Contract Cheating: Introduction

This chapter introduces the Handbook part on “Contract Cheating and the Commodification of Academic Misconduct.” This chapter considers the definitions of contract cheating, the emergence of contract cheating as an area of rising research interest, and the impact of commercialization and commodification of education on these trends. Next, the chapters within this part of the Handbook are summarized and foreshadowed. The chapter concludes with issues for the future, including the potential impact of artificial intelligence generators on the contract cheating industry and an assessment of how massification and commercialization in higher education have potentially contributed both to the problem of contract cheating and the difficulty of tackling contract cheating.