Designing out contract cheating 20 Jan

Wednesday 20 January 09:00 - 11:00 

UCL Arena Centre are delivering this session, which is open to all staff involved in designing assessment at UCL. The workshop will explore and share concerns about contract cheating.

Contract cheating threatens university assessment integrity and has led to recent work on redesigning assessment tasks to deter contract cheating.

The workshop draws on research and professional development work in Australia to help participants analyse sample assessment tasks for weaknesses and redesign these tasks so that they are more robust and discourage contract cheating. 

Participants will explore and share concerns about contract cheating, analyse assessment tasks for weaknesses and discuss ways of redesiging tasks to deter contract cheating. Principles for robust assessment design will be presented. 

In the workshop, participants will:

• Identify concerns about academic integrity and contract cheating
• Analyse assessment tasks
• Redesign good quality tasks that deter contract cheating 

Guest contributor 

We will be using workshop materials developed by Christine Slade and Christine will be joining us as a guest contributor. Christine is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI) at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia.

In this role, Dr Slade contributes to UQ’s strategic priorities in assessment and academic integrity, and has leadership responsibilities in the implementation of the University’s first Academic Integrity Action Plan. In 2016-2017 Dr Slade led a grant funded by the Asia Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity (APFEI), which used co-design workshops across the university sector, to develop high stakes assessment case studies that demonstrated ways to strengthen the verification of student identity in undertaking these tasks.

Ten case studies and a set of presenter slides were placed on APFEI’s website to help others run their own academic integrity in assessment workshops.

Who should attend 

You should attend if you are a member of UCL staff, academic or professional services, involved in assessment. 

Postgraduate Teaching Assistants and all early career educators will find this session particularly useful.