I was invited to present some of the latest findings on contract cheating and what can be done about it to the Pedagogic Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton as part of their lunchtime seminar series. The session went well, presented to a packed and eager audience, and ran well over the scheduled one-hour slot with all of the discussion.
As well as overviewing some of the key research in the field and the subject areas being research on, I shared some of my early findings on some of my new areas of interest, including looking at the marketing profiles behind contract cheating services and the type of people who are ghostwriting and providing undue support to students. I also shared a whole host of new and recent examples within the talk.
The slides for the University of Wolverhampton talk are available for access online. These can be viewed on my SlideShare account, or you can also see the slides below.
Due to the nature of this talk, I don’t have a video version available, but I anticipate that the ideas will make it into some of my forthcoming publications and blog posts. As always, I’m also always happy to share ideas at research seminars, teaching seminars and training events around the UK (or further afield if travel funding is available).
Some of the interesting aspects on the discussion focused on the legality of essay sites (most of them are very careful to stay on the correct side of what is allowable) and the issue of translation plagiarism – not strictly contract cheating, but an area that I have explored in the past and need to do more work on.
I was also alerted about the potential for grammarly, an online grammar checker that is available for students to use to try and improve their work, being used as part of a potential marketing funnel towards students using contract cheating sources. That’s certainly a development that I need to investigate further.