Academic Integrity Fundamentals Tutorial

Contract cheating occurs when you submit work that someone else completed for you. For example, contract cheating includes having a friend or family member do your work or assignments for you, or purchasing an essay from a person or company.

You may see advertisements for companies offering to complete work for you. For example, some companies offer to write your paper or impersonate you in an exam. Using these services to complete your assignments is considered contract cheating.

Contract cheating is academic misconduct. Consequences include:

• Failing your assignment​
• Failing your course​
• Being suspended from RDP
• Being expelled from RDP
• And not being accepted at another college or university after being expelled

adapted from SFU (CC BY-NC 4.0) and UBC

Contract cheating includes:

• Paying a private individual or company to provide you with “model” answers for an assignment that you minimally edit before submission
• Buying, selling, or swapping completed assignments through “sharing” websites or social media platforms

You also may not:

• Upload your instructor’s teaching materials (e.g. course outlines, lecture slides, assignment questions, etc.) to note-sharing websites
• Share your instructor’s teaching materials with private tutoring companies
• Share your RDP username and password 

There are legitimate tutoring services available at RDP. These tutors will only provide ethical help.

adapted from SFU (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Graphic by Sara LeBlanc, University of Waterloo (CC BY-NC 4.0)