Academics at a Victorian university just did exactly what they told their students they must never do - cheat. But it was all in the name of research.
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Deakin University researchers got permission to go undercover online and hire someone to write their assignments.
The outsourced papers were then slipped into a pile of legitimate student essays to see if experienced tutors could identify the contract cheating.
The authors of the study, associate professors Philip Dawson and Wendy Sutherland-Smith, discovered that tutors only identified three out of five examples of contract cheating.
“University markers need to be on the lookout for this,” Dr Dawson said.
“The key message that needs to be communicated to markers and student is that contract cheating can be detected.”
Contract cheating involves paying someone to produce individual university assignments, and the global industry is estimated to be worth $400 million.
It’s a growing problem for universities, with research suggesting up to 15 per cent of students have engaged in some form of contract cheating.
While the researchers paid up to $200 for each assignment, Dr Dawson said many of them were of poor quality.
“They did not always deliver. They don’t address the question or fulfilling the specific requirements,” he said.
He also had to hassle some of the online essay mills to hand over the work he’d paid for.
“It’s dodgy,” he said.
The researchers received ethics approval to give 15 tutors a bundle of 20 papers which were comprised of six contract cheating assignments and 14 legitimate ones.
They then had to assess whether the psychology, nutrition, marketing and biology essays were the real deal.
They got much better at detecting the contract cheating essays after taking part in a training session.
After being taught what to look out for , the markers detected 82 per cent of contract cheating according to the research published in the journal of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education.
The telltale signs of contract cheating include a lack of figures and tables in essays, poor-quality reflections and few references to ideas discussed in class.
“It looks more like a generic essay rather than something that addresses the genre of the task,” Dr Dawson said.
While the academic writing and referencing may be high-quality, he said the overall quality of the outsourced assignments was substandard.
“They are written by generalist writers,” Dr Dawson explained.
Last year, Australia's higher education watchdog unveiled new guidelines to tackle contract cheating.
The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency recommends barring students from commercial cheat sites while on campus and sending them counter-messages when they try to access the sites.
It also recommends compulsory academic integrity training for students, and professional development for staff to help them identify contract cheating.
Contract cheating is difficult to detect because it cannot be identified like regular plagiarism through text-matching software.
Several universities are using the US-based Turnitin program to crack down on dodgy papers by monitoring students’ writing styles.
Deakin University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Wollongong and the University of Queensland are testing the technology, which has been built with the help of forensic linguists.
They helped identify 70 key factors that feed into a person’s unique writing style, including the use of commas, parentheses and dashes, how they list examples and whether they add a double space after a full stop.
