Hundreds of Sydney students were embroiled in a cheating scandal. Then came the bomb threat

Hundreds of Sydney University students were accused of cheating before teachers received a bomb threat warning them not to investigate in a disturbing escalation of cheating provider aggression.

The university has also been forced to shut down O-week stalls and kick people off campus after discovering they had been infiltrated by illegal cheating providers who convince students to hand over personal details.

Sydney University is trying to tackle contract cheating.Credit: Oscar Coleman

Authorities are becoming increasingly concerned about the behaviour of contract cheating providers, who are usually based overseas leaving the police and the government powerless to intervene. The practice involves students paying other people to do their work for them.

An internal report revealed that a dramatic surge in contract cheating at Sydney University last year was largely attributed to one first-year philosophy subject, with 440 allegations – 40 per cent of all reports at the university – linked to the course.

Hundreds of students were accused of using model answers from a third-party source across three assignments within the subject late last year, it said.

In January this year, an email from a person claiming to be from a Sydney company that had provided the model answers for the subject landed in university inboxes.

It warned staff not to extend their investigations to other subjects and ended the email with a photo of a bomb.

“If such situation happens, we will launch some bomb attack to save everything for the students,” it read. “Yes, you heard right. It was a b o m b a t t a c k.

“If it gets to that point, it’s not good for the university or the safety of staff.”

Police were called and a building was evacuated. NSW Police is investigating but has determined that the email was sent from overseas. No one has been arrested.

A Sydney University spokeswoman said it was not aware of further threats towards staff and considers the bomb threat as the tactic of an individual agent or provider.

However, the institution had seen evidence of blackmail and other pressure against students, she said. “Companies are shifting their promotional strategies to be more discreet and make detection more difficult, and we continually adapt our strategies to counter this threat,” she said.

Providers becoming more brazen

Professor Cath Ellis, an independent academic integrity expert, said the brazenness of contract cheating providers showed they were increasingly confident of getting away with the activity.

“It’s telling us that what we are doing is not effective or as effective as it needs to be,” she said.

“The question we have to ask is can we ever hope to outrun the cheating problem or do we need to rethink what we’re doing here?”

Ellis said universities needed to increase the security around marked work, for example ceasing take-home assessments.

Australian laws passed in 2020 ban contract cheating and people can be fined or jailed for providing services, but the university watchdog has never prosecuted anyone.

Hampering prospects is the fact that cheating companies are usually based overseas – often in China, India and Kenya – leaving Australian authorities powerless to prosecute. The watchdog can shut down access to websites known to offer contract cheating services.

Sydney University said its move away from online exams in 2023 resulted in a reduction in exam misconduct. However, at the same time it reported a “staggering” surge in contract cheating cases.

The university recorded 940 contract cheating cases in 2023, up from 444 in 2022. In semester 1 this year, there were 237 cases of suspected contract cheating.

International students are overwhelmingly overrepresented in cheating cases, Sydney University’s misconduct report said.

In 2023, they accounted for 76.9 per cent of reported breaches despite making up 51.6 per cent of coursework enrolments – a significant increase since 2023 when they accounted for 70.94 per cent of cases.

“Factors such as language barriers, cultural differences and unfamiliarity with academic conventions contribute to heightened vulnerability to academic misconduct among this demographic,” the report said.

The university has been dealing with a surge in aggressive advertising by contract cheating organisations, with students solicited by companies for their personal information in exchange for promotional giveaways.

The report said despite vetting procedures, three stalls at the semester 2 Welcome Festival were closed down and multiple people were removed from campus.

It led the university to create a taskforce for the 2024 Welcome Festival to alert students and stakeholders to the risk of contract cheating companies having a presence on campus.

The country’s higher education watchdog, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, contacted universities this year with concerns operators were becoming more aggressive and direct in their promotional activities.

“[There’s also been] an uptick in aggression directed at the staff who do the really important work of detection,” the director of the academic integrity unit, Dr Helen Gniel, said.

Record number of suspensions

The University of NSW had a record number of expulsions in 2023 which it attributes to increased detection of the most serious forms of contract cheating, according to its annual student misconduct report.

There were 33 students expelled, 17 suspended and 223 given a fail grade for one or more courses. Some 559 were given a 0 per cent grade in one or more assessment tasks.

While contract cheating detections were slightly down on 2022, the university said it had observed more assertive efforts by the illegitimate companies to target UNSW students.

A number of students had shared their login credentials to enable contract cheating services to impersonate them online in assessments and exams, the report said.

As a result, contract cheating services have been able to access the university’s learning management system to gather students’ emails and course materials.

“Contract cheating services have then used the email addresses to target students with their services – in one case, impersonating the course co-ordinator in the email communication to students in the course,” the report said.

UNSW has also noted that while there was speculation the generative artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, would spell the end of contract cheating, this had not happened.

“Instead, the university has evidence that contract cheating services are using generative AI to deliver almost instantly, seemingly, high-quality outputs to the student as a premium service,” its report said.

“The [university] has managed cases in which there is evidence that the student has engaged a contract cheating service to complete an assessment.

“However, unbeknown to the student, the contract cheating service heavily used generative AI in completing assessments.”

Ellis said it was a “pot of gold” for a contract cheating provider to get access to a student ID.

“They are not just there to get a contract writing fee but to squeeze as much juice out of a lemon as they can,” she said. “They are crafty, wily and cunning.”

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