Detecting Contract Cheating
- Prior to grading in Blackboard, download a grade history report from the full grade center to identify IP addresses of assignment submission (submissions to third party integrations such as Turnitin, McGraw-Hill Connect, Pearson, etc. will not record IP address in this report). IP addresses are only included in this report in the downloaded version. ;
- Get to know your students. Ask them to submit writing samples, participate in discussion boards, etc., so you get to know their writing style and can identify inconsistencies.
- Check document properties of files submitted for creation date, time and author (Word, Excel, PPT files).
- In Turnitin and SafeAssign, pay attention to very low matches or very high matches (<5% or 30%).
Watch for:
- Assignments that only vaguely address required content.
- Papers with no in-text citations, mismatched citations/reference page, foreign references.
- Papers that quote abstracts or summaries of sources.
- Suspiciously high quality writing.