Abstract
Contract cheating is currently one of the most serious academic integrity issues around the globe. Numerous studies have been conducted, mostly in English speaking countries. So far, no such research has been conducted in Czechia, and consequently there have been no specific data available on Czech students’ fraudulent behaviour. For this study, we created a questionnaire to obtain primary data on student usage of essay mills and their self-reported exposure to contract cheating. The questionnaire focused on students and graduates of Czech universities and collected a total of 1016. Of that number, 8% of respondents admit having engaged in contract cheating. The questionnaire responses yielded useful information and insight into students’ attitudes regarding contract cheating and the extent of this phenomenon in Czechia. We now know more about their reasons for contract cheating and have insight into their thoughts regarding possible discovery.
Highlights
Contract cheating has become one of the most severe problems in academia across the globe
Czechia witnessed several publicly known cases of contract cheating that received wide media attention (Česká televize 2014; Jarkovská 2015; Kabátová 2015a, b), yet the news coverage contained no references to data or related studies, leading us to believe that this paper describes the first study on this topic in Czechia
8% of Czech students have submitted assignment or thesis written by someone else, most of which were written by a friend or class-mate. 34% of students know someone who has engaged in contract cheating and 87% of students are aware of companies providing ghost writing services
Summary
Contract cheating has become one of the most severe problems in academia across the globe. For various reasons, which will be discussed below, some percentage of students trying to take shortcuts regarding their studies, are open to the practice of using work done by someone else. First are file sharing sites, where a wide variety of previously written student works are available, free of charge, or for a fee (Králíková 2017). Many of the authors of these files have agreed to have their work used by other students. Besides these essay file-sharing sites, there are websites where documents of many other types – scientific papers, theses, etc., are publicly available and ready for instant download. While most university students have been taught what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, there is a nontrivial group of students who tend to submit the work of others rather than produce their own texts.
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