The Decibel - What’s behind a surge of cheating in universities

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Allegations of academic misconduct at Canadian universities have risen sharply in the 2020 to 2021 school year as more and more students turn to hiring people to complete assignments and tests for them. The consequences for the student are clear: a permanent blemish on their academic careers and possible impact on their job prospects if they are caught.But the wider trend is also a concern for Canadian universities as a whole, as their brand depends on maintaining academic integrity. Post-secondary education reporter Joe Friesen explains.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Well, one of the examples that I looked at was the story of a young man who was in first-year university. That's post-secondary education reporter Joe Friesen, talking about a student who can only be identified as H.M. H.M. was feeling the pressure to get good grades, like a lot of first-year kids. So much so that he hired someone to cheat on his behalf. He told them that he wanted an A on the exam. This is called contract cheating, and it can cost a student anywhere from $50 to several hundreds of dollars. The process is fairly simple. The student found someone online, explained what the course was, and when the time for the exam rolled around, the paid tutor logged in with his credentials,

took the exam, and got a passing grade. And that passing grade? It wasn't an A. H.M. got a 62% from this cheating. The kid got away with it initially, but then things went off the rails from his cheating. The kid got away with it initially, but then things went off the rails from his perspective. We don't know why, but the person HM hired ratted him out to his professor. After getting caught, he apologized to his professor,

said he wouldn't do it again, and a few days later, he did it again. In this case, it was a different class, so not the exact same class, but did it again and again got caught. After the second incident, things got serious for H.M. He ended up being suspended from the university for five years. That charge of academic misconduct will stay on his transcript, so he's unlikely to be able to go anywhere else to study.

And what struck me in doing the research for this story was to see how common this kind of thing is. Today, Joe is going to take us through the rise that Canadian universities are seeing in cheating. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Joe, thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. So off the top, we heard about the case of that student referred to as HM. That seems like a pretty extreme example, but I'm wondering how that kind of cheating and other forms like plagiarism really fits into the bigger picture, Joe. What's this trend that we're seeing now at Canadian universities? Especially during the pandemic, there seems to have been a real increase in cases of academic misconduct. And academic misconduct is a term that includes a

few things. So plagiarism, as you mentioned, is the one that most people readily identify. There's also contract cheating. There's things like misrepresenting yourself on a resume, saying you have credentials you don't. So there's a huge number of things that would go into this big category. And what we've seen across a whole bunch of universities is a doubling in many cases of the number of incidents of academic misconduct

that are getting reported to deans, that are going to university tribunals to be tried. So something fundamental seems to have changed in the last couple of years that has seen an explosion in these kinds of cases. You said a doubling in the number of cases here. I mean, that seems like a lot. Is that significant in this area? Yeah, I think it's really significant. So to take the University of Toronto as one prominent example, there was a doubling over the course of two years, particularly during the pandemic. The hope is, and I think the early evidence is that as students have returned to in-person learning and assessment, that those numbers will come down

again. So at the U of T, they were down 15% in the last academic year, which means they're still almost 100% higher than they were two or three years ago. But it may be that those numbers are going to, we will look back on this moment as a bit of a blip. Okay. We'll have to see. And so you mentioned U of T, but you said this is actually a broader trend that we're seeing across other Canadian universities as well. Can you just give us some examples of the other universities that saw this kind of data here? So the data isn't always easy to compare between universities.

But if you look at the University of Alberta, for example, the number of cases that were decided at the dean level at University of Alberta doubled during the pandemic. At the University of Manitoba, the story is roughly the same. UBC, the cases at its most serious level that go to a kind of a tribunal, those doubled during the pandemic. Queen's, I think, is also in the same boat and University of Saskatchewan too. So that's a wide range of universities from one coast almost to the other. Many of them big research universities.

And also, I should say, around the world, this trend has been observed too. I don't know if it's always a doubling, but there's certainly been a big increase just in the last few years. So not just in Canada. We're seeing this elsewhere then too. Yeah, yeah. One of the things I found in researching this is that a lot of the experts say it's more likely to happen early in a student's career. So for example, the data from the University of Alberta shows that about half of their cases from a year or two ago were among first-year students. And it may be that when you're in a

first year, and particularly for some of these students who didn't go through the usual intake process where they met their professors in person, where they had classmates around them, people they were working with in the library, that they didn't learn the kind of positive habits or some of the habits of integrity that a professor can impart maybe in a face-to-face scenario. It's not to say that it's only first-year students, but I think these cases do tend to happen a little more with students who are still learning the ropes. Students cheating is nothing new. Unfortunately, we know that this does happen. So why is this so significant, Joe? I think one of the things that we will look back on from this period is we will look at what changed in the pandemic. How did people act differently? And I think what this data shows us is that something shifted in these years to

cause this kind of bubble in the numbers. Okay. Well, let's get into this a little bit then. If we're talking about seeing this increase now specifically in the last few years, what do experts say is actually behind this increase in numbers? So the experts talk about a kind of triangle or three reasons that lead to increases in academic fraud or dishonesty. There's the pressure that students feel. There's a sense of rationalization that other people are getting away with this, so why don't I do it too? And then there's opportunity. Students were under a huge amount of pressure, as it was everyone in society. One of the people I spoke to said, on a scale of one to 10, the pandemic put us all at 11. Because so much of the assessment moved online, because

assignments were being done open book or in different formats, I think students maybe had opportunities that they thought they could take advantage of. So the online, the shift online essentially presented them with more opportunities. I think that's probably the case. But the shift to online also presented more opportunity for catching students. It's not always easy to catch people who are cheating, but online you do tend to leave a footprint of what you have done. So, you know, one example that I found in doing this research is students getting caught using more than one IP address to access their exams. So they're having someone else look

at their screens or provide answers. That's fairly easy to track once an investigation begins. Okay. So that's pressure and opportunity, those first two factors. But what about the third? What about rationalization? I think for a lot of students, if there was a sense that people were cheating and getting away with it, it may have increased their likelihood of cheating. So, for example, in the early part of the pandemic, there were isolated stories of large scale cheating in one or two classes at different universities. And it could be the word of those incidents was getting around. I think a lot of people were discussing it on social media, for example. And if that idea takes hold in a student's mind that other people are cheating and getting away with it and succeeding, then why shouldn't I? I think is the way the thinking would go. It's not correct, but I can see how some students might feel that way. Yeah, you almost feel like you're missing out or maybe you're going to be penalized in a way

because everyone else has a bit of an advantage. That's right. You could suffer. Your grades may not be as high as others and it won't be fair. Now, the response to unfairness is not to then, I think, cheat, but these are some of the things that can contribute to academic integrity offenses. How someone might rationalize doing this themselves. Right. And I would imagine though, on the other side of things, like the professors and the TAs who are actually doing the marking and administrating these, the tests and exams, they must know that there's that temptation too. Did we see anything, I guess, to how they responded?

Well, it may be that they responded with more enforcement, that they were concerned that they were being taken advantage of. So research shows that faculty tend to report misconduct, like to elevate it to the dean level, only about one in every two times they come across it. And there could be lots of reasons why faculty might not want to go the full bore on a misconduct allegation. But it could be that in this case, we're seeing statistical evidence that more cases were just being logged and tracked because faculty felt more inclined to crack down. You said that sometimes faculty might not feel inclined to kind of take the heavy-handed approach. Why not? I think for many of them, they wonder if it would be the best thing for the student.

You can see how a professor might want to protect the student from the most serious kinds of consequences. They might use it as an opportunity to teach the student about academic integrity. They might offer a penalty that they can decide rather than having the dean decide. So you could get a professor saying, I'll give you zero on this assignment, but don't ever try this again. And the student would still have the opportunity to pass the course in that case. Or the professor might say, you know what? I don't think this course is working out for you. Maybe you should just withdraw and save us all the trouble. A case like that would not get recorded either. In the pandemic, maybe we saw fewer of those. I don't know.

So even though something might not escalate to the upper levels, it's not like these cases are necessarily being ignored. There's usually some kind of discussion that's happening between a prof and a student there. Yeah, I don't think, I think profs really don't like it when students try to get one past them. And when they catch it, they want to at least have a conversation with the student to find out what went on here. We'll be right back after this message. I want to come back to contract cheating, Joe, because this seems like a fair bit of work to actually go and do this. Are these services difficult for students to find? They are not difficult to find.

In fact, you can Google academic help or tutoring or pay to do my exam and you will be inundated with results. When I walk through a university kind, and then the offer will slowly shift into something that breaks the rules. So you might be struggling to write an essay, for example, you look for help, and all of a sudden the tutoring service might say, well, for a little more money, we could just write the essay for you. Or maybe they wait for the student to suggest it. But if you post on social media that you're really struggling with an exam, you might get, you know, a reply from someone you've never heard of saying, come to our site, we can help. They do scan these social media sites looking for opportunities like that. So there's something interesting that you're

saying is happening here. This kind of, there's a fine line between the legitimate help and then the not legitimate help. It's easier to find a tutoring service or something that can sometimes morph into the other kind. Yeah. And I think universities are becoming more concerned about that kind of help, what they call unauthorized aid. Anyway, it can be a bit of a gray area and it's difficult, I think, for students in those cases because they may enter the relationship innocently and suddenly find themselves looking for an easy way out when they run into some trouble. Yeah. And you mentioned, Joe, the student off the top, they were actually outed by the person

that they hired. Does that happen frequently? It does. As one of the people I spoke to for the article told me that extortion is part of the business model. Once they have a student's credit card information, once they know what courses the student is taking at what university, they're very identifiable. And they can use that leverage to say to the student, you know, in this case, we know you've cheated. You've cheated with our help and we can put you in some serious hot water if you don't pay up.

And you can see how students faced with that scenario would continue to pay perhaps for more than a year or two just to make their problems go away. Why would they be paying for more than a year or two? What I've heard can happen is that these companies will have the student's credit card information and say, you're going to continue to pay us a fee for the tutoring that we're going to provide, which they may or may not provide for the next year or two until their credit card expires. And so the students don't have much choice. And that's what happens when you get into these relationships. You know, blackmail is a possibility.

One thing when we talk about cheating, I think a lot of people these days might think about chat GPT and these chatbots that we're hearing about and that we've all kind of played with a little bit, right? Because the stuff that they can spew out is actually stuff that could be used in these kind of situations. So how do chatbots factor into all of this, Joe? Are we seeing them being used for cheating? Yes, we are seeing them being used. And there's some debate about whether they are by definition cheating.

Some people think that students are going to have access to chatbots for the next several decades. And so as long as they are citing the output of the chatbot and acknowledging that this was kind of a starting point for their work, but maybe not the end point, that they should be welcomed into the classroom. So it could be used for research purposes, essentially. Exactly. But there's also the very likely possibility that these services that do essays for people for hire are using these chatbots to write the essays now, or that students could use them themselves. Many people have contacted me saying that's the case. I haven't seen many documented discipline cases yet about this, but I'm sure those will be coming. It's going to be a very complicated terrain. We don't really understand what kind of impact they're going to have, except I think we all agree that they're going to have an impact. Yeah. So this uptick in cheating, this cannot be good for universities. I'd imagine they want to protect their academic reputation. So what are schools doing to tamp down on this surge of cheating that Canadian universities are seeing?

Well, a lot of them, I think, are relying on this return to in-person instruction and assessment as being a first step in reducing those numbers. I think they're counting on that being the case. A lot of them have also brought in programs to encourage and teach students about academic integrity. So one of the examples that I found in my research was a kind of remedial program at the University of British Columbia at the Okanagan. In the last couple of years, they've seen their referrals more than triple as professors have encouraged students who maybe ran into trouble or maybe they could sense were headed for trouble to head some of that off to teach the students about what it means to be an honest student who acts with integrity. And that's a big part of what going to university can teach a student, I think,

is you do want people coming out who behave ethically, who have learned how to produce work that is their own and to accept their own limitations and not do something that's unethical. What can universities do to improve the situation and cut down on cheating? Like, you mentioned this program at UBC Okanagan, but I guess, are there tangible things that maybe we've seen elsewhere that we could actually replicate in Canada to help this problem? is a huge business for Canada. We are, I think, right up there with Britain and Australia in competing for international students. It's a $22 billion a year industry. And in those countries, they have brought in laws to kind of tackle this contract cheating business. And what they do is they've made it illegal to advertise contract cheating services. And if money changes hands, the people involved can be punished with potentially up to two

years in prison. So these examples that you're talking about when someone is Googling tutoring help or something and these ads are popping up for contract cheating, essentially, that is not allowed in Australia. That's right. That's not allowed. They also put their quality assessment board in charge of keeping track of academic integrity offenses, which is potentially a useful tool because it allows them to capture data on a national level

to ensure that you're not seeing areas that are getting out of line with the norm. If you had one area where you say suddenly had a surge in academic integrity offenses, it's the kind of thing that you might want to know at a national or statewide level. Whereas in Canada, we tend to leave all the enforcement to the individual institutions, to the universities themselves. And so they're only comparing it themselves to themselves in previous years. We wouldn't know if there was sort of a rising tide all across a province or across the country. So is there actually momentum around these ideas here in Canada? I think it's something that's being talked about, particularly among the experts in the

academic integrity field. But I don't see it as being something that's an immediate likelihood in Canada. It's not on the agenda as far as I can tell. Okay. Lastly here, Joe, what happens if universities don't fix this and this trend keeps going up and up and we keep seeing more cheating? Well, I think that could be a problem. Higher education is a huge business for Canada. It's a $22 billion industry. International students pay more than $6 billion in tuition annually, and I expect that number is going to continue to rise. If Canada doesn't maintain a reputation as a high-quality system

with degrees that mean something, with academic integrity embedded in every student who comes out of that system, it could cause some real difficulties in that international market. And I think for universities in Canada generally, they want to produce students who act ethically. So it's something that everyone is going to be paying attention to. Joe, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. All right. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Jay Coburn helped work on this episode.

Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Cheung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.