Contract cheating, instances in which a student enlists someone other than themselves to produce coursework, has been identified as a growing problem within academic integrity literature and in news headlines. The percentage of students who have utilized this type of cheating has been reported to range between 6% and 15.7%. Generational sentiments about cheating and the prevalent accessibility of contract cheating providers online seems to only have exacerbated the issue. The problem is that there is currently no simple means identified and verified to detect contract cheating, as available plagiarism detection software has been shown to be ineffective in these cases. One method that is commonly used for authorship authentication in nonacademic settings, stylometry, has been suggested as a potential means for detection. Stylometry uses various attributes of documents to determine if they were written by the same individual. This pilot study sought to assess the utility of three easy to use and readily available stylometry software systems to detect simulated cases of contract cheating on academic documents. Average accuracy ranged from 33% to 88.9%. While more research is necessary to further investigate the reliability of the best performing software packages, stylometry software appears to show significant promise for the potential detection of contract cheating.

中文翻译：

---

通过测距法检测在线合同作弊的初步研究

在学术诚信文献和新闻头条中，合同作弊，即学生招募除自己之外的其他人来制作课程作业的实例，已被视为一个日益严重的问题。据报道，利用这种作弊的学生比例在6％至15.7％之间。关于作弊的代际情绪和合同作弊提供者普遍在线访问似乎只会加剧这一问题。问题在于，目前还没有确定和验证用于检测合同欺诈的简单方法，因为已经证明可用的available窃检测软件在这些情况下无效。已经提出了一种在非学术环境中通常用于作者身份验证的方法，即测笔法，作为一种潜在的检测手段。笔法使用文档的各种属性来确定它们是否由同一个人编写。这项初步研究试图评估三种易于使用且易于使用的笔迹测量软件系统在检测学术文件上合同作弊的模拟案例中的效用。平均准确度为33％至88.9％。虽然有必要进行更多的研究以进一步研究性能最佳的软件包的可靠性，但测线软件似乎显示出潜在的合同欺诈检测潜力。9％。虽然有必要进行更多的研究以进一步研究性能最佳的软件包的可靠性，但测速软件似乎显示出潜在的合同欺诈检测潜力。9％。虽然有必要进行更多的研究以进一步研究性能最佳的软件包的可靠性，但测线软件似乎显示出潜在的合同欺诈检测潜力。