General conclusions

The term ‘social plagiarism’ has been recruited here as a useful descriptor for a wide range of student practices that are judged to be academic integrity offences. They are practices in which the unattributed borrowing of submitted material has been mediated through partnerships with other people. This configuration of circumstances gives rise to a number of distinct tensions. They have been explored on this website through research strategies of (i) engaging with the relevant literature addressing matters of academic integrity and (ii) deploying observations arising from our own project on ‘help seeking’, as conducted in two UK universities

This present page comprises a set of assertions that are judged to follow from that research effort. Many should be seen as offering general insights or principles that might merely underpin both discussion of institutional strategy and reflection on individual practice – rather than dictate to these matters. However, bullet points that are highlighted in bold font take the form of more direct recommendations to the sector in general.

The next and final page of this website offers a more narrative version of this summary – and one more directly addressing practitioners.

1. The problem context

1. Media commentary suggests that universities now face a crisis of confidence rooted in a popular perception that the sector is failing to deal with assignment plagiarism by students.
2. While text plagiarism is widely discussed and researched, less attention has been given to plagiarism in which the unattributed material arises through an interpersonal arrangement between a student and a collaborator. This general class of offence may be termed ‘social plagiarism’.
3. Often it may lead to a ‘document handover’: material which may then be borrowed for submission, in whole or part. This may be scrutinised as evidence in the way it would be in cases of text plagiarism. But, in other plagiarism partnerships, the input to an assignment might be more conversational, with no lasting record. These cases are very difficult to judge.
4. Therefore, confronting this ‘social plagiarism’ is troublesome. Because both university guidelines and students’ comments indicate that the legitimacy of some  “interpersonal arrangements” for study is a contested matter.
5. Progress in addressing such tensions will depend, in part, upon staff acquiring a greater awareness of the nature and scale of social plagiarism within the student community. Institutions should take steps to publicise the conditions of this challenge.
6. At present university guidelines on regulating this form of plagiarism are variable in how they address the problem and rarely resolve tensions between (forbidden) collusions and (valued) collaborations. Institutions should review the clarity of their regulations around this distinction and, in doing so, investigate differences across disciplines in how they are expressed.

2. Sources for outsourcing

1. University teaching and learning are highly social practices. Staff should notice that the inherent sociality of student life can blur distinctions between good and poor study practices that involve coordinations with other people.
2. So-called ‘essay mills’ are the best-known agents of assignment co-authoring. Their services should not be dismissed: they offer a highly efficient and secure business process that is widely used.
3. Essay mills create a seductive rhetoric in promoting their services; it often includes a characterisation of the student as an institutional ‘victim’. Such toxic messages need to be challenged.
4. These services are found to supply more than essays: their wide-ranging portfolio of products can cope with even the most creative assignment formats.
5. Essay mills are skilled at softening their services by, for instance, stressing products are only “examples” of writing and not to be submitted. Also they may publish on their sites study skill advice that is free and, often, is useful.
6. Media attention to essay mills may have distracted institutions from recognising the large number of freelancing authors who also welcome assignment authoring – and who are very difficult to track. This community should be identified in integrity guidelines.
7. Students routinely report referring to peers and family for collaborative support in completing assignments. These relationships should also be recognised and addressed in advice to students.
8. Beyond peers and family, many contacts with such informal sources of help are found and sustained through the advertising and coordination potential of social media.
9. Help that replicates features of human dialogue are being developed online through various forms of artificial and blended intelligence. Institutions need to evaluate the boundaries of their fair use and give appropriate and consistent advice through their regulations.
10. Online services are increasingly sophisticated in their capability to proof read and repair weaknesses of expression and grammar. Again, institutions need to evaluate the boundaries of fair use for these tools and provide appropriate and consistent guidance to students.

3. The quality of assignment help

1. Individual contracted authors who publicly discuss their practice refer sympathetically to their student customers: viewing them as more desperate than devious and often characterising them as ‘victims’ of education.
2. Statistics from our sample of 100 website services indicate that most sites are robust and long running. The often uncertain location of their operating centre may make them immune from legal pursuit.
3. There are hundreds of website addresses dedicated to this form of plagiarising service, although many may be manged by the same smaller set of central agents.
4. Meta-analsyses of research on student practices of paid assignment outsourcing indicates that it is widespread. Around 15% of undergraduates may have purchased such a service at some time.
5. Student trust in these services may be guided by user reviews. But these are unreliable, as their authorship can be uncertain. Apparently legitimate commentaries suggest a range of quality from very poor to very good.
6. Research indicates that outsourced products rarely reach the standard requested, but they typically perform at least to ‘pass’ levels and some that have been sampled by ‘mystery shopping’ have been very good.
7. The same research indicates that teams of accredited authors marking such products, anonymously and blind, differ greatly among themselves.

4. Forms of institutional response

1. An audit of institutional guidelines on assignment integrity reveals much attention to text plagiarism and citation conventions. While social plagiarism is more modestly covered and mainly in terms of peer collusion. Coverage should be extended to include the examples reviewed here.
2. Students can be resentful of the manner in which these regulations are defined.  They are often seen as contradicting other institutional messages regarding good study practice. The formulation of guidelines should directly address tensions between productive collaborating and improper colluding.
3. Regulations rarely engage with the challenge of freelancer outsourcing or forms of social help with assignments that are not commercially ‘contracted’ but are privately negotiated. These forms of relationship should be recognised in regulations.
4. Academic staff report felt anxiety and stress that arises from the uncertainty of judgement that surrounds pursuing cases of possible social plagiarism. The design of resources relevant to staff development in this area should be considered.
5. It is widely believed by staff that cases are much more frequent in occurrence than the number reported and investigated. There should be a sharing of intelligence arising from these understandings.
6. Automated methods are under development for examining suspected false ownership claims – but in cases were Turnitin-style analysis of text plagiarism is clean. These are based upon stylometry and/or institutional logs of student assessment achievements.
7. Both methods are labour intensive and are not yet part of any systematic institutional practice.
8. Detection of false ownership claims is more challenging in the context of courses (e.g. some distance learning programs) where there is limited one-to-one contact between students and staff and where all assessment is coursework based. Specification for practice on such programs should include regular and relevant one-to-one engagement with students and documented evidence of individual student progress.
9. Where cases are pursued for evaluation, staff report the disciplinary processes as stressful, in terms of relationships with students but also with colleagues. Reviewing processes across schools may help normalise practice and, in doing so, work to minimise stress.
10. There has been recent pressure to render contract cheating services illegal. However, the fluid and international nature of the industry create significant obstacles.
11. A further obstacle to legalisation is the inherent ambiguity of the products furnished. In ‘Terms and Conditions’, they are often marketed as ‘guides’ for an assignment and not the finished item for submission.

5. A culture of outsourcing

1. Some apparent integrity lapses may be associated with cultural differences in how study sources are defined or how a student author’s obligations to attribute authorship are understood. Institutions should consider whether students entering from different cultural contexts are effectively targeted with integrity advice.
2. Practices of outsourcing may be symptomatic of the sector embracing an increasingly commodified set of educational practices.
3. Within current cultural trends, widely discussed practices of ghost writing may serve to normalise social plagiarism.
4. Easy access to digital communication networks may bring about shifts in how the concept of authorship is understood, as well as mediating fast and anonymous exchange of shareable material.
5. Students may be aware of how educational theories increasingly stress the inherently social nature of learning and the mediated nature of what is known. Staff need to consider how these may shape or confuse understandings of ownership and collaboration as academic practices.
6. Students may also be aware of employer imperatives for graduate soft skills of joint working and collaboration.  This may problematise how collusion is presented by institutions and understoood by students.
7. Students’ personal reporting of assignment experiences suggest that they can often involve a felt loss of agency. This risks creating for students an opportunity to see themselves as educational ‘victims’.
8. Understandings of this kind can then become a way in which offences are ‘neutralised’ without seeming to violate moral codes – which individuals nevertheless respect.
9. Drawing on exactly how students voice assignment stress or anxiety can suggest ways in which current assessment practice needs to be repaired to create tasks that are judged fair.

6. Addressing the problems

1. Tutors should more often consider ways in which assessment tasks are sufficiently anchored to local (personal or classroom) student experience, such that they offer less easy openings for completion by third party authors. Exchange of disciplinary intelligence around such assessment innovation should be an institutional consideration.
2. Diversifying assignment formats, while perhaps a worthy educational practice, may not tax the versatility of current outsourcing services.
3. Assignment portfolio methods offer a chance to monitor student academic development trajectories and, thereby, detect unexpected spikes or dips in performance that deserve scrutiny. Schools who have made progress in portfolio development should share experience, and institutions should furnish the necessary tools and training for implementation.
4. Peer review of assignment drafts (and the documenting of such processes) can create a trail that is difficult to falsify through outsourcing. Experience in this area should be shared.
5. Assignments that comprise a sequence of integrated sub-tasks with an overviewing conclusion section may also present difficulties to outsourcing agents.
6. All such modes of assignment innovation are labour intensive in terms of staff assessment commitments.
7. The risk of students neutralising integrity offences through claims of poor staff support might be met by a more just-in-time and need-sensitive provision of help from the academic staff overseeing an assignment.
8. Such provision could also be labour intensive and this should therefore encourage an efficiency review of office hours and other practices whereby such ‘official’ help is offered. Consideration should be given to the ways in which staff contact time is defined and published. This might include the recruitment of app technology
9. Awareness of processes and practices surrounding social plagiarism should be more thoroughly covered in the sectors’ staff development arena – such as PGCHE. The topic should be a significant element in required HE staff development
10. Many commentators – suspicious of easy solutions – advocate giving more consideration to how far and how effectively undergraduates are inducted into a community of academic practice. The student experience should create a sense of authentic academic membership and participation – dispositions that may strengthen commitment to academic values. Institutions should consider how far they have designed spaces, tools and practices that offer students membership of their chosen disciplinary communities.