Detecting Contract Cheating

Lancaster and Clarke (2007) identify a process of detecting contract cheating which contains six stages, systematizing the detective work involved.

The idea here is that the detection process should not be the responsibility of the lecturer alone. This is similar to the way that TurnitIn handles the process of comparing a student's essay against a large corpus of documents, preparing a report for the lecturer to follow up on. In this case, a “detective agent” (human or automatic) performs the middle four stages, comparing a database of assignments to a database of student bids.

1. Publication — the assignment is published to a “known and searchable location” by the lecturer. This location is known to the detective agent.
2. Collection — known contract cheating sites are scanned for timely bids.
3. Identification — postings on those sites are filtered to identify possible bids.
4. Attribution — the identified bids are analysed to identify the institution (etc.) which each relates to. There are potential confidentiality issues here, but these can be overcome.
5. Notification — for each bid which is matched to a published assignment, the lecturer is contacted.
6. Investigation — the originating department scrutinises the evidence, attempts to identify the student(s) involved, and invokes institutional processes.

The detective agent is a role which may, of course, be performed by the lecturer, but the amount of work involved suggests that in the future dedicated software should be used.

References

Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke (2007). “Establishing a Systematic Six-Stage Process for Detecting Contract Cheating”, in Proceedings of ICPCA07 pp. 342-347.