Using incentivised truth-telling to estimate the prevalence of commercial contract cheating in Aust.
Channel: AusPLAT Conferences and Roundtables
Date: 2022-04-12

Self-report surveys suggest that 2-4% of students engage in commercial contract cheating (buying and submitting assessments written by other people). However, people often under-report socially-undesirable behaviours in self-report surveys. In this study, we used an incentivised truth-telling method and surveyed 4098 students from six universities and six independent higher education providers in Australia. We found that 2.46 times more students admitted to commercial contract cheating, via submitting ghost-written assessments, when truth-telling was incentivised (via a Bayesian Truth Serum methodology) rather than when normal self-report survey instructions were used. Using prevalence estimation formulae that are combined with the incentivised truth-telling method, we estimate that 7.9% of students buy and submit assignments from commercial contract cheating services. Additionally, 11.4% outsource assessments via obtaining pre-written work from commercial file-sharing sites. These are substantially higher percentages of commercial contract cheating than self-report surveys suggest. We conclude that commercial contract cheating is a more common problem, in the order of two to four times higher than suggested by self-report surveys. We argue that higher education institutions and governments must increase their efforts to curb commercial contract cheating.