pay someone to do my assignment

pay someone to do my assignment

Ethical Considerations in Academic Integrity: Understanding the Implications of Paying Someone to Do Your Assignment

1. Introduction to Academic Integrity and Ethics

This book brings forward and centralizes an issue in relation to a swathe of ‘non-academic’ actions that demonstrate implications primarily (though not exclusively) for academic activities and assignments and, as such, are covered by the term ‘academic integrity’. The essays that make up this volume are written out of a concern to acknowledge the first issue and explore responses to it. This first chapter broadens the introduction only slightly; its purpose is to provide an introductory overview of ethics. In so doing, it aims to provide a background to the relative emphasis of the present issue, distinguishing the relative ethical significance of various academic practices.

Academic integrity is not just a matter of getting good grades: deep down, it is about who we are as human beings, and about the kinds of people we want to be. However, there has been some difficulty in stakes-blind drives to impress upon (‘encourage’) students the nature of academic integrity as something more fundamental than a caveated get-rich-quick strategy. Does a student understand why it’s wrong to offer somebody else money to do their assignments? Is the only reason they don’t do it because they might get caught? There is an increasing emphasis on the ethicality of academic activities such as ghost-writing, proofreading, and paying/wasting/spending time getting others to do one’s assignments or ghost-write theses, but there is little of ethical substance in such drives whilst other academic practices – things like group work, tutor-assistance, and peer feedback – retain the comparative deaf-ears of the stakes.

2. The Risks and Consequences of Contract Cheating

Institutions of secondary and higher education preach that the learning process is a crucial developmental feature of education. Students, however, may want to pursue other extracurricular activities, work on full-time or part-time schedules, or genuinely lack the background knowledge in a particular area to complete a variety of assignments. Some students have to choose between missing important parts of growing up, paying off educational expenses, and earning good grades. Thus, the decision to contract someone else to do one’s work is not easily made. It is easy to see the personal costs of cheating in this regard, but it can sometimes be difficult to weigh these costs against the very real fears of failing a course or being unable to make tuition payments.

Contract cheating, particularly the act of hiring someone to complete assignments, is costly to the individual. A lack of a genuine knowledge base can make it difficult for individuals to apply knowledge learned in class. Perhaps the most pressing problem with using academic writers and editors is that it is ethically obvious that service abuse harms legitimate students, particularly by eroding faculty perception of all students as prospective cheaters. Broadly, contract cheating is costly to higher education. Cheating in college cheapens the entire enterprise, as a college degree has more than a monetary significance; a college education is also an ideological mark of self-improvement. A contagious epidemic of contract cheating undermines the idea of a college education as an inherently valuable endeavor. This has both social and economic costs. On a micro-social level, the student with a degree earned through cheating can falsely secure a job for which the student is not qualified. On a meso-economic level, a surfeit of unqualified graduates can induce a cultural devaluation of the college degree in the first place.

3. Exploring Alternatives to Contract Cheating

One of the ways in which we can support academic integrity is to help expose the ethical problems with contract cheating and its impacts. When students see the serious ethical consequences associated with contract cheating, we hope that they will search for a range of alternatives to engage in such activities. Below, we offer a number of concepts and ideas which students can pursue rather than engaging in contract cheating or associated activities. These ideas are based on academic integrity principles and do not come with potential consequences that engaging in contract cheating can.

Not all of these will be possible or appropriate for all students or for all assessment types. All of the ideas below should be seen as simply that – ideas that are informed by principles related to academic integrity. Another principle to keep in mind as students is that: It is the student’s responsibility to approach unit of study coordinators well in advance of an assignment deadline to discuss options available to them in their particular situation. In other words, if students are genuinely experiencing difficulties with assessments or have situations that prevent them from participating in assessments, they should engage in these discussions with the relevant person. This is a central part of being an ethical student: stand up for what is right and take responsibility for one’s actions.

4. Promoting a Culture of Academic Integrity in Educational Institutions

There are several strategies to promote a culture of academic integrity within educational institutions. Honor codes, academic integrity training, and developing comprehensive academic integrity policies are mentioned as part of the strategies to address academic dishonesty. The University of Saskatchewan has made both the Student Academic Integrity/Assessment policy and a corresponding Academic Appeals policy available online for students and other stakeholders. These policies have demonstrated an oversight is in place to address violations of academic integrity. Creating more policies and rules seems to be the ‘answer’ presented for addressing AI. However, none of these more punitive approaches have been proven to be successful in decreasing contract cheating. A more positive approach would be to prevent students from turning to cheating in the first place. In order to do that, the academic community should foster an educational environment that honors honesty, hard work, and ethics in academic activities. This is inherently critical to the academic community.

The only approach in published research that has been shown to impact student behavior, according to Anderman et al., is values-based interventions such as honor codes and policies that “get to the heart” of the issue. If students are educated, early and often, about AI, the expected behaviors from a community of scholars, and the importance of diversity in thought, and then given the opportunity to, and encouraged to, reflect on those topics or values, it can be an effective countermeasure in discouraging AI violations. Koles, Stoddard, & Woolston also agree that an “educational, collaborative, values-based approach” is the most effective strategy to help students internalize and act given the standards for academic integrity. Furthermore, if we agree that over a third of university students in one Canadian research study saw AI policies as helpful, then providing students with awareness of such policies and sanctions prior to their university enrollment could have a culturing and hustling effect, whereas breaking the pledge or dishonoring the policy could result in consequences for a student on a broader scale, disincentivizing cheating.