TECHNOLOGY
campusreview.com.au
Evolution of cheating
Could bespoke
interventions
through AI
stop students
cheating?
By James Thorley
W
hile technology has had a positive
impact on the student learning
experience, it has also posed
a challenge for educational institutions in
upholding academic integrity.
New technologies make it easier for
students to conduct academic misconduct,
such as plagiarising or contract cheating
(where a student recruits a third party to
complete their academic work). This is
largely due to the increase of opportunities
through better access to information,
improved communication and access to
cheap ‘labour’.
As Newton suggests in his 2018 study,
there has been an increase over recent
years in academic misconduct across
the board. While he doesn’t make any
conclusions in his work, it’s very likely
that increased access to technology is a
contributing factor.
So technology can be said to have had
both a positive and negative impact on
academic integrity. However, it is my belief
that the next wave of technological changes
could greatly diminish academic misconduct.
Before we get into that though, it’s important
to understand the evolution of misconduct.
While academic misconduct has been
around since the start of education, the
first instance where technology had a
major influence was the introduction of the
World Wide Web, and the ability to copy
and paste. As content moved from offline
to online sources, more students would
pull information from academic resources,
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insert it into their essays and submit it as their
own work. While some students continue
to copy and paste today, similarity checking
technology now gives teachers the ability to
detect and police all unreferenced sources.
The next challenge to academic integrity
saw the rise of the essay mill, where students
would upload essays to earn credits that gain
them access to other submitted essays. The
idea of pre-written essays being available
made academic misconduct much easier.
But again, technology has stopped this, to
a large extent, as the database of essays
submitted began to build up, allowing
software to compare essays submitted across
various academic institutions. Fortunately,
essay mills have almost completely died out.
But once again, academic misconduct
evolved. Educational institutions are now
faced with a larger problem: bespoke essay
writing. The internet facilitated the rise of
e-commerce, which saw the introduction of
online marketplaces and the gig economy,
matching writers to students willing to pay
someone else to write their assignments.
As Ellis, Zucker and Randall showed in their
2018 study, technology around e-commerce
has allowed for a highly developed contract
cheating site structure to emerge. This is
currently the most sophisticated method
of misconduct.
In any teaching environment, there needs
to be a balance between education and
quality assurance. Students first need to be
made aware of the risks, and educated about
the importance of academic integrity. While
some misconduct is inevitable, technologies
have already significantly reduced the
amount of instances across educational
institutions. Here are the three stages where
technologies have been applied to maintain
integrity and reduce academic misconduct:
1. Policing the issue – the challenge
posed by copy and paste and essay
mills are easily policed through the use
of plagiarism software. This technology
can analyse a student’s work to see if
they’re using online content or using
past assignments. However, while
policing is an effective measure to
detect misconduct, it doesn’t address
the root of the issue, which is why
education is important.
2. Education aims to stop the misconduct
before it occurs. Technology
comes into the picture as a learning
resource throughout the drafting and
development of a written piece of
work, providing the student with an
opportunity to learn what’s considered
misconduct, while not being
penalised. It also opens up a line of
communication between the teacher
and the student around the topic of
academic integrity.
3. Intervening through traits of
misconduct – contract cheating is the
hardest form of academic misconduct
to identify because it is original work,
just not by the student. However, we’re
close to the stage where technology
can be used to understand and detect
unoriginal work. By using machine
learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to
study multiple written submissions from
a student, the technology can identify
patterns and traits, and recognise an
essay that does not fit those patterns.
While technology can still be used for
policing and education, AI has the ability
to intervene when the student begins to
show signs of struggling with the course or
program and provide them with the correct
resources to help them stop before it results
in academic misconduct.
If done right, this is where technology has
the ability to make academic misconduct
all but disappear through a bespoke
intervention, on an individual basis, to
students who need this level of support.
Most students who go to university
don’t start a course wanting to plagiarise,
download work from an essay mill or engage
a contract cheater. They often get to that
stage because they don’t have the skills or
understanding, or have external pressures
that force them down that path. This is where
technology has an opportunity to highlight
opportunities for teacher intervention, which
ultimately should result in better academic
results, higher graduation rates and greatly
reduced levels of academic misconduct. ■
James Thorley is regional director, APAC,
at Turnitin.