Assignment outsourcing: moving beyond contract cheating

In short

Where do students turn when they outsource assignments? Using one survey tool across countries, the paper reports respondents named friends, family and peer-sharing sites more often than essay mills, with large differences by country.

What it looked at

A large international project that used the same survey tool in multiple countries, asking respondents about outsourcing their assignments. The paper reports self-reported behaviour and offers a new term, assignment outsourcing, to cover the range of methods.

What it means for teaching

Prevention aimed only at essay mills may miss the friends, family and peer-sharing routes that respondents reported most often.

Limits

Results are self-reported, so they show what respondents said, not what they did. The abstract does not say how many took part or how they were chosen.

Cited 86 times by other papers, as counted by OpenAlex in November 2026. A count measures attention, not quality.