Helping or Cheating? (Literacy Brokering or Contract Cheating?)

Part of the purpose of this chapter is to help you figure out how to draw the line between “normal,” acceptable ways that students work together with others as they complete academic assignments, and activities that cross the line into cheating or otherwise violating the university’s academic integrity policy (and the basic unwritten rules of ethical behavior in general). Understanding where the line is drawn isn’t always easy, and it sometimes depends on how your instructor interprets the basic principles of academic integrity.

There are two concepts I like to think about to help me make sense of this. The terms are “literacy brokering,” which was coined by Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis, and “contract cheating,” by Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke. They both describe ways that people get help with academic work. And interestingly, they were both terms first coined in 2006, which shows that it’s just within the last few decades that professors have begun seriously researching this stuff.

For Curry and Lillis, “literacy brokering” is the work done by people who help academic writers (usually professors) make sure the things they write are ready for publication. This can include editors, reviewers, academic colleagues, and even friends and family members. As I said above, for academics, this is quite common. We share texts with people who alter them in some way all the time, because we want them to be better before we turn them in for publication.

For Lancaster and Clarke, “contract cheating” is the “outsourcing of student work,” or when students pay someone else to complete all or part of an assignment.

The funny thing about these two terms is that the people who do literacy brokering and the people who do contract cheating operate in surprisingly similar ways. They are usually found through interpersonal or professional networks, or are people close to the writer; they sometimes advertise their services; they often charge a fee for their services; and they work on something that they will not ultimately be considered the “authors” of – something that will be published or turned in without their name on it.

We can understand a few things when we consider these paradoxical similarities.

First, literacy brokering was a concept developed to describe how professional academic writers get help – people who are professors or graduate students, writing up their research, and seeking to have it published in academic journals. Contract cheating, on the other hand, is a concept meant to describe the unethical behavior of some college students. In a way, these two terms are apples and oranges: They describe work done in different contexts, even if the work is often similar.

Second, we can see that there is a bit of a double standard operating here: Literacy brokering is considered legitimate, but contract cheating is not. On the surface, this does not seem fair, and to be honest, in some cases, it’s not fair. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to play by the rules. As an undergraduate student, you are kind of an apprentice in your field of study, and you need to show that you can play by the rules – kind of like the apprentice sushi chefs in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi who have to make a simple egg sushi over and over again before they can move on to being trusted with more complicated dishes.

So, knowing that this paradox exists – that most of us get at least some help with academic work to some extent, but that some forms of help are considered cheating – what can you do?