In memoriam · founding research
Robert Clarke, 1950–2020
Robert Clarke was a Principal Lecturer at Birmingham City University, a persistent investigator of online academic outsourcing and, with Dr Thomas Lancaster, a co-originator of contract cheating research.
Read the Times Higher Education obituary remembering Robert Clarke’s life and work.
Teaching and university life
Robert Clarke was born in Cheltenham in March 1950. He studied chemistry at the University of East Anglia from 1968 to 1971 and later completed an MSc in Business Information Services at Keele University from 1994 to 1998.
He taught chemistry in Walsall from 1971 to 1974 and in Birmingham from 1974 to 1978. After working as an information and advisory officer at Leicester Polytechnic from 1978 to 1980, he joined Birmingham City University.
Clarke served as Principal Lecturer in the School of Computing and Digital Technology from 1980 to 2010. He was a founding member of the Department of Computing and helped establish its first degree, a BSc in Computing Information Systems. After taking voluntary redundancy in 2010, he continued as a consultant and taught at the university until 2016.
Contract cheating research
Clarke worked with Dr Thomas Lancaster on academic integrity. They co-authored Eliminating the successor to plagiarism? Identifying the usage of contract cheating sites. Dr Lancaster presented the paper at the 2nd International Plagiarism Conference in Newcastle/Gateshead in June 2006; Clarke was not present at the conference. Their paper coined the term contract cheating.
Clarke’s detailed monitoring of public assignment requests gave the work its empirical base. The pair then developed a practical and interdisciplinary programme spanning detection, market structure, subject coverage, prevention and institutional response.
Selected joint research milestones
These outputs show the continuity and range of the Clarke–Lancaster programme; the list is selective rather than exhaustive.
2006 · Naming and measuring the problem
Eliminating the successor to plagiarism? introduced the term and quantified activity on a freelance marketplace.
2007 · Systematic detection
Establishing a systematic six-stage process for detecting contract cheating translated investigation into a repeatable workflow.
2008 · Defining the phenomenon
The phenomena of contract cheating situated outsourcing within the wider online plagiarism environment.
2013–2014 · Markets and disciplinary reach
The pair examined the commercial structure of contract cheating and the range of subjects represented on agency websites.
2016 · Consolidating practice
Their Handbook of Academic Integrity chapter synthesised the evidence and set out practical prevention and response options.
A lasting investigative ethic
Clarke’s work was grounded in finding real outsourcing activity, alerting educators and protecting the meaning of assessed work. That evidence-led ethic remains central to credible research and practice.
Remembered by a colleague
Without Bob Clarke’s pioneering work, there would not be a contract cheating research field in its present form. The pioneering research was almost a side-product of Bob’s real passion, where he would spend his evenings looking up assignment details posted online for money, then he would try and locate the instructor whose work was being outsourced. Bob received such a range of responses, some grateful, others who did not want to know or who thought he was crazy. After all, those students would never cheat. Without Bob’s collection of data, his passion for supporting students and for academic integrity, we’d be in a much poorer educational system right now.
Thomas Lancaster
Legacy
Robert Clarke died on 4 March 2020.
His pioneering work continues to influence contract-cheating research, academic integrity practice and the support offered to students. The term, platform evidence and investigative approach he established with Thomas Lancaster gave researchers and educators a clearer way to understand outsourcing and respond to it.
How to cite this page
Suggested citation:
ContractCheating.com. (2026). Robert Clarke, 1950–2020. https://contractcheating.com/robert-clarke