ON CAMPUS
campusreview.com.au
Cheaters, Cadmus
knows your type
T
M unimelb
A new keystroke
recognition
system shows
great promise
as a tool against
plagiarism and
ghostwritten
work.
Richard James
interviewed by
James Wells
20
he stroke of a keyboard is all it takes
for the University of Melbourne to detect
ghost-written essays with a new anti-cheating
system the institution is trialling.
Cadmus, developed by UniMelb
alumni-turned-entrepreneurs Herk Kailis and
Robbie Russo, is a cheat-busting online editing and
authentication tool that analyses students’ keystrokes
to detect whether they’ve typed out an essay
themselves or used a ghost-written piece churned
out by an essay mill. It can even detect a student
transcribing essays, due to differences in keystrokes.
If Cadmus detects infringements, it prompts the
student to reference properly. The university hopes
this will deter would-be cheats. For the system to
work, students must login via a free mobile app
before logging on to their computers.
Cadmus was trialled by 300 students between two
faculties over the last summer. More trials are underway.
UniMelb pro vice-chancellor academic, Richard James,
said overall it has been a success, though functionality
issues and equity concerns have been raised.
Cheating scandals having made national headlines
recently, as universities work to rub out the practice
of ghost-writing. James asserted that only a minority
of the university’s students would be intentionally
cheating, though he admitted the precise extent of
the issue was unknowable. Cadmus isn’t “the magic
bullet” to stop all cheats, he concluded, but it’ll stop
many of them in their tracks.
James sits down with Campus Review to discuss
the system he hopes can help ensure the future of
academic integrity in higher education.
CR: Can you begin by giving us the key points of
Cadmus?
RJ: Academic integrity is a big issue for the sector,
and in fact the national standards for higher
education require universities and other higher
education providers to have robust processes for
ensuring the academic integrity of their rewards.
While most institutions have large sets of educative
resources and use ways of detecting plagiarism such
as Turnitin software, one of the gaps we’ve got is that
we don’t have the mechanism at the moment for
detecting when students are buying ghost-written
essays from essay mills. These essays are purportedly
original, but they’re not [written by] the students who