Contract Cheating

Although it has been defined in different ways, contract cheating is best described as the “outsourcing of student work to third parties” (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016, p. 639).

What Is Contract Cheating?

Contract cheating occurs when students have someone else (third parties) complete their course work. This could be having a friend complete an assignment, paying a company to provide answers, or hiring an individual to complete and submit course work under the student’s identity. There doesn’t need to be an exchange of money for this to be considered contract cheating. A favor or free resource used in a student’s assignment can still be contract cheating.

Current forms of contract cheating we see at UCI:

  • Having a friend write a paper
  • Having a “tutor” heavily “edit” a student’s paper (tutors are not supposed to add material information to papers and limit their assistance to correcting grammatical, logical, or technical issues)
  • Paying for an essay to be completed
  • Submitting any part of homework, assignment, exam, or course work worth points to someone else or an external resource for answers/assistance
  • Submitting questions to Course Hero, Chegg, or any similar service for answers
  • Taking someone else’s work from a homework site like Course Hero or Chegg
  • And many others! New practices come up every day, so this list is not exhaustive

Requesting Investigation Data

Faculty members may initiate investigations to obtain data from Chegg, Course Hero, or other related third parties in order to determine student identities as well as request that the information be taken down. OAISC will sign a letter of support for you to present when you submit your request.

Request a letter to submit to third parties for student information and investigation:

OAISC Take Down and Request for data form

Instructions to complete the OAISC Take Down Request Form:

  1. Click the button above – enter your full name and UCI email – click “Begin Signing”
  2. Enter the course name and number and submit the form
  3. OAISC will review, sign, and send the completed form to you (usually in 1 business day)
  4. Attach the signed form to your report/investigation request with the third party

If you have questions, please contact conduct@uci.edu.

Requests to UCI OIT Security for suspected student misconduct incidents: 

Faculty are able to obtain student access logs from some third parties. Faculty need to gain approval for OIT Security to correlate this access data with logins to UCI services for which OIT Security has access to authentication logs since this is not an approved use of authentication log data. The University electronic communications non-consensual access process, must be followed.

Chegg

Course Hero