Contract cheating in Irish academia involves students outsourcing their assignments or exams to third-party services, often called "essay mills," which threatens the integrity and reputation of higher education institutions. Over the past few years, at least 1000 students across Irish universities have been reported for cheating, including contract cheating, plagiarism, and exam breaches. Ireland is among the few countries with legislation (Section 43A of the 2019 Qualifications and Quality Assurance Act) that criminalizes facilitating, advertising, or promoting contract cheating, with penalties including fines up to €100,000 and imprisonment up to five years.

Universities in Ireland are adopting a multifaceted approach to managing contract cheating. This includes developing clear academic integrity policies aligned with national frameworks, improving detection and investigation processes, engaging students as partners in integrity initiatives, and collaborating with national bodies like the National Academic Integrity Network and QQI for enforcement and education.

Specifically, the platform WIROO, developed by Macquarie University, Australia, is recognized as an innovative tool to combat contract cheating. WIRRO uses large-scale data analytics and "non-learning analytics" to detect suspicious behaviours and potential breaches of academic integrity at scale. It analyses patterns such as shared IP addresses, unusual submission behaviours, and geographic anomalies (e.g., submissions from unexpected locations like Kenya) to generate risk scores for students, helping institutions identify and investigate contract cheating more efficiently. Other platforms that co-exist with Platforms such as WIROO are Turnitin Authorship, which tool designed to help educators and academic institutions detect and investigate potential cases of contract cheating. Turnitin Authorship provides a comprehensive solution by analysing a student’s writing style over time and comparing it with their submitted work to identify inconsistencies.

This presentation will outline the start of the journey in using WIROO, funded under N-TUTORR and the #NextGenerationEU scheme. For us, this is a pilot project for us here at SETU