Contract Cheating On The Rise, Here In The UAE
If a student pays for, or gets someone else to write their essays for them, often in exchange for money, it is then referred to as “contract cheating”. This practice – which has gained more prominence as technology advances – is a 21st century issue, which has the potential to breed a generation of e-cheaters.
Dr Zeenath Khan, a UAE education expert and professor of cyber ethics and academic integrity at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, has said dozens of easily accessible “essay writing for cash” websites are profiting from learners taking shortcuts to success.
She said “that is a real problem as students then think it is OK for somebody else to do a writing project for them, which can mushroom into a habit of getting people to do their work”.
But Knowing Why Learners Cheat is Crucial
Dr Thomas Lancaster, a senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London, has carried out several studies into academic integrity.
As part of his research, he identified “thousands of requests from students covering literally any academic subject”.
“There are lots of reasons why students engage in contract cheating,” he said.
“Often it’s because of pressure. They are busy working and cannot concentrate on their assessments. Sometimes they want to get a higher mark. Sometimes it is just out of desperation.”
“When we think of contract cheating, we tend to think of third parties being online services but actually, oftentimes, it could be a family member or friend that ends up completing work or projects for students,” said Dr. Zeenath.
In a recent article on how students turn to essay mills to help them cheat by the BBC, “Chris wrote an essay for someone else, he was paid in food. A friend said his student girlfriend needed help, so Chris agreed to proofread her essay. But it needed more than an edit – “the logic was too messy” – so he rewrote the whole thing.
It did the job: the essay was good and the student got a high grade. Chris’s friend was pleased too. “He treated me to hotpot in Singapore – that was the first time I’d been to a hotpot restaurant,” he recalls.
Then the student asked him to help her with another assignment. “I said: ‘I can’t eat hotpot every day, I should charge a price.’ Then she introduced me to her classmates and that’s how everything began,” says Chris.
Today, he runs what’s known as an ‘essay mill’ – a highly lucrative business writing assignments for students struggling to complete them on their own.
Defeat the Cheat
Crossman cites in a research published by Swansea University indicating up to one in seven students around the world might be cheating in this way. It’s not a new phenomenon, he adds, but one that has greatly increased in scale due to advances in technology and how essay mills have harnessed them.
Crossman says his organisation has written to relevant tech players to ask them to block paid-for advertising for essay mills. He says some social media firms, notably Google, have stopped essay mills advertising through them in the UK at least, but there’s been no similar clampdown from Facebook. And despite legislation in a few US states, New Zealand and imminently the Republic of Ireland, essay mills do remain legal throughout most parts of the developed world.
For students, the consequences of handing in work that someone else has done can be life changing.
It is known as academic misconduct and can lead to qualifications being cancelled, or students being asked to leave university.
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