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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.

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.

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.

Following a growing number of misconduct allegations involving ministers and public servants, Queensland Department of Education Director-General announced zero tolerance to fraud and corruption and encouraged a culture of commitment to working with integrity. Employees and state school teachers and staff can now report alleged corruption through a new anonymous online portal.