An International Comparison of Discipline Integration of the Commercial Contract Cheating Industry

Abstract

Commercial contract cheating, the act of requesting a third party to complete an assignment for payment, is a growing industry and poses a problem that academic institutions are trying to tackle internationally. The reach of the industry in nine fields of education and across four locations – Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States – are analysed through an automated data-gathering process on a total of 4032 Google searches and with the help of a machine learning model trained to identify which results are essay mills. 49% of all results are found to be essay mills, 3247 of which results are found to be paid advertisements despite this being against Google’s advertising policies. The fields of Arts and Humanities and Education are found to be at the highest risk of further exploitation by the industry. The paper concludes by recommending that the educational community continues to monitor the reach of the contract cheating industry and that it considers solutions to further promote academic integrity.