University of Auckland's cheating cases soar since pandemic

Cheating cases during the pandemic have soared. Photo / 123rf

One New Zealand university has caught about 30 times as many students cheating on exams since the pandemic began, new data shows.

But an expert on academic integrity says despite the apparent alarming spike in cases, the students of today aren't less ethical - there are just more opportunities to cheat now, and in many cases it's easier to get caught.

The Herald on Sunday asked New Zealand's eight universities how many academic misconduct cases they had upheld over the last five years.

On average, during pandemic years, cheating cases upheld at the University of Auckland were up 153 per cent from 2019 and Canterbury's were up 214 per cent. Victoria University of Wellington was up 9 per cent, Waikato up 5 per cent and Otago up 19 per cent. But cases upheld at Massey University were down 4 per cent and Auckland University of Technology (AUT) down 27 per cent. Cases investigated at Lincoln were down 61 per cent, though not all of these were upheld.

The average masked year-to-year fluctuations, such as at Victoria where cheating spiked in 2020 before returning to baseline, and at Waikato where cases jumped a third that year then dropped to 2018 levels.

Cheating in exams and plagiarism were most common, but in some cases, students also purchased answers or even whole assignments online.

Penalties could range from lost marks to disciplinary action and in egregious cases, expulsion.

By far the most cheats were caught at Auckland University, even accounting for the university's larger roll.

While coursework cheating was down at Auckland during the pandemic, there was an almost 27-fold increase in exam cheating cases from 2019 to 2020 - from 27 cases to 723 - and 831 in 2021.

That reflected "the Examinations Office's diligence in detecting breaches of academic integrity in the new online examinations", the university said in a statement accompanying the data.

Auckland University's pro vice-chancellor for education Professor Bridget Kool said there had been more exam cheating during the pandemic, "but we've also really improved our detection rates, which to me is encouraging because then we can monitor and see if what we're doing is working".

Processes had improved since the sudden move to online in 2020, when the first semester's exams were left open for 24 hours.

That extra time had given students a chance to discuss answers or even sit the exam together, as well as posting questions to third-party cheating sites and getting answers.

"It was meant to be a generous gesture to say... we know it's tough, and you might have internet problems," Kool said.

"So we'll leave them open as long as we can. And of course, a lot of students took advantage of that. So we did not repeat that."

The university was developing more authentic assessment practices that looked at students' understanding rather than information recall, and would probably see a "general shift away from exams".

The university also planned to internally block access to cheating websites, and Kool had asked Universities NZ whether New Zealand could follow Australia's lead by blocking the most visited cheating sites nationally.

The vast majority of students did the right thing, Kool said, and a few were "naive" early in their studies. "And then there's a small percentage who - no matter what we do - will try extremely hard to flout the system, despite us doing our very best to keep up".

University of Auckland Associate Professor Jason Stephens has researched cheating for two decades.

He said around 70 to 80 per cent of students would admit to engaging in at least one cheating behaviour in any given year - most often colluding with others on "individual' work, but plagiarism was also common.

Exam cheating was rarer but his own research had found around 5 to 6 per cent of students cheated in exams. Auckland had detected about 2 per cent of students cheating in exams during the pandemic - which was probably less than half the true number, he said.

University of Auckland Associate Professor Jason Stephens says cheating is a normal human behaviour - but a university's job is to encourage students to develop integrity. Photo / Supplied

Stephens believed those universities that weren't seeing a spike in cheating in the past two years were "not doing their job, quite frankly".

"I can guarantee you their students are cheating just as much as students anywhere else."

Higher education was locked in an arms race with companies providing cheating services, Stephens said.

He was seeing more frequent use of "study" platforms like Chegg and Course Hero, where students could post questions and get the answers. But a new service called Assignment Watch was promising to combat this by monitoring key sites and alerting professors if their assignment or exam questions had been posted online.

Universities were also ramping up their use of Turnitin, a computer program that checked for plagiarism.

However, artificial intelligence technology was getting more sophisticated - from paraphrasing services like QuillBot to AI that could spit out realistic-sounding paragraphs with a one-sentence prompt.

"Ultimately it's an arms race we're going to lose," Stephens said.

Much of his work focused on helping students behave consistently with their beliefs.

Stephens said cheating was a natural human behaviour - it saved energy and gained people a competitive advantage - but most people also believed it was wrong.

And the more students saw others cheating, that increased the likelihood of doing so themselves.

"They feel like, 'God, if I'm not a cheater, then I'm a sucker... I'm just getting cheated.' That's a terrible position to put students in and that's why we as institutions and teachers have to take it seriously."