The highest estimates of the prevalence of commercial contract cheating in Australia come from self-report surveys, which suggest that around 2% of students engage in commercial contract cheating during their higher education studies. However, self-report surveys are limited in that participants under-report socially-undesirable behaviours. In…

In this article we report findings from a review of universities' academic integrity policies in Ontario, Canada. The research team systematically extracted, reviewed, and evaluated information from policy documents in an effort to understand how these documents described contract cheating in Ontario universities (n = 21). In all, 23 policies were…

Contract cheating occurs when a student outsources their assessment to a third party, regardless of the third party's relationship with the student, or whether money is exchanged. In higher education, there is a widespread belief that assessment design is a solution to the problem of contract cheating and that authentic assessment tasks are…

The use of essay mills and other online sites to buy academic work is a global industry estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The practice is known as "contract cheating" (Clarke & Lancaster, 2006), and it occurs when a student engages with a third party to complete academic work on their behalf. Canada lags behind…