A small success from our contract cheating work. We’ve found a way to improve on percentage of assignments found on agency sites which we’re able to attribute to academic institutions.
The secret? We’ve taken to running difficult to attribute assignment specifications through Turnitin, the plagiarism detection engine. It sounds counter-intuitive, but these often identity with fragments of work submitted by students.
All the details are in a paper from the HEA STEM Conference 2014, but the talk below, which I used at the conference, provides a few extra examples of interest
You can also check out this talk, and many slides from my other contract cheating sessions on my SlideShare account).
The conference format changed this year, which provided us with lots of time for discussion. The idea of contract cheating was new to some of the delegates and we went through a lot of examples, but we also talked about the future developments within student cheating and the issues associated with MOOCs and distance learning assessment.
Lots of stuff to keep academics on their toes.