract cheating. For instance, casual markers may find it difficult to dob in students, especially where continuation of the casual contract depends on good ratings from students, or they may fear not being taken seriously by the unit coordinator. On the other hand, I can appreciate the anxieties of wrongly convicting the innocent student, which is more harmful than not punishing the guilty, as we don’t yet have a poka-yoke (fail-proof) system to identify offenders beyond reasonable doubt.
On a positive note, Wendy provided diverse strategies to attack the problem from multiple directions: awareness campaigns at a student level; training at a marker level; proactive design at an assessment level; recognising the seriousness of the issue at a teacher level; robust policies at a university level; and legislation at a sector level.
Only time will tell if we are able to win this battle through innovative and creative ideas and supporting technology.
You can view slides from Wendy’s presentation here.
