Page 79 - Articles Written by JGJ EF DPS

their university years.” (7) A situation that at post graduate level is
exacerbated with the introduction of overseas students whose cultural
norms, on the question of plagiarism and course completion, differs from

domestic students putting them at a distinct disadvantage.

For our MBA courses we developed our own case studies and teaching
guides. We used the case study for final examination purposes, handing it
out to the students three weeks before the examination, which was an
open-book examination with un-sighted questions under invigilated

examination conditions. After this usage the case could be further used
for coursework purposes in the following session and subsequently for
general tutorial purposes.

Having produced these business case studies, from our own research,

for use on our courses with fully developed case solutions, or more
appropriately, teaching guides they were then submitted to competition
e.g. The European Foundation for Management Development (efmd)
case writing competition and then The Case Centre (formerly The European
Case Clearing House) for other academics and professionals throughout
the globe to use.

Unfortunately, the environment had changed, in particular university
students were resorting more and more to ‘contract cheating’ by

accessing websites that offered to produce cheap and not-so-cheap
“paid for” course assignments for them. These burgeoning “essay mills”
were in essence threatening the quality of a British university degree. In
response the Department of Education announced it was consulting with
universities over how to crackdown on cheating students with new
guidance due to be implemented in September 2017.

It was against this background that it recently came to our attention that

a website, ‘caseforest.com’, was offering paid business case study
solutions. This was an interesting development and certainly one that
required some investigation. Caseforest.com, are not the only site
offering this service but it was one we thought we could examine.