Self-confessed cheats ‘the tip of the iceberg’

Research has bolstered fears that cheating by university students is commonplace, finding that close to one in 10 buys or trades assignments – about triple the proportion that admit to doing so.

An Australian study has confirmed that self-reports of cheating vastly understate the scale of the problem, with about two and a half times as many students owning up to academic dishonesty if they are incentivised to tell the truth.

The research, published in the journal Studies in Higher Education, applied a statistical methodology to overcome survey respondents’ reluctance to admit to socially unacceptable behaviours in multiple-choice questionnaires.

The Bayesian truth serum (BST), developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Drazen Prelec, assigns honesty “scores” based not on the most common answers but rather on answers that emerge more commonly than predicted.

The research team, led by University of Western Australia psychologist Guy Curtis, surveyed more than 4,000 students from six universities and six independent colleges. The researchers donated a dollar for every student who participated, with students able to nominate charities of their choice.

But half the respondents were told that truthful answers would lead to higher donations, with the BST method applied to gauge their honesty. This group proved almost 2.5 times more likely to confess to “custom ghostwriting” – buying work from contract cheating services.

The researchers combined this “incentivised” self-reporting result with two other figures – a multiplier based on estimates of how many cheats never confess, and students’ estimates of the proportion of their peers who cheat – to calculate that about 8 per cent of students buy ghostwritten assignments.

Previous studies have found that only about 2 per cent of students admit to commercial contract cheating, and the proportion of cheats who are detected is vanishingly small.

“Our results are concerning in the context of an Australian higher education system that has already taken significant educational, regulatory and legal steps to combat commercial contract cheating,” the paper says.

Curiously, the team found that honesty incentives made little difference to the proportion of students who admitted to “file-sharing”, where people passed off other people’s work as their own but no money changed hands.

Dr Curtis said this finding suggested that students considered file-sharing “more acceptable” than buying someone else’s work. “They seem to think it’s happening more,” he said.

He said “worse” forms of behaviour tended to elicit greater differences in confession rates when incentives were applied. “If something is fairly common practice, and everyone does it, giving people an incentive to tell the truth doesn’t seem to increase the admission rate very much.”

The team estimated that over 11 per cent of Australian students use file-sharing services. This is a “particular concern”, the paper says, because swapping rather than buying assignments – even if it happens on a commercial file-sharing site – is a legal grey area.

“The extent to which such sites breach new Australian laws is less clear than for custom ghost-writing providers,” the paper says. “Our survey suggests that higher education institutions and governments need to redouble their efforts to combat the threat to higher education integrity posed by commercial contract cheating.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com