To help students understand when they may be breaking the rules and also to avoid getting scammed by “pay-to-pass” companies, the University of Calgary has developed a new web resource called “What you need to know about paying for academic support”. The resource highlights unscrupulous practices that these “pay-to-pass” (e.g. tutoring; file sharing) companies use to convince students to pay for their services and/or work for them. This post is focused on the behaviors students should look out for if they’re thinking about working for such companies:.

Example #1: Booking space on campus.

Students are permitted to book certain spaces on campus for the learning purposes, such as group work rooms. But students are not permitted to use their student ID to book rooms for a business purpose, such as interviewing fellow students for jobs.

Example #2: Requiring students to surrender academic materials at a job interview or as a condition of employment.

Some companies require student applicants to surrender copies of tests, midterms or other assessments during a job interview. They pitch this as a way for students to prove they are qualified to offer tutoring for a particular course, when it is just a pretext to acquire materials the company will later sell to other students. Sometimes students do not realize they are sharing material to which the instructor holds the copyright. By providing the materials to a third party who then sells them, they may be unknowingly facilitating a copyright violation. In other cases, the materials may be institutionally approved study materials offered for free to students as study tools and made available via the websites of an academic department. The companies offer the same materials for sale on their website, effectively tricking students into buying study tools already available to them for free.

Example #3: Unauthorized use of institutional e-mail addresses.

Companies require or encourage students to engage in unethical behaviour such as reaching out to their classmates to market the company’s services. This is particularly dangerous when student hired by these companies send out e-mail “blasts” to classmates using class lists contained within the institutional learning management system. The class lists are provided to students for the purposes of allowing them to connect with each other for the purposes of learning, such as setting up group work meetings. The university IT policy explicitly states that student e-mail addresses may be used to market to sell third-party services or products.

In any of the above cases, a student could be held responsible for violating the institutional code of conduct by contravening institutional policy, when it is really the company at fault for encouraging or requiring unethical behaviour as a condition of employment.

A secondary benefit of this resource is that it allows staff and faculty to engage students in pro-active conversations about how to protect themselves from being scammed by unethical companies. This is the first time the university has developed a resource such as this for students to help them navigate the complexities of working with (or for) pay-to-pass companies. Other universities can link to this resource to help their own students.

Written by Tomas Foltynek

February 12, 2019

I remember the time when I first came across the issue of academic integrity. It was October 2010 at the IPPHEAE project (Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education across Europe) kick-off meeting. Mendel University in Brno was invited to share its experience with the development of a plagiarism detection tool. At that meeting, I realized that the concept was much more complex than just plagiarism and that UK universities were dealing with issues that Czech universities were not even aware of.

The project identified huge gaps in institutional and national policies, but also many examples of good practice. And, more importantly, a willingness to share this practice and learn from others’ experience. The group of enthusiastic people gathered 12 European partners to apply for an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project 3-year grant funded by the European Union. We called our project the “European Network for Academic Integrity” (ENAI). Within this project, we have founded an independent legal body (NGO) that establishes a sustainable network and conducts the following activities:

1. Annual Conferences. After three conferences in Brno, Czechia (2013, 2015, 2017), we moved to Ephesus, Turkey (2018). The next conferences will be in Vilnius, Lithuania (2019) and Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2020).

1. Training Events. At these events, we intensively develop educational materials and other project outputs, and offer lectures and workshops available to all (one of which was also broadcasted  by the Council of Europe).

1. Educational Materials. We have developed lot of materials ourselves, but also collated from the internet. A significant part of our materials is devoted to teaching and learning resources that can be used with students in different study contexts.

1. Academic Integrity Guidelines. These Guidelines were developed with partners from UK to Cyprus and from Portugal to Latvia, with representatives from computer science, biomedicine, social sciences and other areas. The Guidelines include a glossary of terms with explanatory details and recommendations for higher education institutions.

1. Relationship Maintenance. We have relationships with like-minded organizations, such as Netherlands Research Integrity Network, European Network of Research Integrity Offices, and ICAI. With ICAI, we agreed on mutual recognition of membership for discounted conference fees. ENAI members pay the same fee as ICAI members at the ICAI conference and vice versa. So, if ICAI members want to come to Lithuania, they will be charged as an ENAI member.

1. Researcher Platform. We are working on providing a set of good practices for conducting academic integrity research and to developing a set of questions, which can be used across countries and over time so the results will be comparable to each other.

1. Plagiarism Detection Tool Testing. This activity will enable users to determine which of these systems suits best to their needs.

We see that our work is useful and appreciated. Our membership has more than doubled to 25 members from 19 countries. Our close cooperation with Council of Europe’s ETINED platform will help formulate recommendations for all European states. Our mission is to provide resources, educational materials, research evidence and a platform to share and gain the experience from others.

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