International students and cheating: how worried should we be?

Some evidence shows international students are more likely to use essay mills, but academics say this reflects wider problems in global higher education

三月 20, 2019
abseilers
Source: Getty

As universities around the world step up their efforts to combat essay mills, knowing which students are more likely to pay someone else to complete an assignment for them is increasingly important.

A recent study found that as many as one in seven recent graduates may have been guilty of contract cheating and, for Western university sectors that are increasingly reliant on international students, emerging evidence points towards an uncomfortable truth that such learners may be more likely to break the rules than their domestic peers.

Some essay mills are targeted specifically at international students. The issue was thrust into the spotlight in 2013 when a contract cheating service aimed at Chinese-speaking students in New Zealand, called Assignments4U, was exposed. The following year, hundreds of students at 16 Australian universities were found to have used the contract cheating site MyMaster to write their essays and even to sit online exams for them. Written in Chinese, the website was aimed at Chinese studying abroad.

Looking at cheating and plagiarism as a whole, a 2016 investigation by The Times into more than 100 UK universities found that students from outside the European Union were more than four times as likely to be caught cheating as their classmates from inside the bloc, including the UK. The same year, a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 14 leading US colleges found that international students were five times more likely to be found guilty of cheating than their American counterparts.

A self-selecting survey of 230 academics from around the world conducted by Times Higher Education adds fresh evidence to the debate. Asked whether international or domestic students were more likely to use contract cheating services, 51 per cent said that the risk was the same for each group; but 42 per cent said that international students were more likely to use essay mills, compared with only 8 per cent who identified domestic learners as being the greatest danger.

As the THE survey indicates, none of this is to say that domestic students’ use of essay mills is not a significant problem. However, many academics regard the challenges facing international students as the elephant in the room of the contract cheating debate, and one that can no longer be ignored.

Anecdotally, sector experts identify a range of issues that might make some international students more likely to cheat: for some, having English as a second language; in a number of cases, the intense pressure to succeed that comes with having a significant proportion of familial income invested in your education; and perhaps an unfamiliarity with Western academic norms and experience of a more didactic educational culture in which reciting others’ words is seen as a mark of respect, not plagiarism.

Emerging academic evidence supports some of these assumptions. A 2018 survey of about 14,000 students in eight Australian universities found that students who spoke a language other than English at home were significantly more likely to say that they had cheated in assessments than those who used English. A 2015 UK study that explored which students were most likely to purchase essays came to similar conclusions.

Tracey Bretag, director of academic integrity at the University of South Australia Business School and one of the authors of the Australian study, told THE that it was important to note that the findings were about language, not national or cultural heritage. “Our research found that domestic students for whom English is a second language also had serious problems. Of course the bottom line is, at least in the Australian context, 80 per cent of our second language learners are international,” she said.

For Dr Bretag, the problem is that in the drive to recruit more international students – and the hefty tuition fees they command – the language requirements needed to study at university have become too low.

The most common official assessment of English language ability used by Western universities is the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), which grades students from one to nine. Universities usually require a minimum score of six, while in the UK the government minimum is 5.5, but native English speakers would score a nine. “[A six] is not adequate for the linguistic manipulation you need for academic writing,” Dr Bretag said.


Who’ll pay to stay the course? Perceptions of cheating

perceptions-of-cheating-graph


 

In a 2018 paper, Danijela Trenkic, an associate professor in second language education at the University of York, found that the English vocabulary of international students in the UK was on average just under half the size of that of home students, even though the students in the study all had an IELTS score of 6.5 to 7.5. Furthermore, they read and processed information in English at half the speed, understood significantly less of what they read and were less able to summarise in writing what they had read.

According to Dr Bretag, although these students arrive at university thinking they are prepared for the rigours of academic study, they are not. “We set them up for failure, knowing that they will need more support and a lot more training…and they don’t have time to access any non-mandatory support that is on offer,” she said. “Then, on top of that, we have unscrupulous, marketing-savvy essay mills that target those vulnerable students.”

Rather than disappoint their parents – who have often worked hard to afford to get them there – the students turn to contract cheating, she said.

Lord Storey, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for education in the UK’s House of Lords, agreed that many of the students who resort to essay mills do so for this reason. Lord Storey put the main problem international students have down to “cultural learning differences, because education is different between countries. How students learn in Asia is different to how you learn in the UK, and that is different to America, for example.”

A 2018 paper by Louise Kaktiņš, a lecturer in the linguistics department at Macquarie University in Sydney, which found “particular concerns” regarding international students and contract cheating, said that their use of essay mills was a side-effect of the “increasingly corporatised, commercialised university culture”.

“Universities are now in fierce competition with one another for a share of the international student market,” Dr Kaktiņš told THE. “It is not surprising that entry requirements for international students are becoming less stringent and increasingly flimsy and porous, especially as regards students’ academic suitability.”

In THE’s survey, asked whether university admission standards were partly to blame for the rise in contract cheating, 43 per cent of respondents agreed that they were. Only a quarter (26 per cent) felt that they were not, while a third (32 per cent) were undecided.

One Australian respondent said that international students were more likely to turn to essay mills “because we assure them that their English is of a sufficient standard to get by in our courses when often it isn’t – that is our fault, not theirs. The purchasing power of international students has been used in lieu of appropriate and sustainable government funding. We should hardly be surprised if that purchasing power is used in ways we can’t control.”

However, Cath Ellis, associate dean (education) in UNSW Sydney’s School of the Arts & Media, cautioned that the perception that international students were more likely to contract-cheat might actually be because academic staff found it easier to detect in the work of students for whom English is a second language. “These students are probably less able to cover their tracks. In other words, it may actually be a kind of reporting bias,” she said.

How, then, should universities respond? Singling out international students might serve only to increase their isolation and push them towards essay mills, and the perils of this approach were demonstrated earlier this year when the University of Liverpool was forced to apologise for sending an email suggesting that international students did not know what cheating was.

Many of the solutions apply to all students: the Republic of Ireland recently said that it would follow New Zealand’s lead and make essay mills illegal, while technology company Turnitin last week launched Authorship Investigation, software that claims to be able to use machine-learning algorithms and forensic linguistic analysis to detect whether a student is indeed the author of a submitted essay.

Some academics recommend a shift to more assessment by exams, rather than essays, while others advocate greater use of vivas and other forms of assessment that involve direct interaction with academics.

For South Australia’s Dr Bretag, the most significant step relating to international students would be to introduce higher language-related entry requirements. “But there need to be strict criteria on the agents who recruit international students and to make sure our IELTS testing centres, and other centres, are free from corruption,” she said. “I’ve spoken to students who can barely speak English and yet they show me their certificate and it says 6.5.”

Dr Kaktiņš recommended the introduction of invigilated “diagnosis” exams when international students arrive to stream them into the right preparatory courses, while Dr Ellis said that institutions needed to provide better support to students who found themselves struggling with language and academic culture.

However, both Dr Bretag and Dr Kaktiņš said that success would be limited without more government funding for universities that are reliant on international student fees.

“[Contract cheating by international students] is a symptom of a wider issue in higher education. It’s a system under stress,” Dr Bretag said. “It’s not good enough to blame institutions for being inefficient with funding, to blame tutors for not doing a good enough job in teaching or catching cheating, and it’s certainly not good enough to blame students, particularly second-language learners, for being cheaters.

“It’s a systemic issue and, unless we look at the big picture, all we’re doing is putting band-aids on minor players who can do very little to change things.”

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com

后记

Print headline: Impossible ascents, devious devices and difficult questions

请先注册再继续

为何要注册?

  • 注册是免费的,而且十分便捷
  • 注册成功后,您每月可免费阅读3篇文章
  • 订阅我们的邮件
注册
Please 登录 or 注册 to read this article.

Reader's comments (4)

It is important to be clear on what a language proficiency exam such as IELTS tells you about the candidate's competence, and equally what it doesn t. There is an assumption amongst people using these exams for whichever purposes including university entrance that the scores are much more universal/ meaningful than of course they are. These are snapshots of competence and follow exam task types - they may be very good exams but all users need to understand what exactly they report on, and it is recommended that a second method is used as a verifier. In addition, the issue of threshold level for success in the target domain needs to be carefully considered as research indicates that current scores accepted for university entrance without formal and rigorous in-sessional support are too low. Sue Hackett
How worried should we be?? Well consider this actual example ... it happened to me. A final year overseas student comes to you seeking advice on a piece of work. The student is unable to speak to you in English and is unable to understand what is being said to them in English. You end the session with the student having made it clear that there is a problem with their language proficiency and that this problem is likely to have an impact on their ability to navigate through to graduation. You make it clear to them that you are not judging their intellect but you are judging their language. You then notify the course leader responsible for recruiting the student and they tell you that this student's IELT score is very good. You are then told that the student has been recruited directly in to the final year after having taken a 'feeder' course in their own country. You then exclaim your experience and are told that you are judging the student too early and to wait for the piece of work to be submitted. With anonymous marking it is impossible to detect which student's work is associated with your prior experience. When all the marking is completed you wonder how it's possible not to have detected a piece of work with any language defects given your past experience, and given that part of the assessment criteria includes communication competency. After moderation of the work and the submission of the marks to the centre, you suddenly realise that this overseas student has written a linguistically faultless piece of work. You alert the course leader who accuses you of being difficult and 'anti' the student; you are invited to 'prove' that the piece of work is not the student's own work regardless of your previous testimony. You get the feeling that you're being taunted and challenged. You also hear the ching of the till as the student's fees makes a contribution to the VC's excellent performance record. So ... how worried should we be?? well work it out from your own perspective.
Admission policies of the universities. People of low income earners are often denied admission. The stress and difficulties of getting things like bank statement, Visa, and financial support. Most scholarships are given to the rich who have strong financial support and do not have time for their books. They only use that opportunity to travel. Students with genuine intension of coming to study are sometimes denied of scholarship and visa because of bank statement, reference letter and others. I know someone who was denied of scholarship because of low income and one who wanted to travel and the family used that opportunity for him. There should be a revisit of admission requirements and the financial statement. Scholarship we understand it here is given to the brilliant but needy not brilliant but the rich.
I think it is a bit unfair to generalize and paint all international students with the same brush. It makes sense for such to happen in countries which are native English speakers. My assumption is that most of these international students are from countries which use a different language as a language of instruction/learning, and this is not a universal thing in non-native English speaking countries. Actually, some countries still use English as the only language of instruction, and these are mostly former British colonies, therefore, I believe international students from such countries can speak or write fairly good English.