The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), Australia’s higher education watchdog, has raised alarms that cheating syndicates run by criminal organisations are becoming more aggressive.
Dr Helen Gniel, TEQSA’s director of the academic integrity unit, told SMH:
“We know that blackmail [of students] happens. 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.”
TEQSA has recently also blocked 79 new websites offering contract cheating services, bringing the total number of banned pages to nearly 370.
Thousands of students across Australia have been accused of cheating and paying others to complete their work, resulting in an increase in contract cheating which is an academic misconduct.
New data shows that the University of Sydney reported a staggering 1000% increase in serious academic cheating cases referred to the registrar between 2021 and 2023, necessitating additional resources to clear a backlog of cases.
A spokeswoman for University of Sydney told SMH:
“Alongside a number of indicators of misconduct, we also use a range of technologies to detect and investigate cases. 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.”
Meanwhile, the University of Wollongong saw a nearly 50% rise in substantiated academic misconduct allegations in 2023 compared to 2022. Much of the increase at the University of Wollongong was attributed to a spike in misconduct during online exams. In contrast, the University of Sydney’s move away from online exams in 2023 led to a decrease in exam-related misconduct. However, the university noted a “concerning increase” in contract cheating, where students pay others to complete their work.
Dr Paul Watters, a Melbourne-based academic and cybersecurity expert, said in a statement on LinkedIn:
“I think we need to seriously consider 100% invigilation as the only valid mechanism for assessment. If the levels are this bad at a Go8, imagine the rest of the sector.”
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