Contract Cheating – A Decade (Plus One) Of Contract Cheating

10 In 10 Contract Cheating Series – Year 11 Review

In 2016, I quietly published a series of blog posts looking back at 10 years of contract cheating. June 2016 marked the 10th anniversary of my research referring to contract cheating. This was first being published in June 2006 (although the data referred to in that study predates this, as it was collected from 2004 onwards).

The A Decade of Contract Cheating series looked back at previous developments, considered future work in the contract cheating and debuted some new elements of research prior to formal publication.

I didn’t heavily promote A Decade of Contract Cheating when the posts were originally published, although I’ve had some good feedback relating to the series. That means that many of the posts have become buried inside the blog.

June 2017 marks 11 years of contract cheating. This brings with it the perfect time to review the A Decade of Contract Cheating series and to look at how the field is continuing to progress. I’ve summarised the posts, with links to the original discussions, in the table below.

Post Number	Post Title	Post Details
Part 01	Examining The Changes That Have Been Made To The Marketplace For Bespoke Essays Slides	This was the first talk I delivered that really drilled down into the marketing of essay mills and contract cheating services. This marketing is one of the main reasons that the essay industry has been able to become so big. I’ve since developed these ideas much further through other presentations.
Part 02	Examining The Changes That Have Been Made To The Marketplace For Bespoke Essays Video	As part of the 10 in 10 series, I recorded a separate (34 minute) version of what I billed as my anniversary presentation. Conference presentations are always tight on time, so this video version allowed me to go into more detail about the examples. Marketing is such a fast moving field that there are new developments to add to how the essay industry works even from one year ago.
Part 03	The Demand For Essay Writing Jobs	A little-spoken about challenge within contract cheating has been the set of academic writers who provide essays and assignments for students. This post identifies five types of ghostwriters along with examples and details of the market that buys and sells essay writing service accounts as these are in great demand. The post doesn’t discuss the fake academic writers who are also out there, collecting money from unsuspecting students.
Part 04	Eliminating The Successor To Plagiarism – Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites 10 Years On Slides	I developed this talk as an Internet exclusive, taking the set of slides from my first conference presentation on contract cheating and annotating them with how the field had developed in the past 10 years. The slides empathise the change in marketing techniques and how the success of similarity detection software has moved the essay industry away from selling the same essay multiple times. They also show the still valid finding, that students don’t just buy a single assignment, but students continue to habitually buy assignments throughout their course.
Part 05	Eliminating The Successor To Plagiarism – Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites 10 Years On Video	The video version of the 10 Years On talk (another Internet exclusive) runs to 27 minutes, allowing me to drill down much more into the differences between the essay writing industry in 2006 and 2016. This is a useful introduction video to anyone looking to see how the contract cheating field has developed.
Part 06	The Growth Of Essay Outsourcing To Fiverr.com	As part of my publications, I’ve broken the news of different sites being used to facilitate contract cheating on many occasions. Fiverr.com is part of the gig economy for cheating, offering very low cost outsourcing opportunities for students thinking outside the box of the major essay mills. Students are using this an agency style website and cutting out the other links in the cheating chain to connect together directly with writers. The site provides over 800 advertised gigs for essay writing services. In a separate investigation of mine where I priced up one of my own assignments, a literature review, most writers asked for $20 USD to complete this 2000 word literature review (just 1c per word).
Part 07	What Shape Is The Bespoke Essay Industry In Today?	How big is the essay industry is one of those difficult questions to answer. I tend to play safe when asked that question, pointing instead to the massive growth of essay site marketing and visibility as being suggestive on many more sites. There have also been suggestions that, although the number of orders has grown, the amount paid per assignment has dropped, so the financial growth of the industry has also slowed. Equating known facts about the industry and search traffic, I estimate an essay industry worth £50 million per year. This is below the figures suggested by the essay mills themselves. However, when smaller players such as individual writers and private tutors are included, as well as the market for work in languages other than English, the real figure could be much higher.
Part 08	The Impact Of Twitter On The Essay Industry	I was an early adopter of social media use within teaching in the UK. In the world of 2017, it would be difficult to imagine a world where students weren’t digitally led and engaged through social media. The contract cheating industry also knows this, with advertising sent to students that can be both context aware and geotargeted. This post focuses on Twitter, but as my essay marketing work has shown, similar functionality is available through Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat and other sites. As well as examples of adverts and classifications of users, the post also identifies the essay companies who are tweeting details of all the assignments they complete – seemingly a great way of advertising the work that can be requested, but also a possible method that academics can use to check if a request for their assignment to be outsourced has been made.
Part 09	Ten Years Of Contract Cheating Keynote Presentation Slides and Video	This keynote presentation traces the movement from contract cheating being kept under wraps to becoming a highly developed and sophisticated industry. This talk firmly sets the stage for the need for open discussions about contract cheating and looks at the challenges posed by new technologies. As well as the slides, a video version of the keynote is also available with my contribution lasting around one hour (for convenience, I’ve embedded this at the end of this blog post).
Part 10	10 Contract Cheating Research Observations From The Past Decade That Have Shaped What We Know About Student Cheating Behaviour	What have we discovered about contract cheating that we didn’t know before (forgive me, this is one of those list type of blog posts). I’ve picked up 10 observations from across the contract cheating literature and collected knowledge base that I think are of importance and I’ve discussed each of these. The final observation holds particularly true and I heard very similar sentiments expressed in a different study just recently. That is, all assignments are cheatable when students are inclined to cheat. To me, student engagement is key, as is their ownership of their learning journey.

Looking back at the posts, I actually cheated a little as there are only really eight subjects (in two cases, I posted slides and a video as separate entitles), but there’s still a lot of information that I hope is of use there.

As several people have expressed to me recently, I’m bad at traditional academic publishing, so there are several components that could easily form the basis for a good academic paper (if only I had an unlimited conference budget). There’s also a huge amount of material I leave buried in the slides from talks, or worse still, in the verbal and video discussions.

There is a useful book bringing the developments in the contract cheating research field together that just needs to emerge.

If you have time to look at just one thing, I think that the keynote I gave on contract cheating at Curtin University balances well the need to review the past and look ahead to the potential future developments in the field.

I’ve also since worked out how to embed the video from the keynote presentation, which you can view below.

This only seems to be a screen capture with audio, but I know that cameras were filming, so that footage might be around somewhere.

The other presentations from the symposium are worth a look as well and there’s the complete recording of an internal contract cheating workshop that I delivered. There’s also audio from the closing discussion where I was part of the contract cheating panel.