Ways to cheat on your work are becoming more and more accessible online.Is the risk of ruining your grade worth it, Sidney Stanford reports

‘Contract cheating’ is the act of having someone else or an online organisation write your work for you. This academic dishonesty is becoming more of an issue every day as the internet makes cheating easier than ever. Search engines store and provide millions of different sources and articles to copy. On a more extreme level, some websites offer to write essays for students for anything up to hundreds of pounds.

Universities across the country work closely with software monitoring company ‘Turnitin’ which helps lecturers and exam boards determine if students are plagiarising their work. The company is trying hard to crack down on ‘contract cheaters’ by unveiling a new software called ‘Authorship Investigation’. This software looks at student’s individual work and flags up anything that doesn’t sound authentic to the student. The new program launched after it was revealed that 1 in 3 lecturers believe that some students submit unoriginal work.

Although it may be easy the outcome is not always worth it. An anonymous student from the London School of Economics who was caught contract cheating on an essay has said: “finding work online or paying someone to do it might be easy but the stress of having to resubmit was not worth it”. He also said: “it was partly because there was no support from uni, and all the work piling up with other modules and no time to do them especially when you have to work at the same time to live”.