Student cheating in Australia’s universities is back in the headlines – again. The national tertiary education regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), estimates that around 8 per cent of tertiary students in Australia are cheating. It is likely to be way higher than this – The Conversation estimates that ‘up to 95 per cent of [cheating] cases go undetected’.

The cheating industry is now heavily corporatised – the so-called ‘contract cheating’ business model offers scaled-up cheating services and has overtaken freelance cheating providers. Deakin University, for example, found that contract cheating had ‘increased considerably’ to 514 reported cases reported in 2022. The University of Sydney recorded 940 reports of potential contract cheating last year, half of which have so far been substantiated. The University of New South Wales says it is detecting close to a 4.5 per cent rate of cheating. So, up to a thousand cases of cheating, that we know about, at some of Australia’s most prestigious universities. That is a serious undermining of academic integrity in anyone’s language.

The angle being pushed this time around is the innovative tactic employed by cheating syndicates. They have upped their level of criminality by resorting to the extortion of their customers. This is done by blackmailing them into continuing payments to avoid being publicly outed for their past cheating and is particularly prevalent for those who have graduated and are in well-paid, high-status jobs.

The criminal cheating gangs are turning to ‘darker tactics’ because they face stiffer competition from the rise of artificial intelligence (which not only offers self-service cheating, but is capable of circumventing plagiarism detection software). There has also been a government anti-cheating crackdown. ‘Website traffic to cheating provider sites has declined by 85 per cent since 2021,’ reports TEQSA. As of April 2024, TEQSA has ‘disrupted almost 290 illegal cheating websites and had 841 social media accounts, posts or adverts providing, or advertising illegal cheating services removed’.

The current bout of media reporting is at pains to emphasise, not the problem of student demand creating a market for criminal cheating services, but rather the ‘vulnerability’ of the cheating students to being unscrupulously blackmailed by profit-making criminals. The head of the academic integrity unit at TEQSA labels the cheating service provider gangs as ‘predatory’. It can be so hard to find an honest cheating service provider you can really trust these days!

Another aspect of the cheating industry that is delicately skirted around in these Woke times is the demographic profile of the cheating industry providers and their customers. Together with the general lowering of admission standards as universities compete for the lucrative fee-paying student income stream, there is one fairly obvious set of criteria for what makes a student ‘vulnerable’ to the cheating provider and to getting forever stung by the criminals – the massive number of international students who often have an entirely new language, and a strange new alphabet, to cope with.

In Australia, the international student cohort is cashed-up but likely to struggle with English and they are often under pressure from their families who are putting up the dosh for their children’s new credentials. The 713,144 international students in Australia (in February 2024) represent an all-time high according to the Home Affairs Department, with China continuing to be the primary source of international students, followed by India and Nepal. Vulnerable they certainly are, which is the ‘compassionate’ way of saying they are out of their depth, either because they are ill-equipped for the subject matter or have poor English language skills. Many are motivated to ‘successfully’, by hook or by crook, acquire their degree as a meal ticket to the real graduation aim of moving from a temporary student visa to permanent residency of Australia.

There is, occasionally, a carefully worded reference to the ‘gangs offshore’ that are behind ‘many of the illegal cheating sites that target students in Australia’ but there is a diplomatic silence on which countries these may be. China, India, and Nepal might be lead contenders, one might suppose. Chinese social media app WeChat features in some limited reporting as a prominent major marketing tool to advertise cheating services.

We can be a little more certain of just who is bulking up the cheating stats. Whilst international students comprise 15 per cent of the total student body in Australia, a major student survey found that foreign students were twice as likely to cheat, with 33 per cent of all students who admitted to cheating being international students. International students at Australian universities consistently fail a higher proportion of their subjects to which the recourse is cheating by students and ‘soft marking’ by academics. (A teachers’ union survey found that 28 per cent of academics agreed with the proposition: ‘I feel pressure to pass full-fee paying students whose work is not good enough.’) A survey of academic staff also found that more than two-thirds of university teachers suspect that work submitted by foreign students was plagiarised because the faultless English in the submitted work was incompatible with what those academics knew of the English-language ability of their foreign students.

None of this really makes the news because the ‘progressive’ times we live in demand that all the sympathy is now for the ‘vulnerable’ victim at the mercy of criminal overseas gangs. The real victims of all this cheating are not the students who initiated a deal with criminals but Australian citizens who may find their lives at the mercy of poorly trained and ill-educated doctors and engineers or who miss out on jobs to the fraudulently-credentialed. Coddling those students who shouldn’t be at university does those students no favours, does the universities no favours, and does Australia no favours.

To stamp out cheating, perhaps we should go back to ‘traditional face-to-face exams, with student identity card checks, arranged seating, and exam rooms monitored by staff’. (I can’t believe I’m quoting The Conversation but even that ‘progressive’ mouthpiece is worried about academic standards.)

Just like back in my uni days when bell-bottom jeans were all the rage and when exams were cheat-proof and you really had to know your stuff and apply it under time pressure and which are still essential across-the-board skills now.