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Thousands of students caught cheating overwhelm university integrity departments
Thousands of students have been accused of cheating and paying others to do their work as the record number of misconduct cases forces universities to beef up their investigation departments.
The large-scale return of international students has reignited fears of a cheating black market linked to visa fraud, while forensic IT advances have helped investigators find more cheating students.
The University of Sydney recorded a 1000 per cent increase in serious academic cheating in two years.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Australia’s higher education watchdog, Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), has warned that cheating companies run by criminal syndicates are becoming more aggressive in their pursuit of students and are even making threats against investigators.
New figures reveal Sydney University recorded a 1000 per cent increase in serious academic cheating referred to the registrar between 2021 and 2023, with extra resources needed to get through a backlog of cases.
Guy Curtis, an academic integrity expert from University of Western Australia, said universities had gotten much better at detecting contract cheating and were catching people even before markers had even looked at an assignment.
He said institutions were using forensic IT methods to find “patterns of engagement” with computer systems and detect contract cheating, where students pay companies or individuals to ghostwrite essays or assignments.
“What we know about contract cheating is that it’s still fairly prevalent [even with advances in AI] because students are worried about the ways to detect AI use,” Curtis said.
“There are forums on contract cheating writers and I’ve seen them discuss that students have been caught for using AI and come back to have real people write things for them.”
Curtis said the widespread return of international students after the pandemic also increased concerns of the intersection between visa and admission fraud, and contract cheating organised crime groups.
“The system would be such that a person coming into Australia who might be involved in a low-paid job or sex trafficking, comes to Australia on a student visa,” he said. “And part of the package for people who are exploiting that student as a worker is that the student’s enrolment in university is maintained by the fact they continue to pass courses, because the work is done by other people.”
At the University of Wollongong, substantiated allegations of academic misconduct rose almost 50 per cent in 2023 compared to 2022.
The university attributed much of the increase to a spike in misconduct on online exams and of the 526 matters, 406 resulted in a “low-level” outcome, and 120 in a “medium-level” outcome.
TEQSA’s director of the academic integrity unit, Dr Helen Gniel, said the watchdog was concerned about a rise in aggressive behaviour from contract cheating providers who often have links to organised crime.
“We know that blackmail [of students] happens,” she said. “We’ve seen direct evidence where people have written to TEQSA and said ‘I did all this student’s work and they didn’t pay me, I want you to take away their degrees’.
“[There’s also been] an uptick in aggression directed at the staff who do the really important work of detection.”
She said the watchdog was also concerned that contract cheating providers were expanding the services they offered to include such things as admissions fraud.
Sydney University said its move away from online exams in 2023 resulted in a reduction in exam misconduct. However, at the same time it reported a “concerning increase” in contract cheating cases – which involves students paying other people to do their work for them.
It said it increased resources to manage the record number of academic integrity breaches flowing through from 6608 cases in 2022 and 5076 new alleged breaches in 2023.
The university recorded 940 contract cheating cases in 2023, up from 444 in 2022.
The record number of alleged breaches in 2022 saw a three-fold increase in serious academic misconduct cases referred to the registrar during 2023: 1038 cases in 2023, up from 345 in 2022 and 92 in 2021.
“Alongside a number of indicators of misconduct, we also use a range of technologies to detect and investigate cases,” a spokeswoman said.
“Where appropriate, we investigate writing style, IP address, website access and use analytical data, text- and code-matching software, web bots and other resources.
“Our decision maker then makes a finding on the balance of probability, taking all the evidence into account.”
University of NSW, which did not provide 2023 data or answer specific questions, said its efforts were focused on educating students on the appropriate use of generative AI, the risks of engaging with contract cheating providers and penalties where academic misconduct is detected.
Curtis said that as universities got better at detecting cheating, they needed to have the resources to deal with the increased case load.
“I have seen in a few universities over the time, one of the reasons they develop a central unit of academic integrity is that they have instances where they have so many cases that they realise it breaks their existing system.”
Australia’s anti-cheating laws make it an offence to provide or advertise academic cheating services in higher education and give TEQSA the power to block access to sites providing the illegal services.
Late last month, TEQSA blocked 79 new websites that offer contract cheating services, bringing the total number of banned pages to almost 370.
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