Integrity experts say sites offering cheating services to students are hard to trace, and some are run by criminals willing to make threats of violence
Experts say contract cheating is still highly prevalent at Australian universities, but most do not report data on the number of cases.Experts say contract cheating is still highly prevalent at Australian universities, but most do not report data on the number of cases.“A comment … threatened to gang rape my wife and decapitate me,” he wrote on his blog in April. Members of his team and their families had also been threatened with violence as a direct result of their work, he said.
NSW Police were called and staff and students were asked to avoid the building until it was declared safe a few hours later. A university spokesperson said it was “extremely concerned” about the risk contract cheating companies posed. Typically, those offering paid cheating services will infiltrate online groups pitched as places to meet fellow international students or receive study advice, spamming them with dozens of posts for “affordable and plagiarism free” content with a “guarantee of confidentiality” and “timely delivery”.Once students join a group, they are sent QR codes for additional private Telegram or WhatsApp chats, leading to more strings of posts and dozens of private messages and calls from unknown numbers.
“I’ve reported them to the RMIT IT department but they never got back to me … if RMIT is serious about plagiarism, they should do something to limit this seeming use of bots to offer contract cheating.” But the vast majority of the services are based overseas, with WhatsApp numbers frequently linked to India and Pakistan, or African countries such as Kenya and Nigeria.
A spokesperson for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency said blocking websites and accounts “seriously disrupts” the operations of sites and made Australia a “less attractive” place to be targeted. Eleven students were excluded in 2022 for serious plagiarism, while the vast majority of those found to have cheated received 0% for their assessment.
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