An Initial Analysis of the Contextual Information Available within Auction Posts on Contract Cheating Agency Websites

The advantages of using contextual information in order to detect contract cheating attempts by students have not yet been fully explored in the academic literature. Contract cheating occurs when a student uses a third party to produce assessed work for them. This paper focuses on contract cheating using agency websites, where an auction type process is used by students to select a contractor to have the assessed work produced for them, often at a financially advantageous price. Currently, the process of finding contract cheating on agency sites is manually intensive, with a detective required to investigate and attribute each cheating attempt. This paper aims to formally identify the context internally and externally available for contract cheating posts on an agency website. The paper is offered as a starting point for academics interested in producing an automated intelligent contextually-aware tool to detect contract cheating.