How to Spot Cheating in
Written Assessments
Task
What awareness raising tasks could you do with your classes, to reduce student misconceptions about cheating in written work?
You may also choose to discuss your response with a colleague or as part of a team meeting or CPD session.
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What is Contract Cheating?
Find out in this Student Association resource.
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Definitions
Contract cheating | If students use someone else to do their assessments. This includes online tutoring sites which answer questions in real time. |
Chegging | When students use tuition services in real time during online examinations. |
Essay or assessment mills | Agencies write academic assignments for students, usually for money. |
Essay or assessment banks | A business sells pre-written work in order to commit academic fraud. |
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Student who use Contract Cheating companies may do the following.
The techniques in the following slides DON’T disguise cheating. Instead, they allow the Lecturer to identify potential cheating.
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Student misconceptions when trying to disguise cheating | Why it doesn't work |
Putting “ “ quotation marks round everything means you are not plagiarising | Turnitin will still pick it up and all quotes need properly referenced |
Using a JPEG of your assessment can’t be read by Turnitin, so no-one will know you’ve cheated | Word count on Turnitin will show the Lecturer that it is an image and it will not be accepted |
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Student misconceptions when trying to disguise cheating | Why it doesn't work |
Contract Cheating is not covered by the Student Disciplinary Policy so cannot be acted on | Contract Cheating is specifically covered by the Student Disciplinary Policy |
Turnitin can’t pick up contract cheating | If you use anything which is already published online, anti-plagiarism software used by the College will detect this |
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Student misconceptions when trying to disguise cheating | Why it doesn't work |
If you change text slightly or include hidden text, it can’t be picked up by Turnitin as plagiarism. | Turnitin picks up deep document metadata and text manipulation such as hidden text. |
If you swap a letter in the work e.g. swap “e” for a Cyrillic "e", Turnitin won’t spot that the whole work is plagiarised. | Turnitin picks up character swapping. |
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Student misconceptions when trying to disguise cheating | Why it doesn't work |
Turnitin can’t pick up cheating if you use macros or PDFs. | Turnitin picks up cheating if you use macros or PDFs. |
If you swap all the spaces with invisible (white) text, Turnitin can’t detect it. | Turnitin can spot if you have swapped all the spaces with invisible (white) text to try to avoid plagiarism. |
Go Further
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