Does authentic assessment assure academic integrity? Evidence from contract cheating data

ABSTRACT

Contract cheating occurs when a student outsources their assessment to a third party, regardless of the third party’s relationship with the student, or whether money is exchanged. In higher education, there is a widespread belief that assessment design is a solution to the problem of contract cheating and that authentic assessment tasks are particularly effective. This research analysed two datasets – 221 assignment orders placed on academic custom writing websites and 198 assessment tasks in which contract cheating was detected – to investigate if authentic assessment can assure academic integrity. The authenticity of assessments was determined using five factors derived from the literature: frequency, fidelity, complexity, real-world impact and feed forward. Our analysis found that assessment tasks with no, some, or all of the five authenticity factors are routinely outsourced by students.

KEYWORDS:

• Contract cheating
• authenticity
• assessment design
• academic integrity
• academic integrity breaches

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Australian Government Department of Education and Training, Grant SP16-5383. We acknowledge the assistance of Professor Chris Adam in the confirmation of FoE codes for tasks in the 08 Management and Commerce and the 0919 Economics and Econometrics fields in dataset 1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

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

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

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

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

Scott McBride http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9358-904X

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

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

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Office for Learning and Teaching [grant number SP16-5383]; Australian Government Department of Education and Training.