They say cheaters never win, but they can make universities losers

The return of international students after the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the growing use of AI, is pushing Australian universities to crack down on cheating as they battle to maintain credibility against the debasement of standards.

Cheating in exams has been a constant of tertiary student life, but after institutions largely abandoned pen-and-paper tests during the pandemic, the Herald’s Daniella White reports that more recently, students in unprecedented numbers have been accused of cheating and of paying others to do their work.

New figures show the University of Sydney recorded a 1000 per cent increase in serious academic cheating referred to the registrar between 2021 and 2023. Extra resources were needed to get through a backlog of cases. At the University of Wollongong, substantiated allegations of academic misconduct rose by 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.

Guy Curtis, an academic integrity expert from the University of Western Australia, said the return of international students also increased concerns over visa and admission fraud, and contract cheating by 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.”

Meanwhile, Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency academic integrity unit director Helen Gniel said Australia’s higher education watchdog was concerned about a rise in aggressive behaviour to her staff from contract cheating providers who often have links to organised crime and who have blackmailed their student clients. “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’,” she said.

The university sector has been beset by a number of overseas student scandals. Last August, we learnt institutions were scrambling to prevent overseas students from rorting the entry system with fake secondary school diplomas and English-language tests, prompting them to consider stricter rules for Chinese nationals to stop the further erosion of standards. Previously, Australian universities had to address allegations of plagiarism among international students and the embarrassing high proportion of them who completed degrees despite being unable to speak or write English satisfactorily. However, some universities connive, too, at the debasement of their standards.

The ongoing mess surrounding cheating has partly resulted from Australia’s universities being forced to mainline on overseas students after government cutbacks compelled economies on the tertiary sector, and it turned to fee-paying students, particularly foreign students, to fill gaps in budgets. According to the federal Department of Education, international education was worth $36.4 billion to the Australian economy in 2022-23: $21.8 was spent on goods and services and $14.6 billion was paid on tuition fees. The worth of the overseas student education industry to Australia annually, trails only iron ore, coal and natural gas as an export.

Cheating unchecked has the potential to hurt Australia economically, but for universities, it amounts to an existential threat. They are beefing up their investigation units. But competition is fierce among the world’s universities and, for the ablest students, an Australian institution is rarely the first choice. The quality of the education is paramount. Cheating undermines the credibility of the student, the institution and the qualification.

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