Abstract
Contract cheating has gone rampant in higher education recently. When institutions switched to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of contract cheating students climbed to unprecedented levels. Essay mills saw the lack of face-to-face interaction and proctoring on campus as an opportunity and used aggressive marketing methods to attract students. This study asked the opinions of 20 faculty members working in the English departments of private higher education institutions in Kuwait regarding contract cheating through interviews. The data was analyzed with MAXQDA 2020. The findings show that all faculty members can recognize contract cheating easily. Most of them see contract cheating as a serious problem in the higher education system, a threat to the reliability of language assessment, triggered by laziness, the social pressure to graduate with a high GPA, and exacerbated by the cheating opportunities in online education. Academics have developed certain individual strategies in their courses to curb the number of contract cheating students; however, institutional measures differ, and in some, there are no measures or sanctions on contract cheating students.
Highlights
In recent years, violations of academic integrity by students have increased and received attention from researchers, institutions, journalists, and policy-makers
In a study conducted among Omani university instructors (Ali & Alhassan, 2021), participants expressed that contract cheating is a serious and difficult to detect form of plagiarism which can threaten academic integrity
Overall, the findings of the study reveal that faculty members have a high level of awareness of contract cheating
Summary
Violations of academic integrity by students have increased and received attention from researchers, institutions, journalists, and policy-makers. While these violations vary widely, one emerging problem called ‘contract cheating’ has seen a global rise, across all disciplines. This sinister style of cheating has been aggravated “by the commodification of higher education and the increasingly popular sharing economy” (Williamson, 2019). Some argue that contract cheating should involve a monetary transaction between a student and a company (paper mill), whereas others define it as a student outsourcing his or her work, Erguvan Language Testing in Asia (2021) 11:34 without necessarily having to pay anything for it (Eaton & Turner, 2020). It is worth mentioning that over the last decade, an industry, in which some companies or agencies, known as paper mills, are paid to undertake this kind of academic work has emerged (The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2020)
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