Increasing pressure is being placed on governments and legislators in different countries to take action against assignment outsourcing in higher education. Global discussions focus on prohibiting commercial outsourcing providers, such as contract cheating services. Despite evidence to suggest that outsourcing behaviours by students are…

Contract cheating happens when students commission someone else to do assessed work for them. While it is already illegal in 18 jurisdictions, others are considering making the provision of contract cheating services illegal. To date, legal approaches to addressing contract cheating have faced little scrutiny in the peer reviewed literature. This…

Contract cheating happens when students outsource their assessed work to a third party. One approach that has been suggested for improving contract cheating detection is comparing students' assignment submissions with their previous work, the rationale being that changes in style may indicate a piece of work has been written by somebody else. This…

Contract cheating occurs when students outsource assessed work. In this study, we asked experienced markers from four disciplines to detect contract cheating in a set of 20 discipline-specific assignments. We then conducted a training workshop to improve their detection accuracy, and afterwards asked them to detect contract cheating in 20 new…

Contract cheating is the purchasing of custom-made university assignments with the intention of submitting them. Websites providing contract cheating services often claim this form of cheating is undetectable, and no published research has examined this claim. This paper documents a pilot study where markers were paid to mark a mixture of real…

Students use various licit and illicit substances to enhance their academic performance. As yet, no study has explored whether this is an issue of concern for those working in the higher education sector. This study aimed to explore study drug policy, regulatory environments and responses within Australian universities. Semi-structured interviews…

Bring-your-own-device electronic examinations (BYOD e-exams) are a relatively new type of assessment where students sit an in-person exam under invigilated conditions with their own laptop. Special software restricts student access to prohibited computer functions and files, and provides access to any resources or software the examiner approves.…