Recent media reports indicate that more students than ever before are contracting out their assignments. This pseudepigraphical practice is known as ‘contract cheating’ (Walker & Townley, 2012). Whilst the industry surrounding this practice as well as detection and deterrent techniques, are well documented in literature, there is little documented on the perceptions educators have of this growing problem. This study aimed to discover whether educators within a Higher Education Institution have an awareness of ‘contract cheating’, and whether they effectively detect and/or deter this pseudepigraphical practice. Presented at the Canadian Symposium on Academic Integrity 2019 in Calgary, AB

1. A QUESTION OF TRUST?
EDUCATOR’S VIEWS OF ‘CONTRACT
CHEATING’
James Blackburn
@ajamesblackburn

2. Who’s this guy?
• Former Lecturer and Learning Designer (HE & FE)
• Head of UX at PebblePad
• Became interested in contract cheating after hearing a radio
documentary
• I thought “What would my colleagues think of this? Would we
even know?”
• Completed MA (Ed.) dissertation on educator’s perceptions of
contract cheating at The University of Derby

5. Why look at Educators?
• Lot’s of research emerging on:
• Definition
• Extent of contract cheating problem
• Quality of essays
• Methods of detection
• Why students were cheating
• Little research on what educators think until Harper et al. study
(2018)

6. Aims & Objectives
Find out whether educators within a Higher Education Institution
have an awareness of ‘contract cheating’, and whether they
effectively detect and/or deter this pseudepigraphical practice.
• To explore staff perceptions of the contract cheating problem
within the institution.
• To examine the techniques used by teaching staff to detect and
deter contract cheating.

7. “when a student submits work that has been completed for them by a
third party, irrespective of the third party’s relationship with the
student, and whether they are paid or unpaid.”
(Harper et al., 2018, p. 1).

8. Methodology/Approach
• Study conducted in a mid-size, post -1992, UK University
• 6 educators from Faculty of Education participated
• Semi- structured in-depth interviews
• Struggled to recruit participants for the study
A very small scale study!

9. An example of a purchased essay
• Could not assume that educator’s had seen a purchased essay
before
• Wanted participants to have an additional stimuli in the
interview (Dowling and Brown, 2010, Törrönen, 2002).

10. An example of a purchased essay
• Type of document: Essay
• Subject area: Education
• Topic: Digital Education
• Turnaround time: 10 days (standard)
• Number of pages required: 4
• Standard: 2:1
• Referencing Style: Harvard
• Description: Essay outlining the digital capabilities of students in
higher education
• The essay cost £69.71 GBP/ $122.45 CAD inclusive of Tax.

11. Areas discussed in interviews
• Defining ”contract cheating”
• The essay industry
• Detection
• Institutional culture
• The student and educator relationship
• Deterrence and prevention
• Causal factors
• Experiences and suspicions of contract cheating
• The cheated essay

12. Findings
• Participants were able to define contract cheating relative to
widely accepted definitions but always referred to payment.
• Educators’ knowledge of the essay industry is varied, each
participant had different experiences relating to student
cheating and the essay industry.
• All participants indicated that they believed the practice of both
selling and procuring an assignment was wrong

13. Participant Estimated cost of essay
Lecturer A £20–£40
Lecturer B ~£200
Lecturer C -
Lecturer D £50
Lecturer E £50–£60
Lecturer F £600
Findings
Estimated cost of a purchased paper

14. I've been very alarmed by the fact that around the corner from me there's an
office which has got big advertising boards outside which says ‘come to us if
you want your assignments writing’! And I actually think, I don't know what
the law says on that, but that sounds extremely dodgy legally, to be honest ...
... It's like somebody dealing in drugs or what have you and knowing they
can get away with it ...
Lecturer F

15. Findings
• Detection methods employed by educators are manual,
rudimentary and difficult to implement when operating at scale.
• Other quality measures adopted by some programmes at the
may impede the detectability of contract cheating.

16. Troubling finding…
Educators have a distrust in university regulations and the
managers who help to enforce them. Many participants
discussed a ‘burden of proof’ that they have to produce in order
to effectively make their case to managers when they suspect
that contract cheating has taken place.

17. Harper et al. (2018), p. 5

18. … it is about burden of proof. Now, if it is plagiarism, and you use Turnitin
and you've got [matched] sources, that's relatively easy to capture. Contract
cheating, and, as I understand it, most of the works are originally produced,
would not be flagged up in any way, so it almost feels like our word against
their word and if there's no deniability it's a difficult situation.
Lecturer D

19. But as [a] lecturer, following these procedures partly depends on whether
you think you will be supported by line management or not. Ultimately it goes
to management and they make the decision with the academic procedure.
And as a lecturer you have to trust [management]…
Lecturer C

20. We have a small cohort and I know where all my students are on placement.
But I know them well enough to know what their general life experiences are.
I think, I think the more, more sort of personal nature of our assignments
makes it harder for somebody to pass across information.
Lecturer E

21. Many of the assignments that we developed require people to reflect very
much on their experiences … and so it would be quite hard I think for a
contracted person to replicate that without having actually had the
experiences that the learner had. So, we'd kind of spot that, I think …
Lecturer F

22. The four assessment tasks that were perceived by students to be the least
likely to prompt contract cheating were in-class tasks, personalised and
unique tasks, vivas and reflections on practical placements. Assessments
with short turnaround times and those that are heavily weighted were
perceived to be the most likely.
Bretag et al. (2019) p. 685

23. Recommendations
• Adopt a whistle-blowing-type procedure for staff and students to
raise suspicions of contract cheating anonymously without the
need for any definitive proof.
• Upskill educators’ detection techniques and keep up to date on
essay writing industry trends.
• Employ or redeploy staff to act as investigators for cases of
contract cheating to ensure that staff retain the trust of students.
• Share good assessment design across the institution
• Reconsider blind marking as a quality measure.

25. Final thoughts…
Are we too concerned with products of assessment rather than
the learning process?
Is it right that a stranger can complete (and pass) an assessment
after never setting foot on campus, let alone in a lecture or
seminar?
Have we been institutionalised? Is it time we ditched the essay?
i.e. Are we just assessing our students the way we were
assessed?

26. Final thoughts…
Would staff training time be better spent on coming up with new
assessment methods or investigation techniques? Is it one or the
other?
Would we find similar results talking to managers and support
staff?

27. Questions?

28. References
Tracey Bretag, Rowena Harper, Michael Burton, Cath Ellis, Philip Newton, Karen van Haeringen,
Sonia Saddiqui & Pearl Rozenberg (2019) Contract cheating and assessment design: exploring the
relationship, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44:5, 676-691.
Dowling, P. and Brown, A. (2010) Doing Research/reading Research: Re-interrogating Education.
Routledge.
Harper, R., Bretag, T., Ellis, C., Newton, P., Rozenberg, P., Saddiqui, S. and van Haeringen, K. (2018)
'Contract cheating: a survey of Australian university staff', Studies in Higher Education, pp. 1-17.
Törrönen, J. (2002) 'Semiotic theory on qualitative interviewing using stimulus texts', Qualitative
Research, 2(3), pp. 343-362.

29. DISCUSSION
• If you were engaging colleagues in your institution in similar
conversations what do you think they would they say about one of
the following:
1. Their existing knowledge of contract cheating
2. Their abilities to detect and deter the practice
3. Their confidence in academic integrity procedures within the
institution
Spend a couple of minutes discussing this with the people
around you.