Contract cheating: a survey of Australian university students

ABSTRACT

Recent Australian media scandals suggest that university students are increasingly outsourcing their assessments to third parties – a behaviour known as ‘contract cheating’. This paper reports on findings from a large survey of students from eight Australian universities (n = 14,086) which sought to explore students’ experiences with and attitudes towards contract cheating, and the contextual factors that may influence this behaviour. A spectrum of seven outsourcing behaviours were investigated, and three significant variables were found to be associated with contract cheating: dissatisfaction with the teaching and learning environment, a perception that there are ‘lots of opportunities to cheat’, and speaking a Language Other than English (LOTE) at home. To minimise contract cheating, our evidence suggests that universities need to support the development of teaching and learning environments which nurture strong student–teacher relationships, reduce opportunities to cheat through curriculum and assessment design, and address the well-recognised language and learning needs of LOTE students.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic integrity
• contract cheating
• higher education
• plagiarism
• university

View correction statement:

Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the work of our colleague, Dr Saadia Mahmud, for her provision of descriptive statistics and analysis, which greatly contributed to our early thinking on this topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tracey Bretag http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8433-2675

Rowena Harper http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5330-525X

Michael Burton http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4213-4093

Cath Ellis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1921-6226

Philip Newton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5272-7979

Pearl Rozenberg http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2121-8044

Sonia Saddiqui http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2248-5742

Karen van Haeringen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2045-8943

Notes

1 Also referred to as the collaborative, gig, on-demand and crowd-sourcing economy (Richardson 2015).

2 A recent study by Dawson and Sutherland-Smith (2017) found that if alerted to the possible presence of contract cheating, markers were able to identify outsourced work in 62% of cases. However, in a similar study by Lines (2016), when markers were not alerted to the possibility of contract cheating, none was detected.

3 The survey instruments are available here: www.cheatingandassessment.edu.au/surveys/ The 12 institutions surveyed included eight universities and four non-university higher education providers (NUHEPs). Findings from the staff survey, NUHEPs, and assessment design data will be published separately.

4 Professional service includes an online custom assignment writing service, a local custom assignment writing service, or a tutoring, editing or proofreading service.

5 Wasserstein and Lazar (2016) state that

often the null hypothesis postulates the absence of an effect, such as no difference between two groups, or the absence of a relationship between a factor and an outcome. The smaller the p-value, the greater the statistical incompatibility of the data with the null hypothesis, if the underlying assumptions used to calculate the p-value hold.

In discussing the results, we draw attention to effects where the p-value is equal to or less than .001. Given the large sample size, and the importance of avoiding false positives, we feel this level of statistical incompatibility to be appropriate.

6 The ‘Group of Eight’ (Go8) comprises Australia’s eight leading research Universities – The University of Melbourne, The Australian National University, The University of Sydney, The University of Queensland, The University of Western Australia, The University of Adelaide, Monash University and UNSW Sydney (https://go8.edu.au/page/about).

7 Despite concerns about ‘unconscious bias’ during marking, and the fact that some countries (e.g. UK) insist on anonymous marking to ameliorate this, recent research has shown that anonymous marking has a negligible effect in reducing bias in relation to ethnic group, gender and socio-environmental background (Hinton and Higson 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Australian Office for Learning and Teaching (Australian Government Department of Education and Training), Grant [SP16-5383].