Jenna Price | Cost-cutting universities to blame for rise of plagiarism

It soon became clear which students had actually done the work themselves and which students had cut corners or recycled the work of others.

I taught at a university for 15 years. The only assessment which really exposed cheats was this modified version of a viva, where students had to discuss and defend their work.

In the beginning, students didn't take these chats seriously but it soon became clear this was the one assignment where you could get easily found out. It wasn't a rote speech. It was a discussion.

Eventually that assessment was cut by middle management. Too expensive and too time-consuming apparently. Now oral assessments are making a comeback, at least at the Australian National University, in order to fight what universities claim is a massive growth in plagiarism.

But if we really have a plagiarism problem in our universities, please don't blame the students. Direct your fury at middle management - and even upper management.

News this week from The Guardian's Caitlin Cassidy that universities from the Group of Eight will change the way they run exams and other assessments to try to combat the use by students of artificial intelligence essay-writing tools such as ChatGPT. But we need an entire rethink of how work is marked, who is doing the marking and how much time is allowed.

Too often, casual staff are doing unpaid work in order to give students the best possible feedback.

According to Deakin University's Phillip Dawson, professor and co-director at the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning ,around one in ten Australian university students has at some stage submitted an assignment they didn't do themselves.

This is terrifying to me because it's easy to miss. And the epidemic of middle management cost-cutting as a way of pleasing those higher up the ladder feeds the kind of university culture where cheating is made more possible.

Middle management at universities want to cut costs in order to please upper management. Ways to combat costs include making class sizes bigger. Staff rightly complain about having to deal with many more students (it's not just the assignments, it is also the massive number of interactions required to help students feel secure in their learning).

Casual staff quite rightly say it's not possible to mark three assignments in the single hour allocated to mark the work of one student, let alone pick up whether the student is cheating.

Dawson says giving markers more time would likely improve cheating detection rates. However, at Australian universities an increasing amount of cheating detection is being done by specialists inside academic misconduct units who may never meet the student.

"One thing we've learnt as a sector over the past few years is that cheating detection is an expert practice that individual markers will never be the best at," he says.

Then middle managers say, let's have fewer assignments although every single teacher of any kind knows good assessment drives good learning. Assessments give learners some boundaries for knowledge.

Dawson says if you add other types of cheating, such as using unauthorised material in exams, and "emergent threats from artificial intelligence, you have a fascinating, challenging and dangerous problem". But even before ChatGPT we had a problem.

But a few years ago, university management decided, as one, to resort to Turnitin, which any smart person can work around. This is a tool which doesn't help the development of learning. It exploits the work of students who have already submitted essays and use that work as a giant bank.

Instead of investing in time and staff so the student-teacher bond can be strengthened and trust developed, universities invest in tools for discipline and punishment.

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What they should be doing is spending more money on teaching. More staff. More time to mark.

(Mind you, I can't remember a time in Australia where so many universities are being forced to pay staff properly. Is there a university in Australia which hasn't engaged in wage theft? And thank heavens for the National Tertiary Education Union which has won so many wage theft cases against universities.)

But it's not just deliberate thieving which is the problem. It's the system which forces conscientious casuals to work hours for which they aren't paid. It's the exploitation.

Author Anna Spargo-Ryan, author of A Kind of Magic and The Gulf, taught creative writing at a university until 2021. She says casuals are never given enough time.

"Every casual laments the enormous pressure. The expectation of being able to accurately and fairly assess work at pace is just not realistic," she says.

At some universities, management expects you to mark thousands of words per hour. That means read, assess and then give useful feedback.

"The model of university teaching doesn't allow enough time to engage with students or to give them the resources and knowledge and empower them to do the work properly. Universities have become such a business for profit that it's interest is in just getting the assignments done," she says.

And it is hard for universities to shift that mindset of profit instead of the pursuit of knowledge. Deakin's Dawson says assessment powerfully influences student behaviour.

We need universities to recognise that if they cut corners, they will produce citizens who do that exact same thing.

Says Dawson: "In the next few years I think we'll see universities use a lot more interactive oral assessment because it's just much harder to cheat than a take-home written task. Writing is still very important, but when it really counts, sometimes we need to sit down with students and have a chat."

More talking. More listening. And more time to do both.