What $25,352 worth in contract cheating looks like.

waaaseee

Abstract: The hardest part about contract cheating is quantifying the problem. We can't do much about the former, but we're trying to change the latter. That is, we are trying to quantify contract cheating in hopes of learning more about assessment design, motivations of cheating, and the black market of 'contract cheating'.

Methodology: A web crawler (with the pet name of "Contraband") was let loose on the Internet to sniff out content related to cheating posts. The contracts were then aggregated all together. You can read what the crawler found at the end of this post.

Findings: 18% contractors were approached directly. Out of the posts in which the contractor was not approached directly, 6 (4.5%) contracts were for admission essays, 9 posts (7%) were for work related to masters/PhD theses, and 7 posts (5.34%) were in languages other than English. Almost all of the contracts looked like they required undergrad (or above) proficiency. Finally, the average contract was worth $157. 

It is to be noted, that the crawler (optimistically) scanned  ~1% of the entire "market" and the data collected covered just 3 weeks worth of activity. It might be unfair to simply extrapolate these numbers to arrive at the 'market size', but let's just do it for simplicity's sake.

If 1% of the market is worth $25,353, it implies roughly $2.5 million worth of contracts traded per month. This might sound like a lot, but an average contract value of $157 per contract would mena that roughly 16,148 students cheat online every month.

Future direction: Firstly, I want to expand the corpus we are crawling. Secondly, adding in more data-points such as: collecting the number of bidders (therefore quantifying the size and activity of the market), analyzing peak/trough times, and estimating the writing proficiency of the cheater (low writing proficiency might suggest weak writing skills as a prominent motivator) seems interesting.  Also, the labeling process definitely needs to be improved (since there were some false positives).

How you can participate: Just chime in with your thoughts, is data like this helpful? Should we stop doing this? Is this initiative kinda creepy? What other information can we collect? Anything goes. 

Pour some motiva-tion on me: Summarizing reports like such take a lot of effort, so if you want to motivate me to keep publishing stuff like this please subscribe to the contraband page here.  

The data-set: What follows now is the actual data collected. (Hint: use cmd + down/up arrow for Mac or ctrl + end/home for Windows to directly scroll to the comments section/top of the post.)  

Contraband's contract cheating report.

Total value: $25,232 Total coursework:161

Coursework details

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michellez

waaaseee‌ - WOW. This is eye-opening to say the least. I am not one who is typically naive to this type of activity but what your crawler has found is more than I imagined. I have heard about this type of cheating and I think it is difficult to catch, but if caught, I can only imagine the academic discipline faced for both sides (this assumes, of course, that the hired help is also a student or someone with a close tie to an academic institution). I teach at a law school.  There is a strict code of academic conduct that must be followed.  In addition, attorneys and attorneys-to-be have a strict moral code of professional responsibility.  A finding of engagement in cheating of any kind could prevent admission to the bar. I would love to know how much of this is on a graduate level. For instance, the writing assignments looking for MLA or other similar citation formats are most likely seeking assistance for undergraduate projects.  If there were any mentioning the words "law, legal, legal writing or Bluebook," this would suggest that the assignment is a law school project seeking another law student or a skilled lawyer. I am glad you brought up this discussion. I am curious to see more from the crawler! #contract cheating