campusreview.com.au
Recent research – especially the research coming out of
Australia – indicates that nearly 6 per cent of students admit to
contract cheating. It might not seem like a large number, but as a
proportion of the 1.5 million university students in Australia … we’re
talking about nearly 100,000 students that admit to engaging in
behaviours like contract cheating.
The proposed legislation has been welcomed by universities, but
there is a section in the new laws that seems a bit broad to many in
the sector. They are concerned about students receiving low-level
feedback from say a parent or friend. What’s your opinion on that?
First of all, let me just say that I agree with universities. I also
welcomed this legislative approach to this issue. I think it sends
a very powerful signal not only to the commercial providers of
contracting services but to the sector and the students as well that
contracting will not be tolerated.
But I think with regards to your question, it’s definitely something
we do have to consider, and possibly work with the sector and the
universities to see what can be improved.
But overall, legislation is only part of the holistic, comprehensive
approach to eliminating or reducing contract cheating. We have to
think about things like pedagogy, like technology in the detection
and deterrent as well. You can’t just focus on legislation, because
unless you address all of the other factors that contribute to the rise
in contract cheating of the students going to those sites, or going
to other students, or services that provide a paid service, then
legislation itself will become meaningless.
What difficulties do universities face in dealing with contract
cheating, particularly in identifying and addressing it with students?
Contract cheating is overall extremely difficult to detect and to
form an allegation for. What a lot of my customers at Universities
Australia say is that they struggle with the time and resources when
it comes to the investigation. There’s also an issue with the market
and educators, but quite often they’re not necessarily trained to
picking up those signals that something might be wrong with the
work submitted by the students.
So unless a marker or an educator feels empowered to bring
something like a contract cheating issue or suspicion forward, then
it might not even be picked up, let alone investigated.
Investigation itself is an extremely lengthy process. Unless you
have the proverbial silver bullet – so a receipt with a student’s
name on it saying, “Hey, I know this student’s contract cheating”
– it’s more around picking and collecting evidence to form proof
to then have that balance of probability that yes, the student has
contract‑cheated.
It’s a very unique form of cheating. It’s quite often an original
piece of work, so it’s hard to then utilise the technology that exists
when it comes to text matching, because it will not actually match
any text that universities usually match students’ work to.
Again, we’re talking about people, we’re talking about the time
it takes to investigate and collect that evidence and then form an
allegation against a student. And really, it’s giving that confidence
to educators and investigators and empowering them to bring
those cases forward.
So educators need a streamlined, easy-to-use process or piece of
technology. What kinds of technology are out there?
Really there’s very little technology that exists to assist with this
policy & reform
problem. When we’re talking about detection, we really still rely
on the academics, on the educators, on markers to pick those
nuances in students’ writing to say, “Hey, there’s something wrong
with this assignment.”
When they deal with large class sizes, they might not be
familiar with students’ writing styles per se. This is what one of
our customers said to us back in 2015: “We’ve got this problem.
Contract cheating is an issue. We need something to help us
identify work that has the potential of being contract-cheated.”
That’s prompted us to really work alongside our customers
worldwide but also specifically in Australia to research the
problem, to research how educators and how academic integrity
investigators actually approach potential contract cheating.
And how we can bring technology to assist in the process, to
streamline it, to take that manual aspect of it to help with the time
management of the issue itself.
After a couple of years, we were satisfied and we received
feedback from the customers that we had a piece of technology
that could assist in really streamlining the investigation process
and giving that confidence in the evidence collecting and the sort
of evidence that investigators can use to form an allegation for
contract cheating.
Are these contract cheating services expensive and is the work
provided always original?
Contract cheating work is often original, but not always – you get
what you paid for. We know from the research being done that
some papers can be bought for $7 or $40. It’s not necessarily very
expensive, which again, obviously means that it’s easily accessible
to students. But quite often the quality the students receive is not
very great, so that’s a signal in itself.
But overall, yes, quite often that work is original. Writers learn
as they go as well, so they employ several tactics to avoid detection
by text matching software by using indirect quotes, using those
specific sources that are unlikely to be used in text matching
software. So their aim is to bring the similarity score down as low
as possible.
But then it’s also counterproductive, because what we always
say to our customers is that a certain level of matching is expected.
That’s what text matching is. So, if you have a case of a 0 per cent
match, that’s a potential red flag. That could be an indication that
We’re talking about nearly 100,000
university students in Australia that admit to
engaging in behaviours like contract cheating.
there’s something very wrong with the paper or with the student’s
work because it’s been really worked to bring that similarity score
down as low as possible.
In principle, what we are trying to do with Authorship Investigate,
which is this new technology we came up with in partnership, is
look at the shift in student writing style. We are employing natural
language processing as well as a forensic linguistic analysis to
really help determine whether there is something different in the
students’ work across the board. ■
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