Читать книгу Cheating Academic Integrity - Группа авторов - Страница 17

As McCabe et al. (2012) note, internet access became more widespread over the past 30 years. In 2007/2008, they added additional questions about internet use to their surveys and found that nearly 95 percent of students who had engaged in cut‐and‐paste plagiarism had done so from internet sources. It has been argued that just as the internet may facilitate copying and pasting, the internet also has a role in deterring and detecting this behavior with the advent of text‐matching software (Curtis and Vardanega, 2016; Park, 2003). McCabe et al. (2012) argued that “If students know that faculty will be checking … such cut‐and‐paste plagiarism may decline” (p. 71). However, a form of cheating that is potentially undetectable by text‐matching software is outsourced, ghost‐written work.

Various studies throughout the past 30 years have, at least in part, examined students’ use of outsourcing behaviors in assessment, such as getting help from family and friends, accessing essay mills, or paying other people to complete homework, term papers, or exams for them. In 2006, Clarke and Lancaster coined the term contract cheating to describe the situation where students enter into a contractual agreement with another party to complete an assignment for the student (for more on Contract Cheating, see Lancaster's chapter in this book). The definition of what constitutes contract cheating has since varied, with Bretag et al. (2019) classifying all outsourcing, whether paid or unpaid, as contract cheating, while specifically paid contract cheating has been more recently referred to as commercial contract cheating (e.g. Lancaster, 2020)

Charting trends in contract cheating in the past 30 years is complicated by the fact that only one of the three studies reviewed in the previous section included a measure of commercial contract cheating. The studies reported by Curtis and Tremayne (2021) found percentages of commercial contract cheating of 3.1 percent (2004), 3.4 percent (2009), 2.8 percent (2014), and 2.8–3.5 percent (2019). These percentages did not differ significantly over time or between any two pairs of years.

Newton (2018), however, conducted a review and meta‐analysis of the self‐reported prevalence of commercial contract cheating, principally consisting of studies that surveyed students at one point in time. Newton examined 71 studies conducted between 1978 and 2016 and concluded that just over 3.5 percent of students engaged in commercial contract cheating. An identical figure of 3.5 percent was found in an earlier small‐scale meta‐analysis by Curtis and Clare (2017). Importantly, Newton (2018) reported the prevalence of commercial contract cheating engagement increasing, as indicated by a positive correlation between engagement in cheating and the year in which studies were conducted. However, as discussed previously, estimating trends from studies using different methods, measures, and samples should be done with caution because methodological differences may influence the studies’ results. In addition, several large studies have been published since Newton's (2018) review, which provide additional information on the rates of, and possible trends in, commercial contract cheating.

For this chapter, I have updated and re‐analyzed Newton's (2018) data to consider more recent studies. Specifically, I obtained Newton's (2018) table of the studies he analyzed, and their details, and added to these the details of the following studies: Foltýnek and Králíková (2018), Bretag et al. (2019), Rundle et al. (2019), Curtis and Tremayne (2021), and Awdry (2020). These five additional studies surveyed over 25,000 students, and increase the total sample reported by Newton (2018) by over 45 percent. After adding these studies’ data, I then: 1. re‐ran the analysis of commercial contract cheating prevalence and trends; 2. analyzed the data including only studies 1990–2020; and 3. analyzed the 1990–2020 studies that came from majority English‐speaking countries. To explain the third of these analyses, all studies analyzed by Newton (2018) from 1990–2008 were from majority English‐speaking countries; however, half of the studies since 2009 were not. In addition, some of the highest percentages of commercial contract cheating were reported in recent studies from non‐English‐speaking countries, suggesting that these outlier results may be attributable to the peculiarities of the sample, methods, or academic culture. Limiting analyses to the most frequent language group of the nations among the studies allows for closer to like‐with‐like comparisons.

Table 3 shows the analysis of the prevalence of commercial contract cheating, including: 1. Newton's (2018) findings; 2. revised findings including the subsequent surveys through to 2020; 3. studies limited to 1990–2020; and 4. studies limited to English‐speaking countries from 1990–2020. Importantly, in considering trends, the most relevant statistic is the correlation between the year in which the surveys were collected and the percentage of commercial contract cheating reported in the surveys. A positive correlation indicates that as the year of data collection becomes more recent the prevalence of contract cheating becomes higher. Thus, the significant positive correlation, as found by Newton (2018), suggests a trend of increasing student engagement in commercial contract cheating over time. However, Table 3 indicates that the correlation between year and contract cheating percentage was not significant for the period 1990–2020. Moreover, the correlation between year and contract cheating percentage was non‐significant and weakly negative when only 1990–2020 studies from English‐speaking countries are considered.

This updated analysis of commercial contract cheating prevalence does not suggest an upward trend between 1990–2020. In addition, the analysis indicates that the rate of engagement in this behavior is persistently low—in the range of 2.5–3.5 percent of students self‐reporting engaging in commercial contract cheating. A caveat, of course, is, as mentioned earlier, people tend to under‐report socially‐undesirable behaviors. Still, there are two questions to consider: 1) if cut‐and‐paste plagiarism is trending down because of text‐matching software, why is it not being replaced by commercial contract cheating and 2) given the availability of commercial contract cheating services, why do relatively few students report engaging in this behavior?

Table 3 Trends in commercial contract cheating 1990–2020

	Number of studies	Number of students	Students contract cheating	% contract cheating	Spearman's correlation year‐% cheating	p
Newton (2018)	71	54514	1919	3.52	0.368	.0016*
Newton (2018) plus studies 2016–2020	76	79745	2737	3.43	0.303	.008*
Studies 1990–2020	71	78354	2712	3.46	0.206	.085
Studies 1990–2020—English‐speaking countries	54	65843	1620	2.46	–0.135	.332

Note: * = significant p < .05

Rundle et al. (2019, 2020) offer several answers to the questions above. First, regarding the possibility that commercial contract cheating has not replaced cut‐and‐paste plagiarism, they suggest that this outcome is consistent with research on “crime displacement”. Specifically, when crimes of a certain type, or in a certain place, are reduced, they are not replaced to the same extent by different crimes or by the same crimes occurring elsewhere (Cornish and Clarke, 1987). If this pattern of behavior occurs for academic misconduct, reducing one kind of behavior should not necessarily cause others to increase. Second, Rundle et al. (2019) found that students indicate that they mostly do not engage in commercial contract cheating because they perceive it as immoral non‐normative, and undermining their learning goals. In addition, Rundle et al. (2020) suggest that there are more, and stronger, practical and psychological barriers preventing contract cheating than other forms of unethical assessment behavior.

The extended analysis of Newton's (2018) results suggests that commercial contract cheating did not appear to trend upwards as a substitute for the other forms of cheating and plagiarism that trended downwards. Therefore, it is worth examining whether academic integrity interventions that have been implemented in the past 30 years may provide a better explanation for the downward trend in the prevalence of cheating and plagiarism.