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Attributing Contract Cheating Through the Turnitin Text

Matching ServiceDr. Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke

RESCON 2014

Monday, 15 December 2014

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Our Involvement With Research Into Academic Integrity

Dr. Thomas Lancaster

Senior Lecturer in Computing

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

PhD “Effective And Efficient Plagiarism Detection”

Programme Leader BSc Computer Science

Robert Clarke

Educational Consultant at SCL

Visiting Lecturer/Former Principal Lecturer

30 Years Experience Teaching At BCU

Has Collected Over 25,000 Attempts By Students Worldwide At Contract Cheating

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Working Definition Of Contract Cheating

A student uses a third party to have a bespokepiece of assessed work created for them

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Some Of The Sources A Student May Use For Contract Cheating

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Nothing New… Just Easier…

Observation From Student Taking Courses At Santa Monica College In 1998

“Class would be at 9 a.m. Papers were promised for before class, and students would wait on the front steps of the building. The guy would come and call [the students'] names, handing out papers in front of the building!”

http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=CRS19950531.2.2

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The Challenge Of Contract Cheating = Attribution

BBC South East Today – 9 September 2014

Contract Cheating produces original work, so we would not expect attempts to be attributed when running work through the Turnitin text matching service

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More Formal Definition Of Attribution

The challenging process where a contract cheating detective tries to identify the university that student requests for contract cheating found online are fromMost of our research is based around the Freelancer.com agency site

This provides a visible request from a student to have an assignment completed on their behalf

Lancaster, T and Clarke, R (2012). Dealing With Contract Cheating: A Question Of Attribution; 1st Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Imperial College, London, April 2012.

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Some Success

Running the information that a student supplies when requesting original work through Turnitin has started to show interesting results for a small number cases

107 out of 369 (29.0%) of requests that could not be manually attributed by a contract cheating detective, were found through trace evidence when running the information supplied by a student through Turnitin

Lancaster, T. and Clarke, R. (2014), Using Turnitin As A Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating; 3rd Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, April 2014.

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Turnitin Example #1 Of Successful Attribution

Large match to assignment brief

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Turnitin Example #2 Of Successful Attribution

Multiple small hits from the same source

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Turnitin Example #3 Of (Delayed) Successful Attribution

No matches when first posted

But received request to view from another university when it matched one of

their assignments 2 months later

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Turnitin Example #4 Of Failed Attribution

Multiple sources for

EdExcel courses

Example of

“false positive” matches

More examples at http://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLancaster/lancaster-clarke-stemcontractcheatingpresentation

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Recommendations For Students And Staff

Student Recommendation - Turnitin needs to continue to be used by default to check all student work at Birmingham City University

Supports and protects our students

Ensures that hard working students are not disadvantaged for employability when compared with students who may “get away” with cheating

Helps to build up the national database of assessments needed for attribution

Staff Recommendation - Academics should load all of their assignment briefs into Turnitin

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Further Resources

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References For Our Contract Cheating Work

Lancaster, T. and Clarke, R. (2015), Contract Cheating – The Outsourcing Of Assessed Student Work, in Handbook of Academic Integrity, Bretag, T. (editor): SpringerReference.

Lancaster, T. and Clarke, R. (2014), An Observational Analysis Of The Range And Extent Of Contract Cheating From Online Courses Found On Agency Websites; 8th International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (CISIS 2014), Birmingham City University, UK, July 2014.

Lancaster, T. and Clarke, R. (2014), An Initial Analysis Of The Contextual Information Available Within Auction Posts On Contract Cheating Agency Websites, 28th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, University of Victoria, May 2014

Lancaster, T. and Clarke, R. (2014), Using Turnitin As A Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating; 3rd Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, April 2014.

Clarke, R. and Lancaster, T. (2013). Commercial Aspects Of Contract Cheating; 8th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, July 2013.

Lancaster, T and Clarke, R (2012). Dealing With Contract Cheating: A Question Of Attribution; 1st Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Imperial College, London, April 2012.

Lancaster, T and Clarke, R (2010). Staff-Led Individualised Assessment – A Case Study; 11th Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Information and Computer Sciences, Durham University, August 2010.

Lancaster, T and Clarke, R (2008). How to Succeed at Cheating Without Really Trying: Five Top Tips for Successful Cheating; 9th Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Information and Computer Sciences, Liverpool Hope University, August 2008.

Clarke, R, and Lancaster, T (2007). Establishing a Systematic Six-Stage Process for Detecting Contract Cheating; The Second International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Applications, Birmingham City University, July 2007.

Lancaster, T and Clarke, R (2007). Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective; 8th Annual Higher Education Academy Conference in Information and Computer Sciences, University of Southampton, August 2007.

Lancaster, T and Clarke, R (2007) The Phenomena of Contract Cheating, in Student Plagiarism in an Online World: Problems and solutions, Roberts, T. S. (editor), Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA: Idea Group Inc.

Clarke, R and Lancaster, T (2006). Eliminating The Successor To Plagiarism? Identifying The Usage Of Contract Cheating Sites; 2nd Plagiarism: Prevention, Practice and Policy Conference 2006 - Newcastle, UK, June 2006.

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For More Information

General Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_cheating

http://contractcheating.com

Contract Cheating Special Interest Group (supported by the Higher Education Academy):

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=CONTRACTCHEATING

Slides Available At:

http://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLancaster

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Our Contact Details

Thomas Lancaster

Email: thomas.lancaster@bcu.ac.uk

Website: http://thomaslancaster.co.uk

Twitter: @DrLancaster

Robert Clarke

Email: robert.clarke@bcu.ac.uk