Contract cheating: a Canadian perspective

Contract cheating happens when a student has a third party complete academic work on their behalf. Students often purchase the work from Internet-based companies. Common examples of contract cheating include essay mills, custom writing services, and professional exam takers. Canada ranks among the top four countries from which students place online orders for completion of academic work, outpaced only by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. A Google search of “write my essay” and “Canada” in June 2018 rendered over 1.5 million results. Figure 1. Google search for “write my essay” and “Canada,” (24 June 2018). The Canadian ‘black market’ for academic work A single Google search cannot confirm actual prevalence. But even if only 1% of the search results are contract cheating services, they would represent 15,000 businesses whose customers include Canadian students. That is enough to raise concern. There may be a more accurate way to estimate the extent to which Canadian students buy academic work online. Curtis and Clare (2017) reported that an average of 3.5% of students admit to contract cheating. Using their study as a point of departure to extrapolate from national statistics data, we can estimate the extent of the problem in Canada. Table 1. An Estimation of the Possible Extent of Contact Cheating in Canadian Postsecondary Institutions This estimate of over 71,000 post-secondary students who engage in contract cheating in Canada has yet...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Open Access Publishing academic integrity Canada Contract cheating research integrity Source Type: blogs