Impediments to reporting contract cheating: exploring the role of emotions

Confronting breaches of academic integrity by students has always been fraught with emotions for academic staff. Student cheating represents a transgression of accepted academic norms and brings into potential conflict the pedagogical and personal relationship with the student. The increased prevalence of contract cheating, defined as the outsourcing of assessment tasks to third parties and submitted by students as their own work, brings additional emotional, cognitive and professional workloads. When making a decision on whether to follow institutional procedures to formally report contract cheating, staff must now face the challenge of substantiating what is at times a nebulous and challenging case. Emotions contribute significantly to decision-making, whether in direct response to the situation or as a latent effect of the context in which the judgement occurs. Issues of workload, professional identity and interactions with a reporting and decision-making process that may be perceived as inconsistent and focused on commercial rather than pedagogical factors, may directly influence educators’ decisions regarding academic integrity. If formally reporting cases of contract cheating is fundamental to a fair and quality-assured system, research is required to determine how emotional responses are affecting judgement and decision-making by academic staff when confronted by these types of breaches of academic integrity.