Increasing pressure is being placed on governments and legislators in different countries to take action against assignment outsourcing in higher education. Global discussions focus on prohibiting commercial outsourcing providers, such as contract cheating services. Despite evidence to suggest that outsourcing behaviours by students are…

This study, conducted at a fully online Spanish higher education institution, documents the validation of a bespoke quality assessment tool designed to measure the susceptibility of formative assignments to AI academic misconduct. The research explored the impact of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies in the Humanities. The framework study…

The extent and reach of commercial cheating opportunities is ever present; thousands of websites promote differing business models offering assignments in multiple languages and currencies. In addition to commercial companies, students are known to outsource their assignments from friends and family. Assignment outsourcing and contract cheating…

Long before ChatGPT, it was an open secret that students did not always read the books they were assigned in their English Language Arts (ELA) classes, relying instead on online study guides like SparkNotes. Via a retrospective survey, our exploratory study examined (1) the rate of SparkNotes use among high-school ELA students; (2) why students…

The highest estimates of the prevalence of commercial contract cheating in Australia come from self-report surveys, which suggest that around 2% of students engage in commercial contract cheating during their higher education studies. However, self-report surveys are limited in that participants under-report socially-undesirable behaviours. In…

Recent developments in AI technologies and the increasing accessibility of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, have raised concerns about academic integrity in higher education. Thus, this research aims to shed light on the challenges faced by English as a Second Language (ESL) lecturers in identifying AI-generated texts, and highlighting the skills and…

This article contributes to an emerging body of research on the role of assessment design in the prevention and detection of contract cheating. Drawing on the largest contract cheating dataset gathered to date (see cheatingandassessment.edu.au), this article examines the types of assignments and exams in which students self-reported having engaged…

This study examined the plagiarism rates of student teachers (hereafter students) during the distance education process and investigated the reasons for plagiarising. Qualitative dominant sequential exploratory design was used. The sample consisted of students studying at two different universities in Turkey. The study group was determined in two…

As the contract cheating market has become more sophisticated and competition has intensified, the contract cheating industry has had to redevelop its approach to gain custom. The industry has developed new models of internal operation and providers are using more sophisticated techniques to reach potential customers. This paper discusses contract…

Purpose: The goal of this session is to provide an in-depth account of the history and development of contract cheating in Canada over the past 50+ years. You will also learn about the one and only (failed) attempt at legislation to make ghostwritten essays and exams illegal in Canada. Method: The content of this session is drawn from Eaton's book…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate attitudes toward cheating among business students at a private university in Kenya and examine if a significant difference exists in cheating perceptions among students who have completed one or two ethics courses, and those who have done none. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 554 undergraduate…

Contract cheating is the purchasing of custom-made university assignments with the intention of submitting them. Websites providing contract cheating services often claim this form of cheating is undetectable, and no published research has examined this claim. This paper documents a pilot study where markers were paid to mark a mixture of real…

This study examines business students' learning and assessment under remote teachings during the COVID-19 pandemic in a well-established Finnish university. A survey method is used to collect information on 336 business students including 42 accounting students. As indicated by students' responses, a majority of the students succeeded in assessing…

Contract cheating, or students outsourcing their assignments to be completed by others, has emerged as a significant threat to academic integrity in higher education institutions around the world. During the COVID-19, when traditional face-to-face instruction became unsustainable, the number of contract cheating students increased dramatically.…

Contract cheating is, potentially, a serious threat to the quality of higher education around the world. Prior research has focused on student perspectives and the companies themselves, but the staff view is poorly understood, despite staff being a major stakeholder with considerable influence over strategies designed to address contract cheating.…