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.

To increase the marketing of their services, essay mills are now using comparison websites. According to an expert on academic integrity and cheating, there are over a thousand sites on one comparison site. Many of these sites provide buy-one-get-one-free or loyalty schemes, and when students try to withdraw, they can become the victims of blackmail, targeted by fake legal letters. The UK Government is introducing legislation to ban essay mills and advertising for them, but as most are based overseas, experts fear they are beyond the reach of the legislation.

Although steps have been taken by the Irish authorities, such as the enactment of legislation penalizing essay mills, officials believe that universities need targeted funding to help protect the quality and integrity of teaching and learning. Reports show that 10% of students may have used contract cheating services and they can be difficult to detect as they can go undetected by plagiarism detection software.

While the Academic Integrity Policy has not changed since the transition to remote learning at Rutgers faculty, departments have implemented new measures in an effort to prevent cheating. The Office of Student Conduct has created tutorial videos on completing work honestly, and on exams and major assignments, students should write and sign an honour pledge. The policy includes seven types of violations: plagiarism, cheating, and fabrication, facilitation of dishonesty, academic sabotage, violation of research or professional ethics and violations involving potentially criminal activity.

The new Federal government-funded Education Integrity Unit will monitor academic misconduct at Australian Universities. Researchers report that between 6 and 10 per cent of students have cheated during their studies. The new academic Unit will address “emerging threats” to academic and research integrity, admission standards and information, student safety, foreign interference, cybersecurity, fraud, and corruption.

The Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities hearing board found 34 undergraduates and 27 graduate students to violate academic integrity guidelines. According to academic integrity experts, graduate students are more likely to make accidental citation mistakes, while undergraduates are more inclined to directly copy information from other sources or purchase essays to pass off as their own. Officials put undergraduates who fall below the 2.0 GPA threshold under academic probation, and graduate students cannot receive a degree with a GPA of less than 3.0.