Preventing online shopping for completed assessments: Protecting students by blocking access to contract cheating websites on institutional networks

Contract Cheating in Canada: A Comprehensive Overview

“…As a result, three new provincial networks were established in the six months following the symposium: the Alberta Council on Academic Integrity (ACAI); the British Columbia Academic Integrity Network (BC AIN); and the Manitoba Academic Integrity Network (MAIN) (see Stoesz et al, 2019b). The Manitoba group quickly established themselves as national leaders with a multi-institutional collaborative project to block the uniform resource locators (URLs) of contract cheating websites from being accessed on campuses (Seeland et al, 2020a;. A few provinces to the west, the Alberta Council on Academic Integrity (Eaton et al, 2020a) established a working group (similar to AICO's sub-committee) to focus specifically on contract cheating.…”

Pay-To-Pass: Evolving Online Systems That Undermine the Integrity of Student Work

“…Given how pervasive these sites are in the post-secondary context in Canada and around the world, it may be more appropriate to consider a broader response. For example, post-secondary institutions in Manitoba, Canada block access to these sites on campus computer networks, advising students that the websites are in violation of the institutional academic integrity policy and re-directing them to academic integrity resources (Seeland et al, 2020); the University of Calgary has recently taken similar action. In the United States, educational publishers have successfully used judicial paths to be awarded injunctions against websites posting textbooks, test answers and solution manuals (Pearson, 2020), reflecting another avenue for addressing these websites.…”