News from the world of academic integrity

The school year is getting underway in the Northern Hemisphere, so there have been a number of links twittered or linked to in the past week that need linking:

• Radio Free Europe published an article by Alan Crosby: Montenegro Education Council Members Resign, Learn Lesson About Plagiarism. It seems their curriculum was plagiarized from the Croation one without reference. 
• In Australia the Daily Telegraph authors Chris Harris & Bruce McDougall report on a primary school teacher caught offering contract cheating: Cheating students on marketplace website offering to buy or sell work. It may seem that the practice of contract cheating is rather widespread in Australia, but I believe that is because there are researchers actively looking there. I did a quick search on eBay and found lots of offers and people looking for help in Berlin...
• Linked from another article I was reading was an article by Daniel Etchells from The Sport Digest from 2016 about South Korea: Moon Dae-sung Suspended as IOC Member Over Plagiarism. It seems that Moon, who had won an Olympic gold medal in Athens (2004) in taekwondo, had been awarded a doctorate in 2007 with a thesis on taekwondo. In 2014 Kookmin University rescinded his doctorate. Moon defended himself in the appeal, stating that he had the permission (!) of the author of the text he used to use it. 
• The Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan reported in June 2017 that there has been a record number of university students sanctioned for academic misconduct in 2016. There were a total of 33 universities questioned by the news agency TT, they reported 733 sanctions (an average of 2.5 per 1000 full-time equivalent students). In 2013 there were only 533 sanctions meted out. The increase in serious cases registered and sanctioned may be due to teachers doing more checking or getting better at discovering students who cheat on exams or plagiarize.

UK Report on Ghostwriting

​​The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK (QAA) has just released a public report about ghostwriting: "Plagiarism in Higher Education - Custom essay writing services: an exploration and next steps for the UK higher education sector." It gives an excellent overview of the problem of bespoke essays or contract cheating and also discusses the bleak legal outlook on the problem. They also discuss the legal situation in a few other countries. New Zealand appears to have had regulations about this in their Education Act from 1989, making it illegal to provide or advertise ghostwriting services.

The report summarizes what needs to be done (p. 16) as

Education. Deterrence. Detection.

That is, students and educators need to be informed about good scientific practice, assessments have to be desiged so as to deter academic misconduct, and universities must act to detect (and sanction) such misconduct when it occurs.

I highly recommend reading this report, including the case studies that document the advertising text used by five essay mills, with price information. It is a sobering read.

Contract Cheating

Some interesting articles have shown up recently about the topic of "contract cheating" - students using Web 2.0 bidding sites to find a lowest bidder willing to do their homework for them for a price. Often, the coders or writers are to be found in developing countries.

• Thomas Bartlett, Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply - From Virginia to Manila: on the trail of papers for cash, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009
• Jessica Shepard, History essay in the making, The Guardian, May 6, 2008
• Robert Clarke and Thomas Lancaster, Contract Cheating Information Centre
• Clark and Lancaster have some great resources available, for example these screen shots of contract cheating in action or a list of 138 (!!) sites that offer the possibility of hiring a contractor. They have also set up an entry in Wikipedia on the topic.
  

In German, Spiegel Online author Sebastian Wieschowski has also reported on this phenomenon: Bestnoten mit Billigcode aus Bangladesch (good grades with cheap code from Bangladesch).