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The issue of students paying a third party to do their assignments for them (“contract cheating”) is becoming an increasing problem, as is the availability of source code on web sites which students cut-and-paste into programming assignments.
Depending on the definition of plagiarism, contract cheating may or may not fall within that definition. One definition of plagiarism — “the fradulent representation of another's work as one's own” — does encompass contract cheating (Reading University, 2008), and it is appropriate to discuss it at the same time as other forms of plagiarism.
Lancaster and Clarke (2008) provide a useful discussion of contract cheating in Roberts’ new book on plagiarism. The book is quite expensive, but your library may be willing to purchase a copy; extracts can be viewed online. Of particular interest is their classification of 41 cheat sites into four categories:
Unlike more “classical” forms of cheating, there are many factors which can affect exactly how the process happens. For example, one or many students may post a single or multiple copies of an assignment to multiple auction sites, and many contractors may respond, some subcontracting to further auction sites. Clarke and Lancaster (2008) have identified eleven possible “scenarios” which illustrate well the potential complexity of contract cheating.
Clarke and Lancaster (2006) provide an interesting discussion of those sites used within the computing discipline, and analyse in depth traffic on one such site (rentacoder.com) during a three-week period early in 2005. They conclude that, on that site alone, approximately 1 in every 8 bids is from a student wishing to cheat, and that almost all of those are computing students.
A further study (Lancaster and Clarke, 2007) used a corpus of over 900 RentACoder bids collected from 2004-2006 to analyse the frequency of individuals' bids, their country of origin and the type of assignment. One quarter of the bids (231) originated in the UK, the highest figure in proportion to the number of computing students in the country. Of these, approximately 23% related to Java programming, 10% to a major student project, 10% to databases, and 9% to C/C++ programming.
In order to give you an idea as to the scale of the problem, and the type of resource that some students have been known to use, we offer you a list of sites (collated on 11 March 2008) which — at that date — appeared to us to be a representative snapshot. The list contains links to two main types of cheat site: contract cheating sites which offer services for a fee, such as source code auction sites or essay mills, and bulletin boards or discussion forums containing freely available source code.
As for ordinary plagiarism, prevention is preferable to punishment. However, since the source of the contractor cannot be determined by a simple web search, we offer some suggestions as to how both prevention and detection might be done.
The presentations from the March 2008 HEA-ICS Contract Cheating Workshop may also be of interest.
The (External) Wikipedia page on contract cheating is being actively managed by Bob Clarke and Thomas Lancaster, and contains an up-to-date list of further links.
Robert Clarke and Thomas Lancaster (2008). The Private Life of an Assignment , slides presented at the HEA-ICS Contract Cheating Workshop, March 2008.
Robert Clarke and Thomas Lancaster (2006). “ Eliminating the successor to plagiarism? Identifying the usage of contract cheating sites ” in Proceedings of the 2nd International Plagiarism Conference , Gateshead, UK.
Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke (2008). “The Phenomena of Contract Cheating”, in Roberts (2008), pp. 144-158.
Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke (2007). “ Assessing Contract Cheating through Auction Sites — a Computing Perspective ”, Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Information and Computing Sciences pp. 91-95.
Reading University (2008). Avoiding unintentional plagiarism . Retrieved April 16, 2008. Available from: (External) http://www.reading.ac.uk/studyskills/study_resources/study_guides/referencing%203.htm
Tim Roberts (ed.) (2008). (External) Student Plagiarism in an Online World: Problems and Solutions . Hershey, PA: Idea Group.
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