Abstract
Contract cheating refers to students using third-party online resources to complete their coursework. It is not only a unilateral result of the student, but also has a relationship with educators, as well as social resources. However, little work has been performed to analyze the complex behavioral aspects behind contract cheating in Chinese universities. To this end, this article presents a statistical analysis of contract cheating in Chinese universities. First, a unique parallel survey of educators and students was conducted to collect data from August 2018 to August 2020. Next, statistical analyses were performed to explore students’ experiences and attitudes toward contract cheating and the contextual factors that relate to these behaviors. Additionally, Pearson correlation tests were conducted on the survey data to find potential factors for contract cheating. Finally, a multivariate statistical technique, partial-least-squares regression (PLSR), was applied to interpret the results. The results of the statistical analysis showed that the main motivation for contract cheating is to receive good grades (the correlation coefficient ρ is 0.1309) from the perspective of students’ personal learning; from the side of university management, clear regulations (ρ=−0.1378), penalties for cheating (ρ=−0.1275), and the use of cheating-detection software (ρ=−0.1186) can directly reduce cheating; from the perspective of teachers’ teaching, lecturers’ feedback on cheating on assignments (ρ=−0.1510) can effectively reduce students’ cheating behavior; in addition, increasing students’ sense of achievement in course learning (ρ=−0.2619) also helps to reduce the probability of cheating.
Highlights
Accepted: 14 July 2021In June 2018, a total of 81 students at Guangxi University of Science and Technology copied and pasted extensively in their coursework [1]
Pearson correlation tests were conducted on the survey data to find potential factors for contract cheating
The results of the statistical analysis showed that the main motivation for contract cheating is to receive good grades from the perspective of students’
Summary
Accepted: 14 July 2021In June 2018, a total of 81 students at Guangxi University of Science and Technology copied and pasted extensively in their coursework [1]. In September 2018, Professor Su of the School of Humanities at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that 22 students copied much material from websites to complete their final coursework, but did not cite the sources correctly [2]. These phenomena are becoming more and more frequent [3]. This kind of behavior was firstly coined as contract cheating by Clarke and Lancaster [4], to describe the process by which students outsource their coursework to a third party online. It has evolved to cover a range of outsourcing student coursework to third parties, regardless of the third party’s relationship with the student and whether or not money was exchanged [5,6]
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