Raising Awareness on Contract Cheating –Lessons Learned from Running Campus-Wide Campaigns

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a case study approach to capture a time-series data from three years of a university campus's efforts to raise awareness by celebrating the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI)‘s International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating.

Abstract: Contract cheating is a growing menace that most academic institutions are grappling with globally. With governments now taking steps to help combat the industry and ban such services, it is also important to encourage students to stay away from such services through proactive strategies to raise awareness so that students stop using such services. This paper uses a case study approach to capture a time-series data from three years of a university campus’s efforts to raise awareness by celebrating the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI)‘s International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating. This is in order to explore if such campaigns can be used as tools to increase student understanding of contract cheating as an academic misconduct issue and what roles students can play in raising awareness among other students on contract cheating. Proposing to look at contract cheating as a social issue, the paper positions the misconduct as such and explores how awareness campaigns can help address contract cheating. Over the three years, results show steep increase in awareness of contract cheating, a type of academic misconduct, and that students themselves have a positive influence on other students when raising awareness. An interesting finding of the study is that graduated students have had an impact by showing responsibility to younger students and by actively denouncing contract cheating companies and their approaches on social media; thus providing solid evidence that awareness campaigns can help increase awareness which is the first step towards building a culture of integrity in any campus.

Figures

Figure 1: Categorizing impact of social issue

Figure 2: Categorizing impact of contract cheating (academic misconduct) as a social issue

Figure 4: Campaign questions card

Figure 5: Results across three years showing total number of students’ vs total number of students who were aware

Figure 6: Alumni evidence of going up against essay mills

Table 2: Student awareness across three years

Figure 3: Whiteboard campaign example

Table 1: Impact of known social issues on individual and beyond

Full text

University of Wollongong University of Wollongong
Research Online Research Online
University of Wollongong in Dubai - Papers University of Wollongong in Dubai
1-1-2020
Raising Awareness on Contract Cheating -Lessons Learned from Raising Awareness on Contract Cheating -Lessons Learned from
Running Campus-Wide Campaigns Running Campus-Wide Campaigns
Zeenath Reza Khan
University of Wollongong Dubai
, zeenath@uow.edu.au
Priyanka Hemnani
University of Wollongong Dubai
Sanjana Raheja
University of Wollongong Dubai
Je4n Joshi
Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/dubaipapers
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Khan, Zeenath Reza; Hemnani, Priyanka; Raheja, Sanjana; and Joshi, Je4n: Raising Awareness on Contract
Cheating -Lessons Learned from Running Campus-Wide Campaigns 2020.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/dubaipapers/1118
Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information
contact the UOW Library: research-pubs@uow.edu.au

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Raising awareness about contract cheating –
lessons learned from running campus-wide campaigns
Zeenath Reza Khan, University of Wollongong in Dubai, PO Box 20183, Dubai, UAE,
Priyanka Hemnani, University of Wollongong in Dubai, PO Box 20183, Dubai, UAE
Sanjana Raheja, University of Wollongong in Dubai, PO Box 20183, Dubai, UAE
Jefin Joshy, University of Wollongong in Dubai, PO Box 20183, Dubai, UAE
Email zeenathkhan@uowdubai.ac.ae, Tel 00971 50 3572921, ORCID ID 0000-0002-3386-4222
Abstract
Contract cheating is a growing menace that most academic institutions are grappling with globally. With
governments now taking steps to help combat the industry and ban such services, it is also important to encourage
students to stay away from such services through proactive strategies to raise awareness so that students stop using
such services.
This paper uses a case study approach to capture a time-series data from three years of a university campus’s efforts
to raise awareness by celebrating the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI)’s International Day of
Action Against Contract Cheating. This is in order to explore if such campaigns can be used as tools to increase
student understanding of contract cheating as an academic misconduct issue and what roles students can play in
raising awareness among other students on contract cheating. Proposing to look at contract cheating as a social issue,
the paper positions the misconduct as such and explore how awareness campaigns can help address contract
cheating. Over the three years, results show steep increase in awareness of contract cheating, a type of academic
misconduct, and that students themselves have a positive influence on other students when raising awareness. An
interesting finding of the study is that graduated students have had an impact by showing responsibility to younger
students and by actively denouncing contract cheating companies and their approaches on social media; thus
providing solid evidence that awareness campaigns can help increase awareness which is the first step towards
building a culture of integrity in any campus.
Keywords:
Contract Cheating, Academic Integrity, Campaigns, Integrity Culture, Middle East

Page 2 of 18
Raising awareness on contract cheating –
lessons learned from running campus-wide campaigns
Abstract
Contract cheating is a growing menace that most academic institutions are grappling with globally. With
governments now taking steps to help combat the industry and ban such services, it is also important to encourage
students to stay away from such services through proactive strategies to raise awareness so that students stop using
such services.
This paper uses a case study approach to capture a time-series data from three years of a university campus’s efforts
to raise awareness by celebrating the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI)’s International Day of
Action Against Contract Cheating. This is in order to explore if such campaigns can be used as tools to increase
student understanding of contract cheating as an academic misconduct issue and what roles students can play in
raising awareness among other students on contract cheating. Proposing to look at contract cheating as a social issue,
the paper positions the misconduct as such and explore how awareness campaigns can help address contract
cheating. Over the three years, results show steep increase in awareness of contract cheating, a type of academic
misconduct, and that students themselves have a positive influence on other students when raising awareness. An
interesting finding of the study is that graduated students have had an impact by showing responsibility to younger
students and by actively denouncing contract cheating companies and their approaches on social media; thus,
providing solid evidence that awareness campaigns can help increase awareness which is the first step towards
building a culture of integrity in any campus.
Keywords:
Contract Cheating, Academic Integrity, Campaigns, Integrity Culture, Middle East
1. Introduction
Trying to create a culture of integrity can feel like an uphill battle. Building a culture of integrity may be the best
weapon against academic misconduct (Khan, 2014; Peters, 2019). Student cheating is not a new phenomenon and
researchers and academics have grappled with this issue for generations. Every generation of teachers feel they are
having it worst, with newer, sneakier ways students cheat in and out of classrooms (Bowers, 1964; McCabe
&Bowers, 1994; Anderman et al, 1998; Callahan, 2004; Christensen-Hughes, & McCabe, 2006; Khan &
Balasubramanian, 2012). With the infiltration of technology in today’s blended classrooms, the challenges are as
complex as they are supposed to be varied (Khan & Balasubramanian, 2012; Khan, 2019). However, the problem
remains the same – that of loss of academic integrity inside classrooms and what that means for the greater society.
Academic misconduct has been defined as any action that gives a student an unfair advantage such as cheating in
exams, using resources not permitted, collaborating without consent, submitting work not done by themselves,
copying and pasting work from another source as their own, fabricating data, impersonating another student,
interfering or obstructing other students’ work and so on (UOW, 2019). Literature has captured umpteen amount of
statistics demonstrating the levels of cheating in schools, universities, entrance exams, and other forms of academic
misconduct. Incidences of misconduct as evidenced in literature was captured aptly in an extensive data compiled
by Dr. Donald McCabe at the International Centre for Academic Integrity. The dataset compiled showed survey
results of studies conducted between 2002 – 2015, and showed “64% of students admitted to cheating on a test,
58% admitted to plagiarism, and 95% said they participated in some form of cheating, whether it was on a test,
plagiarism or copying homework” (ICAI, 2019) This makes academic integrity a vital part of education system. As
academics we strive to instill the Fundamental Values as recognized by International Centre for Academic
Integrity, these being honesty, trust, fairness, responsibility, courage and respect (AcademicIntegrity.org; 2014).
But how do we go about instilling these values in our students?

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Literature has highlighted different ways schools and universities have attempted to understand why students
cheat (Khan, 2014; Simkin & McLeod, 2010; Yu, 2018) and how to detect and curb misconducts (Cutler, 2019;
McCabe & Katz, 2009; D’Souza & Siegfeldt, 2017).
With the onset of technology, Khan (2014) posited the impact of policy and university culture and value of
technology to ward off negative impact of technology, recognizing e-cheating as a predominantly prevalent one
since the increase in dependency on technology, adding to an exhaustive list of misconduct behaviors recognized
previously by Newstead et al (1996).
Of interest to this research is one type of academic misconduct – that of buying and selling assessments. Due to
proliferation of websites, buying and selling of assessments, known commonly as contract cheating (Clarke &
Lancaster, 2006), is “prevalent and difficult to detect” (Clarke & Lancaster, 2014, p 2). It would seem with the rise
of the internet, ease of setting up a website and e-commerce, essay mills have transformed into e-mills that are
rampant, mushrooming all over the digital space, flooding students’ mailboxes and hounding them on social media
(Clarke & Lancaster, 2013; Lancaster & Clarke, 2016; Wallace & Newton, 2014; Rigby et al., 2015; Foltynek &
Kralikova, 2018), thus creating an availability heuristic of readily available solutions to completing assessments, a
method through which the mind recollects and helps make fast decisions, albeit sometimes inaccurately (Fox,
2006).
To help deter students from contract cheating, although recent studies have attempted to aid academics through
researching areas such as legal approaches (Draper & Newton, 2017) detection (Rogerson, 2017), analyzing the
advertisements (Kaktins, 2018), so on, we believe the focus needs to be more proactive, than reactive. This is
because reactive response works only after an incident has occurred, thus becoming more “consequences or
reactions to” the behavior or issue (Champlin, 1991). Champlin also posits that reactive strategies aim to minimize
damage rather than prevent. Whereas, proactive strategies are preventive by nature, and help to “reduce the
likelihood of occurrence of challenging behavior [or issue]” (Champlin, 1991).
Thus, the research question we posed was “given that contract cheating is a global menace affecting the quality of
education in schools and universities, how can we step up our proactive efforts in mitigating contract cheating,
and empowering students with a culture of integrity?”
This paper looks at the case of one campus that has used systematic campaigning to test the awareness level of
student body on the issue of contract cheating by first looking at contract cheating as a social issue, then making
a case for awareness campaigns as proactive strategies and then testing the impact of such campaigns to create a
pathway to develop a culture of integrity.
2. Contract cheating – more than an academic issue
Known commonly now as contract cheating, essay mills are not new. Dating as far back as mid nineteenth century
where fraternity houses hosted essay mills in their basements and encouraged recycling of submitted essays, these
fraternity essay mills transformed into ghostwriting and the modern-day contract cheating that researchers and
academics are vehemently opposing, calling for bans on such practices, promotion of such services and illegalizing
such businesses (Singh & Remenyi, 2015).
Contract cheating has become prevalent globally, with universities trying to find ways to tackle it. Authors posit
that contract cheating, like other misconducts, is not only an academic issue, but also a social one. Social issue is
defined as:
“a condition… defined by considerable number of [people] as a deviation from some social norm which they
cherish” (Fuller & Myers, 1941, pp 320-21)
If we apply this definition to contract cheating (or any other misconduct), this is how it would map out:

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Considerable number of people = all academics, researchers (Lane, 2017; Dawson & Sutherland-Smith,
2018; Khomami, 2017; Grove, 2017; Marsh, 2017)
Social Norm = To be tested on learning outcomes through formative or summative assessments
Cherish = Stakeholders don’t consider buying essays favourable (Lane, 2017; Dawson & Sutherland-
Smith, 2018; Khomami, 2017; Grove, 2017; Marsh, 2017), rather academics, and community cherish
and want to see students display values such as truthfulness, honesty, courage, fairness, trust and
responsibility and respect (AcademicIntegrity.org, 2014)
Deviation = act of contract cheating
When applied as above, given the range of direct, long term and surrounding impacts of contract cheating and the
definition of social issue, for the purpose of this study, contract cheating may be considered as a social issue.
Looking closely at “social issue”, social issues typically have impact on the person involved (in this case, we will
define this person as the victim for reference purpose only), his/her family, friends, dependents, society. This is
demonstrated in the Table 1 with some examples and the subsequent Figure 1:
Table 1: Impact of known social issues on individual and beyond
Serial#
Social Issue
Impact on Victim
1
Bullying
➔ Insecurity and loneliness
➔ Poor mental health
➔ Aggressive behavior
➔ Depression
➔ Suicides
➔ Anxiety
(Juvonen, Graham & Schuster, 2006)
2
Drug
➔ Low self esteem
Addiction
➔ Depression
➔ Sensation seeking
➔ Lack of religious commitment
➔ Lack of purpose in life
➔ Disruptive life events
➔ Early use of alcohol
➔ Overdose could lead to death
(Newcomb, Maddahian & Bentler, 1986)
3
Alcoholism
➔ Impact on performance at school
➔ Neuroticism
➔ Low conscientiousness
➔ Low agreeableness