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…

This study examines the phenomenon of plagiarism and impersonation in online course assignments. Technological advancements, coupled with lower costs and accessibility, have made online courses and programs a practical option for higher education students. Unfortunately, the increasing online enrollment and advancing technology have allowed an…

Assignment outsourcing is an intractable challenge for higher education. While various academic and legislative approaches have sought to explain/respond to this problem, recent media, community, and government concerns suggest students are increasingly outsourcing assessments. This paper reports on the qualitative findings of an international…

Contract cheating providers exist as businesses with a single shared intention, to profit on a student's inability to fulfil academic requirements for themselves. For contract cheating providers to make money, the correct market conditions are required. First, providers need to be able to offer the expertise that students request. Second, students…

This article contributes to an emerging body of research on the role of assessment design in the prevention and detection of contract cheating. Drawing on the largest contract cheating dataset gathered to date (see cheatingandassessment.edu.au), this article examines the types of assignments and exams in which students self-reported having engaged…

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…

This study examines business students' learning and assessment under remote teachings during the COVID-19 pandemic in a well-established Finnish university. A survey method is used to collect information on 336 business students including 42 accounting students. As indicated by students' responses, a majority of the students succeeded in assessing…

Contract cheating is, potentially, a serious threat to the quality of higher education around the world. Prior research has focused on student perspectives and the companies themselves, but the staff view is poorly understood, despite staff being a major stakeholder with considerable influence over strategies designed to address contract cheating.…

This institutional self-study investigated the use of text-matching software (TMS) to prevent plagiarism by students in a Canadian university that did not have an institutional license for TMS at the time of the study. Assignments from a graduate-level engineering course were analyzed using iThenticate®. During the initial phase of the study,…

This study explored the adoption level of a specific plagiarism detection software by college professors in a classroom environment. As universities and colleges struggle with the issue of plagiarism and maintaining high standards of integrity, technology tools have been created and provided to assist faculty in identifying if a student has…

This study investigates unproctored assignment-based assessment implementation in an online teaching environment compared to on-site assessment. A mixed-method research approach was conducted with the participation of 284 English-major students, 6 teachers, and 4 experts at a university in Vietnam. Data collection instruments included a…

Contract cheating sites advertise that they provide high quality, undetectable, bespoke work delivered in a timely manner to students purchasing their assignments. This paper tests contract cheating sites' promises about the products they sell. We built on previous reported research examining contract cheating sites' persuasive features which were…

Academic dishonesty is pervasive on college campuses, but few researchers have explored students' situational decisions about cheating. This qualitative study explores influences on students' decisions about academic dishonesty, particularly how students' course contexts affect their decisions. The author found that course context factors heavily…

The delivery of online university courses has continued to grow for more than a decade. New advances in technology have made the efficient delivery of courses possible, as well as increasing the collections of tools for students to cheat. Cheating results in the atrophy of the student's academic integrity, it has the potential to damage a…

Best practices research on plagiarism in the University classroom shows that modifying assignments and classroom environment can have a positive effect on lowering a student's desire to cheat. James Lang suggests four features of a learning environment that can be fostered to ameliorate a student's desire to cheat: mastery of the material for its…