Study finds university students engage in ‘contract cheating’

A survey of more than 14,000 students at Australian universities found 15.3 per cent said they had bought, traded or sold notes.

A cursory search of the internet, experts say, can throw up a selection of global organisations that will provide university work, charged by the page and in many cases guaranteed to pass a plagiarism check.

A survey of more than 14,000 students at Australian universities found 15.3 per cent said they had bought, traded or sold notes, while 27.2 per cent said they had provided completed assignments to other students.

As well as the students in eight Australian universities and four colleges who responded to the survey’s questions, more than 1000 staff responded to a corresponding survey on the same subject.

Led by Tracey Bretag, an associate professor in higher education at the University of South Australia, the federally funded research was commissioned to determine the extent of “contract cheating”, a term coined by British academics that refers to students paying others to do their written work.

The students’ trade in notes and the provision of completed assignments to other students were referred to as “sharing” by the Australian researchers who formulated the student survey. A smaller proportion of students — 5.7 per cent — said they had engaged in contract-cheating behaviour, but that proportion could be lower than the reality because it is probable some students would not admit to paying for essays or assignments.

“Cheating behaviours were primarily explained by students’ international or LOTE (language other than English) status, higher levels of dissatisfaction with the teaching and learning environment, and perceptions that there are lots of opportunities to cheat,” the researchers found.

A cursory search of the internet, experts say, can throw up a selection of global organisations that will provide university work, charged by the page and in many cases guaranteed to pass a plagiarism check.

The researchers concluded the way Australian universities were increasingly expected to operate as commercial enterprises, and the competitive ideology now found in most university operations, along with uncertain job opportunities for graduates and the booming “sharing economy”, had combined to create the potential for contract cheating.

In their paper, published in the Studies in Higher Education journal, the researchers wrote that media-driven cheating scandals about the “purported escalation in students’ use of online essay mills, file-sharing sites, and online contracting platforms” had prompted widespread concern in recent years and led to the Australian national higher education regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, asking the relevant universities to provide reports on their investi­gations and responses.