Assignment outsourcing: moving beyond contract cheating

Abstract

The extent and reach of commercial cheating opportunities is ever present; thousands of websites promote differing business models offering assignments in multiple languages and currencies. In addition to commercial companies, students are known to outsource their assignments from friends and family. Assignment outsourcing and contract cheating are not a new problem, yet research to-date has been conducted utilising different survey tools and in different locations, thereby alluding accurate comparisons. This paper reports on a large international research project which utilised the same survey tool across multiple countries. Respondents most commonly reported outsourcing assignments from friends and family, and peer-sharing sites, as compared to essay mills. Large differences were found in the self-reported outsourcing behaviours between countries. Due to the differing outsourcing methods used, a new definition is offered for these behaviours: assignment outsourcing.

Keywords:

• Assignment outsourcing
• cheating
• essay mills
• contract cheating

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the GEMS team: Tomáš Foltýnek, Jana Dannhoferova, Dita Dlabolová, Veronika Králíková, Bob Ives and Sonja Bjelobaba for their work and dedication to the project. Additional thanks go to Phil Newton and David Rettinger for their input and feedback into the survey tool. A final thank you to all those who translated and piloted the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Awdry

Rebecca Awdry is undertaking her PhD on the topic of assignment outsourcing, including assignment bidding sites, bespoke essay mill services, peer-to-peer sharing sites and obtaining work from others. She is exploring the applicability of criminological theories of deviance to contract cheating in higher education. Rebecca is conducting an international research study to establish whether there are differences in outsourcing behaviours found between different countries, and whether there are global patterns seen in the reported outsourcing types.