Internet Cheating: Story?

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Students finding new cheats on Internet
Assignments, essays being outsourced

In a new twist on using the Internet for academic cheating, students are outsourcing their essays and assignments through freelancer websites intended to allow prospective employers to post one-time jobs for skilled professionals to bid on.

An entry on GetAFreelancer.com — “Proposal letter for MBA final project” — requests a project on a finance subject such as exchange rates or international finance, adding, “first i need to agree for the subject then ill (sic) take the proposal and the full project also.”

Another outlines an American history assignment that appears to have been cut-and-pasted directly from a course syllabus, with 26 people bidding to complete the job for an average price of $119.

Another student provides lecture notes related to a computer programming assignment and requests that it be completed as thoroughly as possible, “but not to a point where it looks suspicious.”

Some students are turning to freelance job sites and online marketplaces like Craigslist and Kijiji to outsource their academic work.

“This is just one more option in a range of options students have, whether they’re seeking things out on essay mills or going a step further and trying to hire someone to do it,” says Deborah Eerkes, director of the office of student judicial affairs at the University of Alberta. “As technology changes, there are new ways of cheating and I would not say that technology increases cheating; I would say it provides another option for those who would choose to cheat anyway.”

Many Canadian universities and instructors require students to submit assignments to plagiarism-detection programs like TurnItIn.com to verify their originality against an extensive database of academic content. Eerkes suspects students are outsourcing their assignments through classified sites because they don’t trust essay mills to provide original material, but she points out there’s no guarantee any ghostwriter a student hires won’t rip off material from another source.

And it can be just as telltale if students submit work that’s a little too good, she adds.

Jane Everett, dean of students at McGill University, sees these efforts to outsource coursework as a new twist on the essay editing services advertised on bulletin boards at campuses across the country, where “editing help” can be a euphemism for paying someone else to write the assignment. Students posting their assignments online for bidders is a new development, she says, and it could make cheating much harder for professors and administrators to catch.

“If this is indeed original work that’s given in exchange for a fee, it might be difficult to detect or find proof that it was written by someone else,” she says.

Shannon Proudfoot
Canwest News Service
03 Feb. 2010 The Windsor Star