Detecting Contract Cheating

• Faculty can review gradebook activity, including IP addresses of assignment submissions in Blackboard. From the gradebook, navigate to students, click on a student and view the activity log. Submissions to third party integrations such as Turnitin, McGraw-Hill Connect, Pearson, etc. will not record IP address.
• Get to know your students. Ask them to submit writing samples, participate in discussion boards, etc., so you get to know their writing style and can identify inconsistencies.
• Check document properties of files submitted for creation date, time and author (Word, Excel, PPT files).
• In Turnitin and SafeAssign, pay attention to very low matches or very high matches (<5% or 30%). 

Watch for:

• Assignments that only vaguely address required content.
• Papers with no in-text citations, mismatched citations/reference page, foreign references.
• Papers that quote abstracts or summaries of sources.
• Suspiciously high quality writing.