policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Time’s up for cheats
New laws could see offenders
in jail – but universities still need
to step up.
Anna Borek interviewed by Wade Zaglas
T
he Morrison government will introduce legislation to curb
academic cheating at university, with people found guilty
facing up to two years’ jail time or a $210,000 fine.
The new laws target so-called ‘contract cheating’, where third
parties provide assessment advice or services for students for a fee,
including sitting exams.
Research shows contract cheating is on the rise in Australia, with
Education Minister Dan Tehan warning that it threatens the integrity
and international reputation of Australia’s higher education sector.
“A degree from an Australian university is valuable, and the
Morrison government is protecting the investment we’re making
in higher education and protecting the value of our $35 billion
international student sector by cracking down on cheats,” he
recently told the ABC.
There are concerns, however, that the phrasing of the
amendment to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards
Agency Act is too broad, and might inadvertently affect more
genuine instances of constructive feedback and assistance.
While Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson
said the bill is necessary, she is nonetheless worried about some
of its language.
“There’s a phrase [in the bill] describing prohibiting the provision
of ‘any part of a piece of work or assignment’ that a student’s
required to complete,” she said.
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“We’re concerned that this might mean if you were a mum or
a dad at home proofreading your kid’s essay and you say, ‘Those
three sentences don’t work very well, how about you use this
different sentence or this different construction or these different
words?’, that this kind of assistance might be captured.
“I don’t think anyone wants that to be the case, so we’d just like
some of the language to have a little more attention before … they
get to the very final version of the draft.”
According to Anna Borek from plagiarism detection service
Turnitin, academic cheating brings into question not only
Australia’s billion-dollar education system, but the trust we
ascribe supposed “professionals” such as doctors, engineers and
lawyers, who must complete rigorous tertiary courses to enter
their professions.
She argues that, while legislation is part of the solution,
universities need help in identifying students engaging in academic
cheating, particular the more difficult-to-identify contract cheating.
Borek spoke to Campus Review about the issue and what
challenges lie ahead for the education sector.
CR: How bad has academic cheating become in Australia,
particularly contract cheating?
AB: Contract cheating isn’t anything new. It’s probably one of
the oldest forms of cheating, according to Tricia Bertram Gallant,
director of the UC San Diego Academic Integrity Office. What
we’re seeing, though, is that it’s becoming more prevalent, and
there’s a couple of reasons. One is the technology and social
media platforms that help advertise those commercial contracting
services. They help to reach the students a little easier. I would
even say they prey on vulnerable students.
Technology also helps the education sector deal with copy
and paste plagiarism in the form of text matching software, but
students have become more creative and outsource the work
completely instead of relying on the internet or past students’ work
to copy and paste into their own.