Contract cheating used to be pretty low-tech, like paying someone to write an essay. Now someone can take over a test taker’s computer through remote access software or feed them answers with hidden AI tools designed to avoid detection. That makes it much harder for colleges and universities, credentialing bodies, and employers to tell who actually completed an exam, assessment, or interview.
Whatever tools come next, it all comes back to one question: Did the right person do the work on their own?
It’s a straightforward question, but solving it is complex.
What is contract cheating?
Contract cheating is when a person outsources all or part of an exam, assignment, or other assessment to someone else and submits the work as their own (Johnson-Clements et al., 2024). The third party may be a commercial service, friend, family member, or another person who takes an exam or completes an interview on the individual’s behalf. Payment is common in commercial contract cheating, but outsourcing can also happen without payment (Rahimi et al., 2024).
Contract cheating can happen at different stages of education and work, whether someone is completing college coursework, pursuing a professional certification or license, or applying for a job.
- College coursework: A student pays someone to write an essay or take an exam for them.
- Credentialing: A participant hires someone to take the exam or gets live help from someone during it.
- Hiring: A candidate pays a proxy to take a pre-hire assessment or uses a hidden AI assistant during a virtual interview.
Examples of contract cheating
- Paid services: Paying an essay mills, subject-matter experts, or other outsourcing services to complete all or part of an assessment or assignment.
- Unpaid help: A friend, family member, classmate, or colleague completes the assessment for you without payment.
- Shared login: Giving someone else your login credentials so they can complete an assessment, task, or interview for you.
- Remote access: Allowing another person to control your computer remotely and complete an assessment on your behalf.
- Tutoring and homework-help sites: Using a live tutor during an assessment or buying, downloading, or submitting pre-written work or answers from tutoring, homework-help, or file-sharing sites.
- Unauthorized AI use: Using generative AI to write an essay, solve problems, produce code, or complete other assessed work when that use isn’t allowed.
How is using AI contract cheating?
Using AI is contract cheating because it completes work you were expected to do yourself and you submit that work as your own. Similar to paying someone to write a paper or answer test questions, using AI tools without permission means the tool is doing some or potentially all of the work you were expected to do on your own.
How common is contract cheating?
About 8% to 9% of college students have paid someone else to complete an assignment for them, while 10.5% have had someone else take an online test for them (Curtis et al., 2022; Johnson-Clements et al., 2024). But the actual rates could be higher because students don’t always admit to contract cheating on anonymous surveys (Curtis et al., 2022).
How to prevent contract cheating
Verify identity
Verifying the test taker’s identity is the first step in preventing contract cheating on online exams, since blocking AI tools or recording the session won’t help if the wrong person is taking the test. The process should be quick and simple, where the test taker just snaps a photo of themselves and their ID before they start.
Block unauthorized AI and remote access software
Remote access software lets test takers have someone else control the computer and answer the questions while they stay on screen, and new AI tools, such as invisible assistants, are hard to detect because they’re specifically built to remain hidden, even during screen-sharing.
Colleges and employers are already dealing the challenges these tools bring to assessments and interviews.
- 18.7% of college students said they had used a live online tutor (a paid expert) during a test at least once (Johnson-Clements et al., 2024).
- 35% of recruiters and hiring managers said they suspected or caught candidates using AI during interviews, 31% said someone other than the applicant completed the interview, and 18% said a candidate used deepfake AI.
Online proctoring software can block AI tools, remote access software, and other software while still allowing the specific software and resources the assessment requires. For example, you can block everything except Excel for a financial modeling test, Python for a coding assessment, or the case study test takers need to reference during an exam.
Monitor and record assessments and interviews
Recording the webcam and screen gives you a record of what happened during the assessment. The webcam shows the test taker and the space around them, and the screen recording shows everything they did on the computer. And using a second camera gives you a side-angle view of the test taker’s hands and desk that the webcam may not show. If something looks off, you can go back to the recording and see what happened.
Proctored interviews work a bit differently. After verifying the candidate’s identity, interview proctoring AI works in the background during the video interview to block unauthorized AI tools and detect potentially suspicious behavior without adding a proctor to the call or distracting the candidate with warnings and pop-ups. This allows the hiring team to go review the recording and a timestamped report afterward to decide whether anything looks like candidate fraud.
Detect cell phones and other devices
Cell phones, smartwatches, tablets, and other secondary devices give test takers another way to get outside help, since they can message someone, access exam help sites, use generative AI, or ask a voice assistant like Siri or Alexa on a device that’s separate from the computer they’re testing on.
Online proctoring software with multi-device detection can detect cell phones and other handheld devices and activity from nearby devices, and it can listen for phrases that activate voice assistants like Siri or Google Assistant using smart speech detection.
Protect exam content
When exam questions are copied, photographed, or shared online, organizations may have to throw out scores, replace questions, suspend testing, or pay fines. Colleges, credentialing bodies, and employers have all dealt with theith the repercussions of leaked content, such as:
- Higher education: Nearly a third of college students in one survey admitted to uploading academic files to file-sharing websites (Johnson-Clements et al., 2024).
- Nursing: A pediatric nursing board suspended testing and built a new certification exam after its content was shared.
- K12 teaching: A test-prep company had staff memorize Florida’s teacher certification exams and sold the questions in study guides.
- Medicine: The American Board of Internal Medicine suspended or revoked the status of 139 physicians who shared exam questions with a test-prep company.
- Accounting: Big Four firms and their affiliates have paid more than $132.5 million in fines for answer sharing since 2022.
- Cybersecurity: Employees at NCC Group uploaded certification questions and answers to GitHub and Dropbox.
- Law enforcement: Officers photographed questions on the 2022 NYPD sergeant exam, and 35% of the questions reached more than 1,200 officers.
- Plumbing: A certification exam leaked days before 224 apprentices took it, and the agency had to write new questions.
Technology such as Search & DestroyTM, which automatically scans the internet for your exam content, can find leaked questions within a few minutes and lets you send takedown requests with one click. And during online exams, proctoring software can block copy and paste, screenshots, and screen recordings. It can also record the test taker’s screen and webcam and detect phones that could be used to photograph or record questions.
Secure the workspace
A workspace scan helps identify unauthorized materials or devices before an assessment or interview starts. The test taker can use a phone to take a wide-angle photo of the desk and nearby area so the reviewer can see items such as notes, phones, tablets, or another computer. This also helps address situations where the correct person is on camera but has another device or source of help nearby.
Contract cheating will keep changing as new tools give people different ways to get outside help, which brings us back to the question we started with: Did the right person do the work on their own?
Colleges, credentialing bodies, and employers can answer it the same way, whatever tools come next. They can confirm who’s taking the assessment or completing the remote interview, allow only the tools and resources it calls for, and keep a record to review when something looks off.
Honorlock’s online proctoring makes that possible without compromising the testing experience. It verifies identity in about a minute, blocks unauthorized AI and remote access software while keeping any approved apps available, detects suspicious behavior, and provides clear objective evidence to make better decisions regarding exam or interview integrity. Ultimately, this helps give the score, credential, or job offer to the person who earned it.
References
Curtis, G. J., McNeill, M., Slade, C., Tremayne, K., Harper, R., Rundle, K., & Greenaway, R. (2022). Moving beyond self-reports to estimate the prevalence of commercial contract cheating: an Australian study. Studies in Higher Education, 47(9), 1844–1856. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1972093
Johnson-Clements, T. P., Curtis, G. J., & Clare, J. (2024). Testing a Psychological Model of Post-Pandemic Academic Cheating. Journal of Academic Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-024-09561-4
Rahimi, R., Jones, J., & Bailey, C. (2024). Exploring contract cheating in further education: student engagement and academic integrity challenges. Ethics and Education, 19(1), 38–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2023.2299193
