Earlier in the year we saw a WA parliamentary committee unpack claims by WA member of parliament Barry Urban regarding his supposed entitlement to military honours and academic credentials.
SMH today reports that WA Police have charged Urban
with 12 offences after an investigation by the Major Fraud Squad. ... The maximum sentence he is facing is seven years in prison.
Darling Range MP Barry Urban quit parliament in May after a damning privileges committee report.
Police said he had been charged with five counts of utter a forged document, one count of attempted fraud and one count of forge a record.
He is also facing five counts of giving false evidence before a parliamentary committee.
"The five counts of utter a forged document, and one count each of attempted fraud and forge a record relate to materials and information that the man allegedly provided during applications involving WA Police Force," WA Police spokeswoman Susan Usher said.‘Just turn to us’: the persuasive features of contract cheating websites' by Susan Rowland, Christine Slade, Kai-Sheng Wong and Brooke Whiting in (2018) 43(4) Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 652-665 comments
Academic integrity is important to universities and students must abide by codes of academic conduct around assessment. Students are, however, subject to multiple pressures around assessment, some of which can push them to cheat. Modern contract cheating websites are the fronts for sophisticated, commercial operations that offer individually written assessment items for a fee; to combat their use we need a better understanding of the tools they use to persuade students to become customers. In this study we examined the persuasive features of 11 highly visible contract cheating websites and mapped these features to a previously used persuasiveness framework. We find that contract-cheating websites use a variety of credibility, interactive and informative features designed to persuade students to use their services. In addition, the sites offer low-cost, customisable products available in very short timeframes. We suggest ways in which educators can encourage academic integrity by talking with their students about how the websites promulgate their ‘just turn to us’ message.The authors state
Maintaining high standards of academic integrity through addressing student dishonesty in assessment is an important and long-standing tradition in universities. Recently, however, universities are discovering the difficulty of both detecting and policing the submission of assessment items bought from contract-cheating websites. Contract-cheating websites provide written work-for-purchase; student use of these sites is a global issue that is on the rise, with students across academic disciplines and academic levels in both online and face-to-face courses using services (Lancaster and Clarke 2014; Rogerson 2014). The extent of these practices is unknown, but an analysis of plagiarised text submitted to Turnitin in 2011–2012 suggests that contract cheating is widespread (Newton and Lang 2016). Students who use the sites ‘enjoy the anonymity of the Internet’ and its associated encrypted payment systems and cloud technologies; essentially, students can purchase ‘“ghosts” [who] take exams and quizzes, write papers, and complete entire classes’ (Fisher et al. 2016, 62). Clearly such a sophisticated system is both appealing to students and very hard for universities to regulate.
This statement from Fisher et al. addresses a situation where students who use contract-cheating websites know that they are cheating and deliberately set out to cheat. In this study, however, we are interested in how a student might be persuaded to use a contract-cheating website to obtain assessable work. We take the stance that some students fall victim to the persuasive devices used by the sites and thus choose to purchase work they later submit for assessment. The purpose of this paper is to share insights from a small study at a large metropolitan university that examined the persuasive features and services offered by contract-cheating websites that are highly visible to Australian university students. We ask the questions. (1) What persuasive features are present on contract-cheating websites? (2) How do these features map to an established framework for website persuasiveness? (3) What other persuasive offerings are made to students who engage with contract-cheating websites? In addition, we consider how these features may influence students to use contract-cheating websites, and how we can use our understanding of the sites to help students avoid the pitfall of website-mediated cheating.'The infernal business of contract cheating: understanding the business processes and models of academic custom writing sites' by Cath Ellis, Ian Michael Zucker, and David Randall in (2018) 14(1) International Journal for Educational Integrity 1 comments
.While there is growing awareness of the existence and activities of Academic Custom Writing websites, which form a small part of the contract cheating industry, how they work remains poorly understood. Very little research has been done on these sites, probably because it has been assumed that it is impossible to see behind their firewalls and password protection. We have found that, with some close scrutiny, it is indeed possible to find some ‘cracks’ in these sites through which we can look to gain insights into the business processes that operate within them. We have reverse engineered the business processes that operate within some of these sites. From this we have also been able to identify three different business models that are supported by these sites. Our analysis supports important findings about how these sites operate that can be used to inform future strategies to detect and deter contract cheating.The authors
Contract cheating occurs when a student procures a third party (who knows about and benefits from the transaction) to produce academic work (that is usually, but not always assessable work) that the student then submits to an educational institution as if it were their own. It constitutes a form of plagiarism: presenting someone else’s words and/or ideas as your own without appropriate attribution. The contract can be either paid or unpaid; paid work obviously involves payment in money, but unpaid work could involve favours and other forms of mutual obligation (Lancaster and Clarke 2014a). While there is a widespread perception that contract cheating is a recent phenomenon, as Bertram Gallant points out in her history of academic misconduct, it is probably one of the oldest forms of cheating there is (Bertram Gallant 2008). The way that contract-cheating transactions occur, however, has changed over time. The most recent changes have been a result of emerging technologies that facilitate new ways to procure and produce bespoke academic work.
It is likely that contract cheating is not well understood by many of the academic staff responsible for marking and administering student academic work in educational institutions. This is hardly surprising: contract cheating is, by its very nature, covert and duplicitous. Along side this low level of awareness, there are not, as yet, tools that can effectively and efficiently detect contract cheating at the point of submission. Most institutions will have had some experience of investigating and penalising students for contract cheating and in some instances these have been reported in the media (Jacks 2016). There is a growing concern across the Higher Education sector that the number of instances being detected is considerably smaller than the volume of work being procured, produced and submitted to institutions for assessment. Concomitantly, there is almost certainly a widespread perception amongst students who are currently or who are contemplating cheating in this way that the likelihood of their being caught and penalised is very small indeed. Rigby et al. make the important point that in the contract cheating market place ‘the demand for essays involves the interplay of risk, penalties and the payoffs and the ethics, norms and risk preferences of the individual facing the option to buy’ (Rigby et al. 2015 p23). A low risk of detection is, therefore, almost certainly an important influencing factor for at least some students. Macdonald and Carroll are at pains to point out that detection alone is not an adequate solution to the problem of academic misconduct (Macdonald and Carroll 2006). Detection, however, can contribute in useful ways to a holistic approach to deterrence and is therefore a critical part of the management of academic integrity in any educational institution. The premise of this paper is that in order to improve detection, it is first important to understand better how the business of contract cheating works.
There are several ways in which contract cheating transactions take place. In his 2009 paper “Contract Cheating: A New Phenomenon in Cyber-Plagiarism” Mahmood divides the contract cheating problem into five segments: bespoke essay sites, using friends and family, discussion sites, tutorial sites and auction sites (Mahmood 2009). In their more recent paper, Newton and Lang also divide the problem into five sections that are slightly different to Mahmood’s: academic custom writing, online labour markets, pre-written essay banks, file-sharing sites and paid exam takers (Newton and Lang 2015). This paper suggests that neither of these views provide a fully comprehensive description of the different segments of contract cheating and that it is useful to combine them to identify instead six segments: family and friends; academic custom writing sites; legitimate learning sites (eg. file sharing, discussion and microtutoring sites); legitimate non-learning sites (eg. freelancing sites and online auction sites); paid exam takers; and pre-written essay banks. It is on the second of these segments – academic custom writing sites – that this paper focuses its attention.
There is a growing body of scholarly work on contract cheating. To date the bulk of it has been undertaken by Clarke and Lancaster who have focussed their attention on the use of legitimate freelancing and auction sites for the purposes of contract cheating (see Clarke & Lancaster, 2006, 2007, 2013; Lancaster & Clarke, 2014a, 2014b). Wallace and Newtown have also investigated the speed of production of contract cheating procured and produced through these types of site (Wallace and Newton 2014). The scholarly work on academic custom writing sites has considered such things as the legality of the transactions (Newton and Lang 2015; Draper et al. 2017), the quality of work being produced (Lines 2016), the writers who produce the work (Bartlett 2009; Sivasubramaniam et al. 2016), the ability of markers to detect essays purchased from these sites (Dawson and Sutherland-Smith 2017) and the variety of features used by the sites to persuade students to use their services (Rowland et al. 2017). This paper offers some initial findings that have resulted from a close examination of a selection of sites associated with academic custom writing.
This paper does not include any information that specifically identifies any of these sites in order to avoid promoting any individual companies (see Draper et al. 2017). Information relating to these sites has been made available to the reviewers and also to the Australian Tertiary Education Quality Standards Authority (TEQSA) and the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) in the United Kingdom. The analysis is based on the examination of these sites in particular and this paper makes no claims that these findings represent the academic custom writing industry or the contract-cheating problem as a whole. The analysis does, however, offer a useful window into part of one segment of the industry.
