How Common Is Commercial Contract Cheating in Higher Education and Is It Increasing? A Systematic Review

Abstract

Contract cheating, where students recruit a third party to undertake their assignments, is frequently reported to be increasing, presenting a threat to academic standards and quality. Many incidents involve payment of the third party, often a so-called "Essay Mill," giving contract cheating a commercial aspect. This study synthesized findings from prior research to try and determine how common commercial contract cheating is in Higher Education, and test whether it is increasing. It also sought to evaluate the quality of the research evidence which addresses those questions. Seventy-one samples were identified from 65 studies, going back to 1978. These included 54,514 participants. Contract cheating was self-reported by a historic average of 3.52% of students. The data indicate that contract cheating is increasing; in samples from 2014 to present the percentage of students admitting to paying someone else to undertake their work was 15.7%, potentially representing 31 million students around the world. A significant positive relationship was found between time and the percentage of students admitting to contract cheating. This increase may be due to an overall increase in self-reported cheating generally, rather than contract cheating specifically. Most samples were collected using designs which makes it likely that commercial contract cheating is under-reported, for example using convenience sampling, with a very low response rate and without guarantees of anonymity for participants. Recommendations are made for future studies on academic integrity and contract cheating specifically.

Academic integrity and contract cheating policy analysis of colleges in Ontario, Canada

“…The rate of contract cheating among students has been estimated to be 2-18% among high school students (Sisti 2007;Stoesz and Los, 2019) and 3.5-22% of post-secondary students (McCabe 2005;Hosney and Fatima 2014;Curtis and Clare 2017;Newton 2018). The drastic differences in these estimates may be an indication of early-stage inquiries into the topic that have become more refined as empirical research in the field has become more robust and rigorous, and larger in scale.…”

Interinstitutional perspectives on contract cheating: a qualitative narrative exploration from Canada

“…So to undertake our inquiry, we designed a qualitative action research SoTL project with an exploratory focus. Action research provided us with an approach for engaging in reflective inquiry for professional development and educational practice (McNiff, 2010(McNiff, , 2013(McNiff, , 2014Simmons, Eaton, McDermott, Jacobsen and Brown, 2017). Because so little research has been conducted on contract cheating in Canada (Eaton, 2018;Eaton & Edino, 2018) we chose an exploratory approach.…”

Are essay mills committing fraud? A further analysis of their behaviours vs the 2006 fraud act (UK)

“…Recent research published by Newton (2018) in Frontiers in Education, demonstrates that Essay Mills continue to thrive with students continuing to use their services. Anna…”