A Decade Of Contract Cheating – Eliminating The Successor To Plagiarism – Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites

10 In 10 Contract Cheating Series – Part 4

In this presentation style post, I want to look back at very birth of contract cheating, taking as inspiration the first major talk that I delivered.

Like many of my earlier talks, the slides are not archived online (and the style in which I deliver talks and produce slides has rather changed since then, so that’s probably a good thing).

You can see the slides for the review style presentation on contract cheating on my SlideShare account. They are also embedded below.

The slides look at the issues surrounding the sites that then existed to sell and archive ready-produced essays. That was an issue then and such sites still exist today, but that type of cheating is much easier to spot now.

Where things have really changed is with the development of sites to produce original work for students. The original paper focus on Rentacoder demonstrated several findings that are still seminal to this field, including the use of contract cheating sites across a whole variety of subjects and types of assignments, as well as this behaviour being repeated and habitual. Although the main supply sites have changed, those findings still inform current research.

There is also some disappointment to be had by the fact that the research field still hasn’t really developed solutions to the contract cheating problem. Although awareness of these sites has developed across staff, awareness has also increased across students, so the access to cheating opportunities for students seems easier.

A decade on, there is certainly scope for more quantitative work on contract cheating, but it is towards the solutions where most attention should be devoted.

The various developments in the past 10 years of contract cheating are covered throughout the 10 in 10 contract cheating series.