Contract cheating

Type of academic fraud
Contract cheating is a form of academic dishonesty in which students pay others to complete their coursework. The term was coined in a 2006 study by Thomas Lancaster and the late Robert Clarke (UK), as a more inclusive way to talk about all forms of academic work, as opposed to more outdated terms such as "term paper mill" or "essay mill", which refer to text based academic outsourcing. In contrast, Lancaster and Clarke are computer scientists who found evidence of students systematically outsourcing coding assignments. Hence, they coined the term "contract cheating" to include all outsourced academic work, regardless of whether it is from text based or non text based disciplines.

Assessment design strategies may help to prevent contract cheating from occurring. For example, individualized assessments have been shown to be effective against contract cheating. In addition, some institutions have taken pro active measures to block access to contract cheating companies websites from campus users. Since August 2022, Australia started blocking access to contract cheating sites nationally.

In July 2007, Lancaster and Clarke proposed a systematic six stage process that tutors can use to detect students who are contract cheating. Since then, additional research has been conducted with evidence now pointing to training for those who grade academic work being an important aspect of detection. The quality of solutions to assignments sold by essay mills has been questioned, though other research claims that academic work obtained through the use of an auction site was of sufficient quality to gain satisfactory grades and thus remain undetected by educators. Contract cheating sites often boast that the use of their services is undetectable, however such claims have been refuted by empirical research that shows educators can be effectively trained to detect contract cheating in student work. There are now various resources available to educators to help train them on how to effectively identify contract cheating. It has been proposed that existing assignment and invigilated assessment data can be systematically analyzed in order to detect patterns of students' performance that may be indicative of contract cheating. At the 2015 Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond conference, it was demonstrated how collecting analytical data at the time of writing can help in identifying cases of contract cheating. Although text matching software is unlikely to detect contract cheating, such tools have shown some success in identifying the source of assignments found on auction sites.

The way higher education institutions across the world address contract cheating is inconsistent. The UK and Australia have developed some of the world's most systematic approaches to addressing contract cheating through policies, quality assurance guidance, and corresponding penalties for students. Meanwhile, research and advocacy are underway in countries such as Canada, However, a 2015 UK research study that collected university students' opinions on appropriate penalties for academic misconduct demonstrated that students consistently recommended lenient penalties for plagiarism, and that this effect was most pronounced for contract cheating.

The legal status of these services varies internationally. In 2020, it became illegal for third parties to provide academic work to students in Australia. In New Zealand it is illegal to "advertise or provide third party assistance to cheat". In the United Kingdom, the Quality Assurance Agency published a report advocating the use of a legal approach as one way to tackle contract cheating, and suggested that existing fraud laws might be used, since the activities of such services, and their clients, could be reasonably interpreted to fit with definitions of fraud, as they involve false representation and failure to disclose information. A subsequent research project compared the UK fraud laws with the terms and conditions used by contract cheating services and concluded that such services would be unlikely to fall foul of fraud law because the disclaimers, terms and conditions the services provide generally state that any custom written products are to be used only as "study guides" or "revision aids", thereby placing responsibility and intent on the student client. In 2022, the Skills and Post 16 Education Act criminalised the provision of academic cheating services in England and Wales to students submitting work to English institutions—the unusual scope of this law relating to the devolved nature of the education competence in the United Kingdom. Ireland and Austria have also passed similar prohibitions. A similar analysis in Lithuania concluded that contract cheating services were unlikely to fall foul of existing laws, although an analysis of Australian law concluded that fraud, as well as forgery and conspiracy, might be legal avenues via which contract cheating could be targeted. All three studies called for the introduction of new legal approaches to tackle contract cheating. Contract cheating is not illegal in Canada. Scholars have noted that such laws have created a situation where generative AI and large language model providers may be caught within the scope of these criminal offences, particularly in England and Wales and in Australia. More broadly, despite the apparent potential of a legal challenge to contract cheating companies, prosecutions are currently rare, largely because of the limitations of existing laws. In addition, the simple act of outlawing a service would not necessarily reduce demand for it; the aforementioned research studies all call for a holistic, multi pronged approach to tackling contract cheating.