In recent years, violations of academic integrity by students have received much attention. These forms of violations vary widely, and one emerging problem is called ‘contract cheating’. By definition ‘contract cheating’ is where a student gets a third party to complete an assignment or an exam. Although it is not a new issue, studies have shown an increase in this misbehavior in recent years. Contract cheating calls into question the credibility of higher education qualifications and academic results and proves to be a challenge due to the difficulty of detection. The available evidence highlights that contract cheating is a systematic problem, involving individual, contextual, and organizational factors that requires a combined response to address it.

Although the terminology presumes that there is a payment transaction, contract cheating is a behavior spectrum involving both plagiarism and ghostwriting which may or may not involve payment to the person who does the work. The outsourcing might come from a family member, a friend, a colleague, or anyone who assists the student as a favour. It can also originate from a pre-written assignment freely available online, or in other cases, from someone who was contracted, locally or online.

Some studies reported this form of misbehaviour quite prevalent, but the number of systematic studies is relatively low. However, recent studies found that students tend to obtain work from those known to them (friends, parents), rather than from commercial sites.

A recent study by Awdry and Ives (2020) aimed to explore which variables and motivators are associated with different types of outsourcing. The major finding of the study was that situational factors, such as knowledge of other student’s cheating, and believing cheating is acceptable, were found to have a correlation to self-reported outsourcing behaviours. Individual factors (e.g. gender, age, and first/second language learners) did not show statistical significance in predicting student engagement with outsourcing from those known to them. Also, there is no obvious link between discipline, country, and outsourcing. The conclusion is that universities have to put emphasis on research integrity issues in their education.

The INTEGRITY project aims to create an innovative tool addressing these issues, as well as their gray areas, to empower students to identify ethically questionable behaviors and help them in decision making. The tool will be an additional resource to research integrity training, developed for undergraduate students. It will provide case dilemmas exploring different aspects of academic and research integrity tailored for different research processes and areas.  The tool development is in its prototype version and will be soon available on our website for piloting testing.