The Ethics of Studying Contract Cheating – Are Researchers Crossing the Line? – Thomas Lancaster’s Blog

Despite my active involvement in contract cheating research since 2006, I’ve rarely discussed the difficult ethical challenges of conducting accurate research into this form of academic misconduct.

The lack of documented ethical processes is an issue that Nilupulee Liyanagamage, Elvira Asylguzhina, Prakash Vel, Zeenath Reza Khan, Mario Fernando, and I observed in a recently published paper. We conducted a systematic review of 92 contract cheating studies, all published between 2011 and 2023.

Our findings, published in the Journal of Academic Ethics, revealed not only that new research approaches are needed, but also that more researchers need to report how their studies were conducted ethically.

The Ethical Dilemma: Studying Cheating Without Cheating

Despite the expectation that research in any academic integrity field should be transparent, we found studies using research methodologies that are ethically questionable:

• Limited participant protection – Many studies failed to discuss safeguarding and emotional support processes for participants, particularly those who had admitted cheating.
• Funding cheating services – In some studies, researchers paid essay mills to see the quality of purchased work and to check if this could be detected. But does paying for academic misconduct make the researcher complicit in the contract cheating industry?
• Legal risks – In countries where contract cheating provision is illegal, could funding contract cheating services in this way put the researcher themselves at risk?
• Trap methodologies – Some researchers used deception-based surveys to get students to admit cheating that they would otherwise have kept quiet. There’s always concern about the potential misuse of this information.

Future Research

The sheer scale of the contract cheating industry has to be recognised, even in the age of AI. We do need to continue research into this challenge if we want to be able to ensure that students benefit from learning and act with academic integrity. But we do also have to scrutinise the research methods and approaches that we use.

What alternative approaches are there? I favour finding and using existing data wherever possible. I feel that AI also offers us a lot of potential to automate data collection and analysis without directly engaging with contract cheating providers.

In the paper, we also suggested autoethnographic studies as an interesting area for future publications, allowing researchers to reflect on their own experiences navigating academic integrity as educators. But, we do have to work out where the ethical line in the sand should be drawn and how to define this.

Do check out the full study which is available open access.