Abstract:

Contract cheating is an emerging issue in higher education. Although not new, advances in technology are presenting new opportunities for cheating to take place in assessments, especially online. Contract cheating occurs when a student pays a third party to complete their assessment on their behalf, and the assessment is then submitted as the student’s own work. There are some preventative online tools, but most of the focus is on plagiarism detection.

This virtual presentation presents an approach to online assessment that encourages student engagement and has been pedagogically designed to make contract cheating difficult. In the online units where this assessment has been used, there have been high levels of student engagement and retention, and no identified cases of contract cheating.

The assessment is contained in a public relations unit at CQUniversity. CQUniversity is a regional Australian university with a significant online cohort. The assessment has three parts. The first part of the assessment requires a discipline specific task. In this case, the task was elements from a public relations plan of a real client, assigned to students so that students receive different elements from the plan. Students submit part one online. Part two of the assessment is augmented marking, where students provide written feedback on another student’s assessment, against the marking criteria. Since the students do not know whose assessment they are receiving, they have limited opportunity to outsource a response. Part three of the assessment requires students to complete their final assessment as a team, incorporating the feedback received from their peers. A complete public relations plan is submitted, with each student contributing an element.

The deep learning required in this assessment is profound. The task must be real-world and authentic in order to engage students. It must also be possible to complete the task online. Not only do students engage in a real world task, they must understand the task to the point where they can provide feedback to another student about it. In order to complete the full assessment task, students must be engaged at each point of the assessment process. Their final submission needs to include their modified task, plus an explanation of how the assessment incorporated (or perhaps, rejected) the feedback provided to them.

From a marking perspective, the work of the marker is in a moderated role only. The marker only needs to grade the final submission, not the drafts, and not the student feedback provided.

From a contract cheating perspective, it is difficult to outsource this assessment. As a real world task, there is no set essay-type format preferred by the larger contract cheating providers, the topics change with each cohort, and students do not know in advance what feedback to prepare for their peers. In the four years where this assessment has been used, there have been no identified contract cheating cases, student feedback comments reveal high levels of support for the approach, and retention to the unit has risen from 82% in 2014 to 100% in 2018.

Keywords:

Distance learning, teamwork assessment, augmented marking, contract cheating, academic integrity, attrition, retention, online assessment.