Essay mill websites ‘get more hits than there are people on campus’

When an Australian university moved to prevent online access to companies suspected of offering ways to cheat in assignments, it found that attempts to visit their websites dwarfed the number of people on campus at the time. 

Michael Sankey said Charles Darwin University, where he is director of learning futures, had blocked access to 2,084 websites that had been blacklisted on a confidential Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa) database, circulated among institutions last September.

In just one month, CDU recorded almost 10,000 hits on the sites, despite many of its students being away from campus because of the pandemic. Teqsa has since added about 250 websites to the database and flagged imminent “enforcement action” against some of the most heavily visited sites.

Recent research by support service Studiosity found that one in four Australian university students knew peers who had cheated in 2021, while more than half of Canadian post-secondary students had witnessed cheating.

Higher education is not the only sector grappling with academic malpractice. The number of final-year New South Wales school students caught cheating on assessment tasks last year was 27 per cent higher than before the pandemic, with 854 offences detected.

Such figures scratch the surface of a snowballing problem, as students “under pressure” look for ways to save time. “Things like essays, exams [and] quizzes are really easy to cheat on because they’re accessible to contract tutors,” Professor Sankey said. “A lot of universities use the quizzes that come with their textbooks. The answers are out there.”

He said CDU’s efforts had not stopped students accessing cheating services away from campus. And much on-campus access had probably been missed, with suspect websites emerging more quickly than authorities can identify them. “The artificial intelligence that sits behind a lot of these cheating sites really just replicates itself.”

Torrens University vice-chancellor Alwyn Louw said a “significant” proportion of his institution’s identified cheating caseload involved master’s students in business administration or information systems.

He said cheating was a global issue. “We should not be naive about the creativity underlying this whole thing. We should also not oversimplify the problem. It is not a matter of just education, and it will go away. It is a matter of consistently monitoring, managing and supporting.”

Phillip Dawson, associate director of Deakin University’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, said assessment tasks could be designed in ways that reduced malpractice. Research suggested that students were less inclined to cheat on tasks that they “actually want to do”, and less able to cheat on tasks involving interactive oral assessment.

While oral assessment was “resource intensive”, it could be deployed “at moments in degrees when it really matters” rather than continuously. “We spend a lot of money on exams,” Professor Dawson noted. “It’s not like all other assessment is free.”

Professor Sankey said alternative forms of assessment could be quicker and easier than the traditional techniques academics used by default. “Most people teach in the way they were taught,” he said.

But the sheer ubiquity of cheating necessitated new forms of “personalised” and “authentic” assessment, where students were required to apply rather than merely repeat things they had learned. For example, they could communicate professional perspectives in role plays “mimicking what they might do in the workplace”.

Most workers do not write essays, take exams or answer quizzes, Professor Sankey said. “They sit in business meetings and committees, and solve issues.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com