How EduLegit Detects and Prevents Contract Cheating

An educational environment is dynamic and requires students to adapt to new standards. Learners often use different options to cope with piling assignments. However, besides grammar checkers and similar technological tools, students also pay others to complete texts from scratch. Essays written by professional writers, peers, and other people for money or generated by AI allow learners to submit papers on different topics and present themselves as experts on many subjects. This practice is considered contract cheating because the content does not reflect the student’s knowledge and experience.

Educators need help identifying such texts and stopping students when they want to delegate their homework to others. EduLegit has a solution. The platform offers different solutions to ensure academic honesty at all times. These solutions span from creating an environment where writing efforts are monitored and assessed at every step to receiving all-encompassing plagiarism and AI reports. More so, in case of any suspicious activity that may indicate cheating, teachers receive alerts. Working with EduLegic enables students to use their skills and knowledge instead of relying on others – be it peers’ help or AI assistance – to get better grades.

Contract Cheating in Academics

Many people wonder how prevalent is the problem of cheating in modern classrooms. And many teachers would answer that it is overwhelming. Even students themselves confess to plagiarizing at some point. Studies show that 89% of students report using ChatGPT to write their essays while the percentage of learners who use writing services or ask their peers to work on assignments is unclear but suspected to be as high (Rumi, n.d.). While reasons for resorting to dishonest practices may vary and include tight deadlines, stress, fear of failure, complex instructions, lack of peer support, and more, AI plagiarism is an inexcusable practice that undermines the principles of education. With access to knowledge comes responsibility to learn valuable information, develop skills and gain valid experiences that AI cannot provide. Thus, Edulegit recognizes the severity of the issue and offers a way for students and educators to cooperate based on transparency.

How EduLegit Helps Identify Outsourced Work

Academic institutions face growing challenges in maintaining integrity in student submissions, particularly due to the increased ease of outsourcing assignments. Many individuals and services offer a “ghostwriting” approach to homework and completing papers in a way that mimics a student’s style and language. Restoring such services is contract cheating, which is very hard to detect. In addition, teachers will be grading such outsourced essays as usual ones, and if there is a suspicion of contract cheating, they will be forced to dedicate more time and effort to detecting potential cases of dishonesty manually, making the grading process more complicated and time-consuming.

Yet, outsourcing essay writing to someone else not only complicates the work of teachers but also has long-term effects on learners. Students frequently relying on outside help may struggle to develop the necessary skills. They already damage their future professional competency and the reputation of the institutions that award their credentials. Thus, there is increasing pressure to implement effective tools and strategies to counteract the trend of external writing assistance, and EduLegic offers perfect solutions.

Several approaches can be taken to help teachers and students maintain integrity at all times. They are based on the need to monitor the writing process and get proof that a submitted paper is original and, most importantly, written by a student whose name is on it. The most beneficial features of EduLegit include but are not limited to:

• Writing Process Monitoring: EduLegit analyzes students’ actions during the writing process and uses data to provide reports with the most critical information and insights (for instance, typing patterns, copying, attention score, and more);
• Instant Oversight during Assignments: Teachers can log into the system and see a student’s progress with a particular task;
• Analytics on Student Performance: EduLegit enables teachers to see the time spent actively working on a task, how much attention was dedicated to it, and more;
• Writer Authentication: When using EduLegit, students’ actions are recorded with the help of screenshots and pictures taken by a camera. This approach makes it impossible for someone else to complete a project and shows whether AI was used to plagiarize a paper.

EduLegit helps teachers understand the writing patterns of students and evaluate their performance accurately. We guarantee that no AI plagiarism due to ChatGPT or other tools or external writing assistance can occur when tasks are written using EduLegit. The system can catch any misconduct with ease. Below is an example that shows the parameters our system applies when monitoring the writing process.

Furthermore, these metrics can also be used to identify a student’s writing style and compare it with their other completed assignments for consistency in writing. If a paper is written by someone else, language diversity, sentence length, and other aspects can be used to better understand the situation.

Advantages of Embracing EduLegit Learning Management System

EduLegit empowers teachers by providing a new approach to preventing contract cheating and ensuring integrity. One of the major advantages of using EduLegit is having all aspects of student engagement with tasks in one place. Tools like AI Content Detector, Plagiarism Check, Copy/Paste Monitoring, and others are the best at identifying contract cheating. By detecting content that a student does not write, EduLegit helps maintain high standards of academic integrity and fairness of grading.

EduLegit: All Solutions to Contract Cheating at One Place

EduLegit uses algorithms to gather various data to create reports on each student’s efforts and performance on any task. It contains all the information needed to understand whether a submitted paper is authentic and how it was written. EduLegit provides the history of all changes and includes an analysis of such aspects as editing statistics, attention map, plagiarism and AI percentage, readability score, lexical diversity percentage, and more.

With its AI tools, the EduLegit platform provides an honest reflection of students’ efforts and ensures that there is no chance for both contract cheating and/or unfair accusations of dishonesty or academic misconduct from teachers. Moreover, camera pictures taken during the writing process can be the final step to authenticate a writer and put all doubts to rest. Moreover, the EduLegit team is developing other valuable features that will benefit the education process and outcomes.

EduLegit is on the Guard of Honesty and Authentic Learning

EduLegit offers a transformative solution for educational institutions striving to preserve academic honesty in a landscape increasingly affected by outsourced work. Using advanced algorithms that can analyze work and writing patterns, language styles, and content originality, EduLegit can identify discrepancies and indicate whether any external assistance has been involved in the writing process. This level of scrutiny deters students from attempting to outsource assignments and reinforces accountability and personal responsibility when approaching academic tasks. With the insights provided by AI tools used by EduLegit, educators can gain a clear understanding of individual student needs and learning gaps, offering support where it’s genuinely necessary.

Sources Used:

Oravec, J. A. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Implications for Academic Cheating: Expanding the Dimensions of Responsible Human-AI Collaboration with ChatGPT and Bard.