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The Australian Government has introduced stringent measures to tackle fraud and exploitation in the student visa system. These include prohibiting agent commissions for student transfers between institutions, preventing education agents from owning stakes in Australian education providers, and establishing an integrity unit within the vocational education and training (VET) regulatory authority to monitor and enforce compliance among VET providers, emphasizing the importance of student attendance as a risk indicator.

Cadmus, a software platform with sophisticated learner analytics that detects the authenticity of a student’s work has been awarded $600,000 by the Breakthrough Victoria, the State Government's investment fund. Reports show a 76% decrease in academic misconduct, a 91% positive student experience and an 8.5% increase in academic performance and pass rates.

The higher education regulator TEQSA disrupted access to another 100 academic cheating websites. This brings the number of illegal cheating websites blocked under these protocols to 250 since August 2022. The agency has also developed a range of resources for students and staff. Australia’s anti-cheating laws make it illegal to provide or promote academic cheating services. Penalties include up to 2 years in prison and fines of up to $110,000.

Internet-based plagiarism detection service provider Turnitin is helping private education organisation NextEd to combat actual and potential academic misconduct including the detection of AI writing tools like ChatGPT—across a cohort of 15,000 domestic and international students. Since implementing Turnitin, NextEd has seen a noticeable increase in levels of understanding of academic integrity, improvements in researching and referencing, a rise in literacy skills, and a dramatic reduction in cases of plagiarism—from 140 to less than 20 cases per year, a drop of more than 85%.

Australian universities are split on whether to adopt a new tool which claims to detect AI-generated plagiarism with a near-perfect success rate, citing concerns over out-of-date models and the minimal notice the sector was given to assess the issue. Turnitin’s detection tool cites a 98% efficacy rate at picking up the “high probability” of AI. Out of twelve universities, three have adopted the tool and several were considering integrating it into their detection programmes.

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency received 385 referrals about contract cheating in the first half of 2022, compared with 138 in 2021 and 21 in 2020. Cheating is becoming an “arms race”, and it ranges from students visiting cheating sites to have just one question answered, to paying ghost-writers to complete an entire subject. According to a professor in academic integrity, a new weapon in this race is artificial intelligence, which generates essays almost from scratch or answers problems with the right prompt.

African ghost-writer claims to have written hundreds of papers for New Zealand students while allegedly working for Eastern China-based academic essay writing service Assignment Joy. The anonymous whistle-blower alleges that some New Zealand students graduated without ever writing a single assignment. Urgent talks are ongoing between New Zealand universities and the Government to follow Australia’s move, outlaw cheating websites and block them from local access.

According to an expert the housing crisis, cost-of-living pressures, language barriers, and lack of time and support from universities are prompting students in Australia to turn to contract cheating. His research found about 10% of students submit assignments written by someone else, and more than 95% of them are not caught. He also found those with English as a second or subsequent language are three times more likely to employ ghostwriters.

WA universities have been caught up in claims their students are paying an academic ghost-writing service to complete their assignments. A whistle-blower claimed to have completed assignments for students at universities across Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Association recently cracked down on commercial academic cheat sites using Australia’s new anti-cheating laws. Students who pay to cheat are subject to their institution’s discipline policies.

TEQSA’s Higher Education Integrity Unit has updated a database of 2,333 suspected commercial academic cheating service websites, including 579 sites specifically targeting students at Australian Higher Education institutions. This intelligence sharing will enable providers to block access to these websites from their institutional networks and is part of TEQSA’s ongoing partnership with the Higher Education sector to strengthen cultures of academic integrity.