CONTRACT CHEATING
Eight years ago, I took a sociology of crime course in university. The class met just once each week — a 3-hour session on Thursday evenings.
There was someone — let’s call her Jen — who I had the privilege of sitting with from time to time.
A significant chunk of our grade in that course was based on a final paper. I think I wrote something about the police?
I can’t really remember what Jen wrote about, and she probably has little to no recollection either — she had paid someone to write it for her. Jen told me she couldn’t afford to fail the course, but she could afford to buy a passable essay.
We were handed back our work at the end of term. Jen wasn’t going to make it to class that night, so she asked if I could pick hers up as well. I did, not knowing we would never see each other again.
If you’re somewhere reading this Jen, I hope you’re well…
At UBC, there are posters plastered all over campus advertising essays for sale. I’m sure these can be found at other institutions too.
The idea of buying a paper isn’t something I’ve ever seriously considered. After all, I enjoy writing — I’m just very slow at doing it. As a student, I bought coffee instead — lots of it — to get me through the late nights.
Sure, I’ve entertained the other “side” in being a ghost writer. But again, I could barely finish my own papers — and the academic integrity elephant in the room held me back too.
When Jen gave someone money in exchange for a term paper, we can call that “contract cheating” — paying a third party to complete coursework on your behalf.
Did you know that there’s an International Day of Action (DoA) Against Contract Cheating? This year’s festivities will take place on October 20, so mark your calendars.
The DoA is an International Centre for Academic Integrity initiative, a non-profit organization:
The International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) was founded to combat cheating, plagiarism, and academic dishonesty in higher education. Its mission has since expanded to include the cultivation of cultures of integrity in academic communities throughout the world.
It’s a noble cause — one with likely no end in sight.
Last November, UBC made the news when over a hundred undergraduate math students were accused of cheating on a midterm exam. The scandal even got airtime on local TV.
There was much debate about… everything.
How should these students be punished? How were they caught? What can be done in the future? Have they been cheating in other courses? Would this have happened if classes were in-person, rather than online because of the pandemic? Did they cheat because math makes no sense?
Public panic is not uncommon whenever cheating gets exposed. It’s easy to frame those caught as bad apples, and and get lost in trying to explain how they could possibly do what they did.
I work in the field of instructional support and design though, so I can’t really get lost in the outrage whenever something like this surfaces.
We already know that cheating happens more often than we can catch it. The job has always been to figure out how to facilitate the most meaningful and “secure” learning experiences possible within this reality.
Anyone remember SparkNotes?
When I was in high school — a decade ago — SparkNotes was the forbidden website. I remember the excitement of finding notes for a book we were supposed to read, but didn’t have to anymore.
But while it was nice to get a summary of Chapter 3 in Lord of the Flies, I still had to write my own weekly reflections…
Essay mills, file-sharing communities, and freelancing platforms have made it easier than ever for today’s students to get that stuff done for them as well.
In fact, these services are so popular nowadays that there are even websites out there with the sole purpose of listing and ranking them — check out https://www.topwritersreview.com/top-10-essay-writing-services/ for example, which seems to be a Yelp for custom essays.
File-sharing communities have been hot recently — Course Hero and Chegg are among the most popular, from what I know.
Those math students I mentioned above? They were accused of using Chegg to cheat.
These platforms are intriguing because students are enticed to be more than just passive consumers. Sure they can pay à la carte prices to unlock content on Course Hero for example, but they can also gain free credits simply by uploading their own documents.
It’s a sharing economy where the exchange of course materials — and work — is more convenient and normalized than ever before.
Education has become transactional — a product which can be bought, sold, or traded.
Aren’t students paying tuition already? Can you really buy your way through school now, and is it okay that there are services inviting students to try?
At a price of $14.95 per month, Chegg Study offers a database of “21 million homework solutions”. Students can even request on-demand assistance from an expert — simply “take a photo of your question and get an answer in as little as 30 mins”.
It’s as easy as getting a Netflix subscription. Wait — can you share Chegg accounts too?
Click on the link above and consider the layout, the colourful blocks, the call to actions — these are elements which can be found on any product or business webpage nowadays where the viewer is being sold something.
If you ever decide to set up a business of your own, here’s a list of more than 100 of these templates for you to choose from.
When Susan Rowland et al. (2018) studied essay-for-sale websites to evaluate how they appealed to potential buyers, they noticed some recurring themes:
qualified writers (100% of sites)
quality work (91%)
payment security (91%)
affordability (91%)
on-time delivery (73%)
confidentiality (73%)
satisfaction (64%)
refunds for substandard work (64%)
Replace “writers” with anything you’d like — there’s your next sales pitch.
To nobody’s surprise, Rowland et al. (2018) found no use of the words “dishonest” or “integrity” anywhere in their sample…
Eager to conduct my own investigation, I ended up on EssayMills after a little browsing. The site boldly promises “the best made to order academic assignments which you can get”.
Found this kind of funny — scroll to the bottom of the homepage, and you’ll find some sample paragraphs discussing… plagiarism?
Sure enough, nothing came up when I searched the entire site for the keyword “dishonest”. When I tried “integrity”, I was hit with a single result — some sort of paper about the “Taoist theory of Self Actualization”.
It certainly wasn’t the best piece of writing I’ve ever read, but perhaps I’m just not self-actualized enough to appreciate it properly?
I messed around with their order form and apparently, a request like this would cost $380:
That’s a lot of cheese…
Then I remembered to check out GrabMyEssay as well — the #1 choice we saw above, at least according to Top Writers Review.
The price was a little higher but I can see why — the interface is nicer, you’re able to get an instant quote on the homepage, and there even appears to be a live chat. New customers can also get 15% off!
I will also say that “GrabMyEssay” probably earns a few more creativity points than “Essay Mills” for a company name…
There’s a fundamental question underlying everything here — why do students cheat anyways?
We just discussed how easy it is for students to outsource their work online. Custom essays, solutions to homework or even exam questions — all it takes is a credit card.
Some research has delved into the psychology behind cheating, looking at student motivations, values, and mindsets. There are two ends of a spectrum which are usually brought up:
1. Education as an opportunity for enlightenment and personal development.
Students who think this way are generally less inclined to engage in academic misconduct. According to Rigby et al. (2015), it’s possible that even a “a zero detection probability would not induce” the stronger believers of this sort of philosophy into cheating.
2. Education as a means to an end.
We’ve all heard this at some point — get good grades, get into a good school, get a good job after you graduate from that good school.
In reality, this “golden path” guarantees nothing and not everyone pursues it. But in a world of uncertainty — one where employers aren’t even obligated to tell you that you didn’t get the job, much less give you feedback on why — conquering a post-secondary degree is still appealing to some.
Pressure to do well — or survive — can certainly nudge these individuals towards seeking out “expert” help at some point.
How about another perspective?
Bretag et al. (2019) suggested that cheating is often “primarily influenced by dissatisfaction with the teaching and learning environment”.
Students are vocal — sometimes their concerns are valid, and sometimes they are a little less. At the end of the day though, they’re the ones paying tuition and the customer is always right.
Rigby et al. (2015) found, for example, that second-language students are more likely to pay for essays.
It helps nobody to simply interpret this as evidence that foreign students cheat more. I’m more interested in how it can be an indicator of how foreign students struggle with what’s being taught — and how they’re being taught.
Here’s what I’m trying to get at — there are endless reasons for why students cheat. At some point, we need to be practical and shift our focus to figuring out how we might discourage them from doing so.
I have no magical solution, and I’m not sure that one will ever exist.
Cheating has always happened, and students will eventually find a way around whatever measures are thrown at them. As long as there’s money to be made, services and solutions will emerge to help them do so.
There’s always room for improvement though, and I do have a few ideas. Don’t get too excited, because there’s nothing really groundbreaking here — as someone “in the field”, my focus tends to be on more feasible actions…
I’ve studied at the undergraduate level, and I attended grad school for a couple years as well.
While some of my instructors discussed it from time to time, the idea of plagiarism — for example — never seemed to be any more than a block of generic text pasted into course syllabi for students to ignore.
A step in the right direction would be to make integrity guidelines — codes of conduct, disciplinary procedures — more accessible and easier to read.
I’ll pick on UBC here, where this information is dispersed across 11 separate pages. Maybe one of those website templates I shared could make this sort of stuff sexier?
As for the actual content itself, you can see that it’s vague and not very specific overall. I think that’s just a limitation of written rules though — even laws suffer from ambiguity.
For greater nuance then, why not entertain a multi-tiered approach? General guidelines can be established at the institutional level, but I believe that faculties, departments, and even instructors themselves have a responsibility to provide more specific, detailed, and relevant direction.
Let’s be honest though — policies can be beautifully written and laid out, but they don’t mean much without enforcement.
Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to detect cheating in the first place — it’s even harder to collect enough evidence to prove that it actually happened.
Misconduct investigations demand a lot of time and effort, and the layers of bureaucracy involved make these an uphill battle to begin with.
I won’t speak for other institutions, but maybe this is why UBC’s approach is more reactive than it is proactive. Students are expected to behave and police themselves, and cheating isn’t really acknowledged as an issue until someone gets caught.
From September 2019 to August 2020, a grand total of 42 students at UBC’s Vancouver campus were disciplined for academic misconduct. Most were given a zero in the course, while some received 4 to 8 month suspensions.
I love students, and I’m not a monster or anything who wants to see more people punished but that number does seem a little low — there were more than 60,000 students enrolled during that school year…
How can there be accountability if there aren’t any consequences?
I could have provided some boring suggestions — setting up an integrity office or task force, being more heavy-handed when dealing with confirmed cases.
Changes like these probably wouldn’t hurt, but I’m also not confident that they represent the most sustainable — or effective — way forward.
Discipline — sometimes in the form of a wooden spoon — kept me in check when I was a kid. But while it taught me what things and actions were “wrong”, I didn’t necessarily understand why they were.
There’s a project currently underway within the Faculty of Arts at UBC — “Our Cheating Hearts?: Changing the Conversation Through Academic Integrity Curriculum” — looking into another approach:
How do we get students to care about academic integrity without focusing on punishment? How can we help them put this concept into practice when it comes to their own work? So often, university resources that are ostensibly about academic integrity actually focus on academic dishonesty, using a punitive framework: they instruct students only on policies and consequences.
The idea is that educators should be putting more effort into actively — and explicitly — teaching students about academic integrity, rather than just relying on (weak) threats of punishment to discourage them from cheating.
The project believes that students need to truly understand what integrity entails, and why it matters within academia — and their own learning.
To do so, they’ve developed flexible resources — guidelines on language and concepts to incorporate, activities and tasks to deploy — for instructors to fold into their courses.
This isn’t a case of choosing one approach over the other though — both pedagogy and policy are essential to fostering a better culture of academic integrity. Informing students is the priority, but we also need reliable regulations to fall back on when situations need to be dealt with.
Another reason why I believe in pedagogy — learning design directly impacts the day-to-day experience for students.
It’s not a novel idea by any means, but give this some thought — what if students were assigned smaller tasks more frequently throughout the term?
Doing so would help generate more data points, giving instructors a more detailed “picture” of who their students are — and what they’re capable of.
Looking back now, I really appreciated the professors who made us work on our term papers bit by bit. An annotated bibliography one week, an outline the next, a section or two after that — you get the idea.
Not only does this save students from procrastinating and trying to write a whole paper the night before a deadline, it also provides them with a reliable blueprint on how to approach similar projects in the future.
The same goes for exams — I’ve heard firsthand from students how their course grades are too heavily weighted on a midterm and a final. When a large portion of your mark hinges on one or two tasks, there’s bound to be anxiety and pressure.
Quiz students more often to better evaluate how well they’re responding to course content so far. Create different variations of questions so students aren’t all looking at the same test. Use more than just multiple choice.
Many instructors wait until “major” assessments — final papers, exams — before becoming more vigilant with their anti-cheating measures. In a way, this almost sends the message that integrity doesn’t matter all the time…
With our proposed model, instructors would have an opportunity to emphasize integrity — and check for it at each of the new goalposts. Expectations for academic integrity can be established and meaningfuly embedded over time.
A few months ago, Forbes published an article with an… interesting title — “This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid”.
The company? Chegg.
There’s a lot of good stuff in the piece, so feel free to check it out. You do have to disable your ad blocker though, which I begrudgingly did for the sake of knowledge.
A full-screen ad for BlackBerry greeted me immediately…
Anyways, here are some important highlights:
Subscriptions to Chegg have spiked since nearly every college in the world went virtual. In the third quarter, they grew 69% over the previous year, to 3.7 million.
I’m a bit ashamed to say that Chegg wasn’t really on my radar until UBC students started getting caught cheating with it on exams this past year.
When we started looking more carefully, it became clear that we probably should have been doing so much earlier…
In a 2019 interview, [Chegg CEO Dan Rosenweig] said higher education needs to adjust to the on-demand economy, the way Uber or Amazon have.
One-day shipping and rapid food delivery services came to the rescue of society when storefronts closed because of the pandemic.
Speed is very much a part of Chegg’s game too. This is how many students have managed to receive answers on exam questions — during their exams.
In a written statement, a Chegg president, Nathan Schultz, says: “We are not naive that [cheating] is a problem. And the mass move to remote learning has only increased it. We remain 100% committed to addressing it, and are investing considerable resources to do so. We cannot do it alone and are working with faculty and institutions, and will continue to do more, including educating students.”
It’s a 12-billion dollar answer but here’s the issue — regardless of intent, it’s a simple fact that Chegg and other platforms like it empower academic dishonesty.
Recently, Chegg actually launched its “Honor Shield” initiative — a promise to block students from getting help on exam content while an exam is underway.
Here’s the catch though — for this to work, instructors must upload their own exams ahead of time onto the platform. Judging from this screenshot, the block is only temporary as well — students can get right back to consulting Chegg experts once the exam is over.
I’m inclined to think that this is more of a Chegg PR move than anything, intended to quiet critics after becoming the face of cheating during the pandemic.
It’s tough, because I’ve actually heard good things from instructors about how Chegg has been cooperative and willing to provide data when asked to assist with misconduct investigations.
I’m also familiar with how some instructors have made Chegg work for them — uploading fake answers, for example, to quickly identify any student bold enough to just copy and paste whatever was available without doing any sort of check.
However, it’s still not a great look for the company.
One way to think about it — students are Chegg customers, and Chegg isn’t hesitating to sell them out and play both sides.
Another way — Chegg is dragging instructors into the mess, unapologetically asking them to upload content they probably wouldn’t want public in the first place.
Because at the end of the day, all materials and resources and landing in Chegg’s lap — monetized instantly. You can see why the company is doing well…
What happens now?
Maybe instructors should unite and demand “admin” accounts on Chegg to track how their courses are being exposed.
But this is all additional labour, and the insulting part is that instructors would need to work for the platform responsible for creating these issues in the first place.
There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for our struggle against contract cheating and academic dishonesty, but I have run out of things to say here though — sorry…
Let’s keep doing our best with pedagogy and policy, and I think this is super important — let’s not lose faith in our students.
