Contract Cheating in Canada: How it Started and How it’s Going
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: The goal of this session is to provide an in-depth account of the history and development of contract cheating in Canada over the past 50+ years. You will also learn about the one and only (failed) attempt at legislation to make ghostwritten essays and exams illegal in Canada. Method: The content of this session is drawn from Eaton’s book chapter on contract cheating in the forthcoming edited volume, Academic Integrity in Canada: An Enduring and Essential Challenge (Eaton & Christensen Hughes) that involved over a thousand hours of historical research and digging into archival material to uncover that the contract cheating industry in Canada has been operating successfully for longer than most of us ever realized. Results: Get the details on a criminal case in the 1980s, noted as being the first of its kind in Canada, and possibly the Commonwealth, that made history when an essay mill owner and his wife were charged with fraud and conspiracy. The case was dismissed by the judge, leaving the contract cheating industry to flourish in Canada, which it has done with a vengeance. Then learn about an exposé in a major US magazine in the 1990s that presented in-details about the experiences of writers who supplied services to the contact cheating industry. Now that we are in the 21st century, find out what’s being done across the country today to take action against contract cheating. Implications: I share previously undiscovered evidence and insights that shows how the contract cheating industry has been proliferating in Canada for at least half a century. Even if you thought you knew about contract cheating in Canada, you’ll almost certainly learn something new in this session. I conclude with strong calls to action for educators, advocates, and policy makers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".