Preventing Contract Cheating

Prevention and detection of contract cheating is difficult, much more so than simple plagiarism, since it is unlikely that the student’s document or program will be similar to another which can be sourced from elsewhere. The following have been suggested as possible ways to prevent contract cheating. There are multiple sources for these ideas, including discussions at the March 2008 HEA-ICS Contract Cheating Workshop.

• Monitor students use of systems. This may be technically difficult, and there are ethical and legal (Data Protection) issues.
• Restrict coursework so that it takes place in supervised sessions. This has implications for staffing and timetabling, but is potentially a straightforward solution.
• Viva all students after their coursework is completed. This has serious staffing implications. Students may underperform in such oral exams (which we know are stressful), and this may cause us to focus on the wrong students.
• Use the content of assignments as the basis for a written examination. Since students who have outsourced their coding are likely not to understand the material well, they may perform poorly in a written examination, offsetting any gains they may have made from the cheating.
• Look for changes in students style of writing. This may be unreliable, and is a research topic under investigation at present.
• Monitor cheat sites manually. This is time-consuming — there are many sites with rapidly changing content.
• Monitor cheat sites automatically. This cannot be done at present, since there are no tools yet available.
• Do not reuse assignments. This is general good advice for preventing plagiarism, but will only be effective at preventing re-use of code from (e.g.) bulletin boards.
• Individualise assignments for each student. Combined with other approaches above this could be highly effective, but the staffing implications are considerable.
• Ask students to hand in drafts at each stage. This might work, but some cheat sites can already perform this “service”. However, the added complexity may deter some students.
• Make students aware of the risks. This is good plagiarism prevention practice anyway. Depending on your institution's processes, these might include penalties being imposed at a much later date, and maybe even the possibility of losing their degree after graduation.
• Make students keep log books of their day-to-day coursework activities. This has resource implications for staff, and is time-consuming for students, though many VLEs and other online tools can simplify the process.
• Peer assessment may help. The Open Source tool WebPA, developed at Loughborough, is a web-based peer assessment tool which you should investigate.
• Structure coursework so that individual items follow on from previous assignments. This continuity requires a student to have to have actually learnt the materials him/herself.