New Challenges Institutions are Facing when Detecting Cheating in Student Submissions

Concurrent Session 2

Brief Abstract

Please join us to discuss contract cheating ("ghost writing") issues that institutions are facing, what tools are currently available to help detect this, and what tools Turnitin has developed to aid in that detection process.

Sponsored By

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Stephanie Stocks, Turnitin

Stephanie Stocks was a faculty member at Clemson University in the Department of Biological Sciences and at the University of Florida in the Department of Entomology teaching online courses for both undergraduates and graduate students. She now works at Turnitin as a Customer Success Consultant, training instructors on using Turnitin to provide both formative and summative feedback for students, using her years of teaching to help instructors determine best practices aligning with the goals of their courses and assignments, and in her spare times, she still plays with bugs.

Extended Abstract

Historically, students have copied and pasted text without citation, repurposed friends’ papers as their own, and posted papers to websites as study guides for fellow students to use. Turnitin responded with tools to aid educators in detecting this and also provided tools for students to help avoid these issues with their course work. Now, however, throughout K-12 and Higher Education globally, there is an increase in submitted work where the work was in fact original, but written by someone other than the student who made the submission. This is known as contract cheating or ghost writing. How are instructors able to detect this type of cheating and what tools are available to aid in “proving” when it occurs? Please join us to discuss contract cheating issues that institutions are facing, what tools are currently available to help detect this, and what tools Turnitin has developed to aid in that detection process.