Imagine a university student paying someone else to sit their exam, take their tests, and write and submit all of their assignments. We call this “contract cheating” because the student enters a contract to outsource their work, whether formal or informal, with another person. This is the most serious type of university cheating.
My team’s research in 2022 found that about 10% of students at Australian universities engage in contract cheating during their studies. With over a million university students in Australia, that’s a lot of students who have cheated or will cheat; but, at least, this means that most students do not engage in contract cheating.
The principal reasons student state for not contract cheating are that they care about their learning, they think others don’t cheat, they regard cheating as immoral and they worry about getting caught.
The most common form of academic misconduct at universities is plagiarism. However, text-matching software makes plagiarism easy for students to avoid and easy for markers to detect. Plagiarism is often dealt with as an educational issue because students may not know how and when to acknowledge sources in their writing, particularly when they are new to university.
Unlike plagiarism, contract cheating can’t happen by accident. So, why would students engage in contract cheating? Researchers from psychology, criminology, education and economics have all investigated the reasons why students do it.
Psychologists have found that some students are predisposed to cheating by their personality. For example, students who are more impulsive and who don’t tend to follow the norms of society, tend to cheat more because they don’t think cheating is serious and they don’t expect to feel bad about cheating.
Criminologists suggest that opportunities are critical to wrongdoing and students have been shown to cheat more when they perceive there are opportunities to do so.
Education research shows that students cheat more when they are struggling with their subjects or they’re unhappy with the quality of their teachers.
Finally, economic research shows that some students weigh the costs of buying assignments against the risks of getting caught, and make rational decisions based on such factors.
An additional problem of contract cheating is that it is hard to detect. In large-scale higher education, teachers often do not know students well enough to recognise when they have not written their own assignments. Students who are determined to cheat can share their login details with people who take online tests, and when such tests are unsupervised, there’s no check on who completes them.
Cheap and efficient assessment methods that can be used in distance education, such as unsupervised online tests, spread with the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, with the pandemic now behind us, many such assessments that are vulnerable to cheating are still used more than they used to be by time-poor academics in cash-strapped universities.
Historically, any industry with a problem won’t always admit to it. Such unwillingness, no doubt, is linked to the need to do something about the issue and the cost of doing it. Contract cheating is often invisible and only found when universities dedicate time and effort to investigate. Australian universities have not had an incentive to tackle a problem that is largely hidden and costs money to address when their bottom lines range from only small surpluses to large deficits. But, to maintain educational quality, they must.
In the past two years, some Australian universities have reported a significant increase in the number of cases of contract cheating that they have detected. More students are being caught because of investment in cheating detection. But, as a I said, this is at some universities, and certainly not all of them.
Nonetheless, the ability for the other universities to deny that there’s a problem has been undercut by the success of detection efforts in places like Macquarie University, Deakin University and the University of Southern Queensland.
Importantly, universities that have been slower to invest in efforts to detect and deter the practice should not despair at the cost. Only a handful of dedicated professional staff have been responsible for the bulk of increased contract cheating detection at the universities that are doing it well. And, many of the students who fail a course because they are caught cheating pay to do the course a second time in order to complete their degrees the right way, thus offsetting the cost of upholding the rules.
Some cheating can be prevented with more secure assessments than unsupervised online tests. Beyond this, universities can attenuate cheating further by detecting it, because word gets around among students when cheating is caught and penalised.