Contract cheating, also known as ghostwriting, is broadly defined as students outsourcing their academic work for a third party to complete. Equivalent to hiring a stand-in to take your place, it bypasses authentic participation in learning and poses a significant threat to academic honesty and integrity.
Experiencing an uptick during the rise of remote learning, the contact cheating landscape is continuing to evolve. At a time when students now have powerful and instantaneous content generation in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) at their disposal, there is speculation on how generative AI will affect the practice of contract cheating, and specifically, the demand for commercial contract cheating services like essay mills.
Viewed as a qualitatively different and more serious form of academic misconduct, contract cheating warrants greater awareness and understanding so the education community can better inform their approach to stopping it. In this blog, we explore what contract cheating entails, how it disconnects students from the learning process, and strategies to help educators offset its risk.
What is contract cheating?
Contract cheating occurs when students engage a third party to complete an assignment, which they then represent as their own work (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016). It can occur when someone other than the student—whether a contracted writer from an essay mill service, a friend, or even a family member— completes an assignment on their behalf. Downloading a paper from a “free” essay site also counts as contract cheating.
Contract cheating can be done as a “favor” with no exchange of money. Or it can involve trade-in-kind, like when a student swaps papers with another student. One scenario may see a student ask for help from a friend or family member who, with the intention of helping, may write the paper for the student. While powered by good intentions, this is still contract cheating and a form of academic misconduct.
In the context of a student’s academic integrity journey, resorting to contract cheating is a big step backwards because it demonstrates intent, as opposed to an inadvertent or accidental breach of academic policy. Perhaps most worrying is when students engage an essay mill to write their assignment in exchange for money; an illegal service in some country jurisdictions—laws which, to be clear, criminalize the provider and not the student. This commercial layer introduces a host of risks, even including student extortion and blackmail, meaning it not only threatens learning outcomes and institutional reputation, but most importantly, student welfare.
How does contract cheating manifest in student work?
Like many forms of academic misconduct, stressed students without a deep understanding of academic integrity are vulnerable to contract cheating. When these students fall behind in academic work, for whatever reason, they may feel scared or uncomfortable reaching out to educators and instead believe that external help is the answer to meeting expectations and passing a unit or course.
Contract cheating and its commercial form, is of particular concern for higher education where there’s greater student expectation and autonomy, and the stakes for success or failure are much higher. International students or non-native English speakers have also reported a higher than average risk profile for contract cheating in some research (Curtis, et al., 2021) stemming from language barriers and cultural differences that may impart a real or perceived lack of academic preparedness.
Such student confusion and desperation is ripe for essay mills to market themselves to students on social media and other online venues via “bots”, offering “help” at the eleventh hour. Essay mill marketing takes advantage of student ambiguity with respect to academic integrity, in ostentatious ways. “Our essays are plagiarism-free,” they often tout. While technically true (they are, after all, often written from scratch and not plagiarized), the mills don’t make clear that even if the essay is void of plagiarism, contract cheating itself is academic dishonesty and undeserving of academic credit.
In terms of output and educators’ ability to identify signs of contract cheating, how convincing are purchased essays? Essays written by essay mills often do not “sound” like the student’s work, and may show a marked difference in tone or voice. They may also contain florid language without much in the way of deep content or analysis. Additionally, they may not even properly answer the provided question or prompt. Exposing contract cheating material is reliant upon an educator’s sound understanding of student proficiency, along with document metadata to help validate suspicions of contract cheating.
How does contract cheating impact academic integrity?
When students aren’t doing their own work and delegate someone else to complete their assignments, they’re not learning the material. Students who turn to contract cheating because they’re struggling and stressed aren’t closing learning gaps, and in turn, educators aren’t enabling accurate feedback loops to support learning outcomes.
Contract cheating is, simply put, a dismissal of the learning process. Not only does it undermine assessment of learning, contract cheating erodes learning environments, damages student-teacher relationships, jeopardizes the academic reputations of students, faculty, and institutions, and indicates future workplace dishonesty (Guerrero-Dib et al., 2020).
Disengaged students may perceive contract cheating on a few assignments as harmless, believing it has little impact on their overall success. Although it might achieve the result on the surface–and even then there’s a huge question mark over quality—it lacks authenticity and meaning. It cuts to the heart of academic honesty as not an avoidance of a penalty, but rather, a commitment to fair and genuine outcomes—the absence of which can lead to a disconnect between a student’s actual skills and their academic progress.
To understand contract cheating’s impact on academic integrity, we must also understand its prevalence. Newton’s systematic research review of self-reported contract cheating samples between 2014 to 2018, found an incidence rate of 15.7% of students admitting to paying someone else to undertake their work, “potentially representing 31 million students around the world” (2018). This data and ongoing research into contract cheating during the pandemic period and beyond, points to the sheer scale and gravity of the problem.
How is contract cheating evolving?
Contract cheating is a form of misconduct that existed long before the internet, but it took on new life with the advent of eCommerce technology. It’s now facing another upheaval with the arrival of mainstream generative AI use.
If you think about contract cheating as (previously) the only way for students to produce content quickly without personally mastering the material, AI-powered LLMs are a game-changer, competing on speed and ease of use. It’s natural to assume spells the end of traditional contract cheating via essay mills, but wait, not so fast! Have you heard about the rise of AI-facilitated contract cheating?
It’s no secret that AI output can leave a lot to be desired; particularly when it comes to unique, human-sounding text. As education rethinks traditional student assessment in response to AI, students are getting the message that educators now favor reflective, authentic tasks that capture uniquely human input. Add to this, the bid by essay mills and ghostwriters to stay relevant, and you get AI-to-human-rewriter services. These have emerged to cater to new demand, taking AI-written content from paying individuals and editing it to humanize the content and make it less obviously AI generated.
Intended to improve its quality and originality, or adapt it to a specific style or voice, this method can also be used in an attempt to avoid plagiarism and evade AI text detection used in academic integrity software.
Ways to mitigate contract cheating
Institutions and faculty play a critical role in preventing contract cheating from occurring, and it begins with building an awareness and understanding of contract cheating. When there is silence around contract cheating, the cost of contract cheating may appear low to students. Research has shown that “more than 50% of students would outsource their work if the reward, perhaps in the form of higher marks or passing an assessment they would otherwise have failed, was relatively high and the cost relatively low” (Lancaster, 2020).
Reinforcing shared values and peer accountability around ethics and learning is another important tactic. It’s supported by research by Rundle, et al. (2019), who surveyed university students and concluded that the most strongly endorsed reasons for not engaging in contract cheating were ‘morality and norms’, followed by ‘motivation for learning’, with ‘fear of punishment and detection third’.
Furthermore, thoughtful assessment design is crucial to mitigating contract cheating and enabling later detection. Although institutions can’t completely ‘design out’ cheating, authentic assessments and those that focus on unique classroom discussion and course content deter contract cheating because third parties don’t have access to that information and context.
Bottom line: building a deep understanding of academic integrity and helping students understand contract cheating as a form of dishonesty prevents future misconduct.
When students have a sophisticated understanding of academic integrity, plagiarism, and contract cheating and how they relate to each other, they are also far less likely to fall prey to essay mills that normalize contract cheating and position their services as “help.”
Here are some additional techniques to combat contract cheating:
- Align course content to assessment; test what is taught, teach what is tested, to reduce potential learning gaps that cause students to resort to external help.
- Assign formative low-stakes assessments and enable feedback loops to make students feel seen and supported throughout the learning process.
- Arrange in-class writing assignments to provide a baseline assessment against which to compare future assessments. By emphasizing drafts, the writing process can be made more transparent and helps mitigate third-party interference.
How to overcome contract cheating once it occurs
So, what about detection when prevention tactics fail? Educator intuition and knowledge of their students’ capabilities is powerful in identifying when an assignment is unlikely to be a student’s own work, however it is not foolproof; especially amid the pressures of large class sizes.
Add to this a ‘revolving door’ of graders in higher education, and it warrants specialized training to identify the signs of contract cheating and pursue an investigation. An Australian study by Dawson & Sutherland-Smith (2019) found that when alerted to contract cheating and trained to detect it, graders’ detection accuracy increased from 58% to 82%.
Once contract cheating is suspected, educators then face the burden of proof to collect and assemble evidence which is a challenging and labor-intensive exercise. Decision support in the form of document metadata, such as the time, date, and location of document creation, the file’s creator, and any font manipulations, can be critical to the investigative process. The Authorship tool within Turnitin Originality has been proven to assist educators in surfacing contract cheating insights and evidence for instructors and administrators.
Finally, once a case of contract cheating has been substantiated, there is further work in terms of student remediation. Ideally, a contract cheating case should trigger a ‘restorative justice’ or educative approach that aims to change the student trajectory from one of repeat misconduct to one of growth and authentic learning. And to minimize and indeed repair harm in disciplinary action that can affect a student’s relationship to others and learning itself.
Overview: the impact of contract cheating on learning
Contract cheating or academic ghostwriting is a serious threat to integrity and learning, and as it evolves in the face of changing technology and practices, it remains a widespread and pressing issue, affecting students, classrooms, and institutions globally.
While governments worldwide increasingly look to outlaw commercial contract cheating providers and stop the service at the source, educators must raise awareness and address the root cause of student misconduct with a holistic approach to academic integrity that disincentivizes contract cheating.
In addition to recognising student risk factors and learning to identify contract cheating to protect fair learning outcomes, educators must also focus on turning these incidents into teachable moments that set students on the right path; towards making meaningful progress in reducing contract cheating.