Up until recently, contract cheating was an issue of focus for the higher education sector, but was not being discussed in VET.
For the past decade TEQSA has been working with higher education providers to help them understand the risks of contract cheating by their students and actions they can take to try and prevent it.
In April this year ASQA issued its first guidance to the VET sector on this topic in its monthly ASQA IQ newsletter.
In that newsletter ASQA defined academic cheating as “behaviours such as plagiarism, collusion, work being undertaken by another person on a student’s behalf, bringing notes into an assessment when prohibited, or involvement in contract cheating.”
They went on to note that:
“Contract cheating services enable a student to commission a third party to complete their assessment work and then submit it as their own. Growing sophistication and reach of contract cheating services and ease of access to AI technology, together with consistent reporting of cheating behaviours in complaints and tip-off data, indicates that academic cheating in VET has likely become more prevalent. If left unchecked, increased engagement with cheating services among students and education staff may normalise academic cheating and damage Australia’s VET sector reputation domestically and internationally.”
Recently researchers at the University of Western Australia and the University of Western Sydney have contributed a chapter to a new book, Handbook on Corruption in Higher Education, which is available open access.
The chapter by Prof. Guy Curtis and Prof. Cath Ellis, although focussed on higher education, will still be of interest to VET providers. It is written in a readily accessible style and uses hypothetical case studies to show how contract cheating can form part of a larger “value chain” of corruption – as well as how and why tertiary institutions should not turn away and say it’s too hard to detect this kind of cheating.
They highlight that assessment design is no panacea for detecting/preventing contract cheating – but offer the following good practices:
- Training assessors to “notice tell-tale signs of ghostwritten assignments.”
- Looking for “performance discrepancies” – that is when students perform more poorly on assessments undertaken in a public setting/or (if online) in identity-verified assessments compared with their performance on assessments they do at home.
- Using verification services like Turnitin to check a student’s work with “document properties, software versions, and other data” from all other assignments previously assessed via the software’s text-matching software.
- Document forensics – documents created using Microsoft Office products include ‘xml’ metadata “that can provide evidence as to how a document was written and edited that may distinguish authentically written from copied work.”
- “Courageous conversations: a non-adversarial and empathetic investigative approach to discussing suspected contract cheating with students where reduced penalties are provided for full and frank admissions.”
While ASQA is yet to provide further advice to the sector since its April newsletter – there are two important reasons why this is an issue providers do need to take seriously:
- Students who graduate without the skills attested to on their qualification create enormous risks in workplaces like construction sites, health and care settings, manufacturing plants, mines, in transport settings and many, many more; and
- There are potential regulatory/compliance risks for providers. ASQA recently cancelled the registration of a provider at least in part because it had not detected and taken action against students that ASQA considered had used contract cheating services. While the Administrative Review Tribunal ultimately found in favour of the provider and rejected ASQA’s cancellation decision this time – it may be that ASQA will look to take further action against other VET providers in future on this issue.
