The second session I was involved with delivering at the European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2022 was a workshop held alongside four of the UK’s best known academic integrity practitioners. This was also a rather unique experience, since both delegates and presenters were split between the conference location and virtual delivery.
We held a largely discussion based session looking at an emerging issue in contract cheating policy development, the situation where a students want to come clean and admit that they have contract cheated.
You can see the slides I used below. They are also on my SlideShare account).
We hope to share more in a future publication, but as the workshop explored, this is a complex situation. A student may be forced to come clean due to threats of extortion or blackmail, or they may just wish to equip themselves for success in the future. Then there is a difficult balance to strike between supporting the student but making sure that they have not benefitted from breaching academic misconduct.
These are the tricky type of issues surrounding contract cheating that we are likely to here much more about in the months and years to come.