Protecting Against Contract Cheating

Tools, policies, and tactics for prevention and detection (a series)

Introduction

While student AI use dominates the Academic Integrity conversation, safeguarding a campus, program, or classroom from other types of cheating remains an institutional imperative (if not always a priority).

While academic integrity policies prohibit cheating, fabrication, and plagiarism, “Contract Cheating” and “Essay Mills” don’t often make an appearance in the explicit prohibitions of behavior. My first experience with a contract cheater was receiving an unsolicited email from an essay mill ratting out one of our shared “customers” for non-payment. Except for that email, the cheating would have been undetected. From that moment on, I’ve continued to work on this sticky question: how do we prevent and defend against contract cheating?

As a college or institution, your approach to Essay Mills might include some good offensive measures:

• flagging their advertisements in search results, social media feeds, or elsewhere on the web and supporting This Isn’t Fine 😘,

• banning all the known sites via your campus firewall (EMDB has 342 sites, and paid subscribers get access to the full list), or

• joining movements like GAIN asking for large social media sites to join the fight.

Each of these helps to protect your students and campus in the long run, ensuring that we’re working collectively to build a culture of integrity.

While these efforts help to mitigate the potential of students being solicited to use such services; they don’t provide any defense to protect your submission inbox. The fact of the matter is that contract cheating remains difficult to detect.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve kept one foot in student learning experience and another in the world of assessment validity. My dual mandate: ensure that our students have a clear path to success and maintain a record that validates the learning. Over those two decades, I demoed, researched, trialed, and tested all manner of policies, tools, and approaches, many of which I’ll share below.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll highlight the approaches and solutions that are available that might help protect your classroom from an essay mill. There are loads of tactics and tools, each with pros and cons. They range from easy-to-implement classroom policies and practices to specific commercial technological tools and services that any institution can adopt to improve validity, increase confidence, and even build trust while decreasing the use and non-detection of essay mills and contract cheating.

No single solution

In my experience, the ‘Swiss Cheese’ risk mitigation model¹ works best. The best ‘solution’ is an amalgamation of overlapping policies, tools, and processes that fit your classroom environment and campus culture.

Repeat: there is no silver bullet solution to academic integrity.

In 2010, I started working at a growing online institution offering online courses at the college level. While we started with a clearly stated policy, we quickly added plagiarism detection, proctoring, and additional policies to ensure that our courses met a high bar of rigor and integrity without placing onerous demands on students or unnecessarily invading their privacy.

In 2012, we notified our students that future examinations would be proctored, leading to a Change.org petition against our decision and temporarily tempering student demand for our courses. Changing policies, adopting new integrity tools, or changing student or faculty workflows will always be met with resistance. As your organization weighs the tradeoffs of any given strategy, remember that communication, discussion, and transparency can go a long way in ensuring that you’re building a community of integrity.

No two campuses are the same. Online and offline classes have very different needs and restrictions. Your subject, course, assessment strategy, number of students, and campus environment and culture will all have a bearing on what you do and the effectiveness of your toolset. Additionally, how much leeway and autonomy you have may restrict what, if any, freedom to implement any of the tools or tactics mentioned herein.

What works for one institution or class may not work at another. A decade-plus experience managing online general education courses (including English Composition and writing) taught me one general rule: every institutional use case is different. Please remember that as you consider your institution’s and classroom’s approach.

Next Up: A Steady Drip

Rather than exhaust readers with 4,000 words and lists of different tool providers in one go, you’ll get a steady drip (aiming for Wednesdays) of posts over the next few weeks/months.

1. I hope you’ll comment, share, and let me know what I get wrong!

2. Most content will be available to all subscribers

3. I will not publicly share known defeats, cheating tactics, or workarounds to any of the technology tools; so some of the more sensitive information may be access controlled.

Here’s a sneak peak:

1. Part 1: Policies

   1. Honor Code

   2. Statements of Attestation

   3. No-tech solutions

      1. Classroom writing

      2. Student conferences

      3. Writing journals

   4. Non-writing submissions

      1. Videos

      2. Presentation

      3. Group work

      4. Multi-media

2. Part 2: Detection

   1. The Viva Voces

   2. Technology-mediated viva voces

   3. Originality detection

   4. AI detection

   5. Linguistics and Stylometrics

   6. Non-learning Analytics

3. Part 3: Surveillance

   1. Proctoring

   2. Process Tracking

   3. Typing Biometrics

Stay tuned…

Can’t wait and interested in proof reading? Reply to this or hmu via email for a draft.

1. This model was introduced in Human Error by James Reason in 1991 and applied to academic integrity by Kiata Rundle, Guy Curtis, and Joseph Clare in 2020 (https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789903775.00014)