Four times more university students cheat than we thought

A new study shows that university students are cheating at four times the rate than previously believed.

Students can be driven to cheating by desperation. Picture: supplied.

Up to four times as many university students use commercial contract cheating services than previously estimated, according to a new study, and researchers say the most likely users are those with a non-English first language.

The study of 4098 students at Australian tertiary institutions, surveyed at the end of last year, estimates 7.9 per cent of students pay commercial sites to ghost write assignments for them and 11.4 per cent use file-sharing sites where they can access other students’ work. Both practices are regarded as cheating.

Led by University of Western Australia applied psychologist Guy Curtis and published in Studies in Higher Education, the study updates previous research that estimated between 2 and 3.5 per cent of students submit assignments written by other people.

Of those surveyed, 3910 were at universities and 3284 were domestic students.

“It’s not a problem that can be solved with one action or at one level,” Dr Curtis said. “What TEQSA (the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency which regulates higher education) is doing in blocking and prosecuting sites is good because that reduces students’ opportunities and it discourages companies from advertising in Australia. Our biggest problem is detection.”

A recent international study by Deakin University’s Rebecca Awdry showed that only 4 per cent of students who admitted contract cheating had been caught by their institution.

Dr Curtis said plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin was of some use, as was the guidance, information and training for academics that TEQSA was providing and that was also happening in some universities. “That’s probably where we need to go most hard at the moment.”

But the thriving academic contract cheating industry has moved beyond plagiarism, with ghost written assignments on offer that are customised to students’ specific assessment tasks.

Use of file-sharing is believed to be more frequent than ghost writing, and is of concern because it may not fall under Australian anti-cheating legislation in cases in which no money changes hands.

Cheating through file-sharing often involves no payment with students able to upload academic materials of their own, such as slides, to earn “credits” which enable them to download materials to help with their own assessment tasks, or that they can edit for use. If they have nothing suitable to upload, they can buy the materials outright.

Another concern is the study’s conclusion that students with English as an additional language, were more likely to admit cheating, a finding which is in line with previous studies.

Of the 999 such students with English as an additional language who were surveyed, 2.6 per cent admitted submitting ghost written work, compared to 0.8 per cent of the rest of the students. In the case of using file-sharing services, the proportions were 6.4 per cent and 2.1 per cent respectively.

“If you’re not being taught in the language that you natively speak, education is going to be that much harder,” Dr Curtis said. “There is a temptation to seek help in a way that you may not even be comfortable with. I would think that would be particularly the case for students who are worried that their visa might be under threat.

“Those students have inadequate English, but they don’t want to leave and they don’t want to fail, and they don’t want to waste their money for the qualification as the outcome.

“You’ve got to watch your entry standards for English, but you’ve also got to support the students who don’t have English as a first language so that if they need additional help doing assessments, they get it — rather than have them feel desperate and take a shortcut like this where ultimately there’s no assessment of their knowledge because it’s someone else’s knowledge.”

He conceded the tricky balance of those strategies. “That’s certainly a policy issue for universities to think about, if the trade-off is going to be that we either let in students of a certain standard or we let in students below that standard and then we try to help them. The big question is going to be, is the amount of help you have to give them worth the additional revenue that those students are going to bring in?”

Dr Curtis and his team arrived at the larger numbers for cheating by using the usual self-reported surveys, but also testing how students’ answers might change when they were offered an incentive to tell the truth, known as the Bayesian Truth Serum (BTS) methodology.

All participants were told that money would be given to a charity of their choice.

Then they were divided roughly in half, into a control group that completed the rest of the survey without further conditions, and a group that was told that the more truthful their answers were, the more money would be donated to the charity.

When students had an incentive to tell the truth, two and a half times more admitted to using ghost written assignments at some time, and twice as many admitted to using file-sharing sites in the past year.