University students will need to ditch dodgy practices after the higher education watchdog blocked a range of academic cheating websites.
Australia’s university regulator, TEQSA, has for the first time used new special protocols to prevent access to the most-visited cheating sites.
The 40 websites blocked by the regulator are visited about 450,000 times a month, Education Minister Jason Clare said.
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“Illegal cheating services threaten academic integrity and expose students to criminals who often attempt to blackmail students into paying large sums of money,” he said in a statement.
“Blocking these websites will seriously disrupt the operations of the criminals behind them.”
It’s the first time the regulator has used new protocols it developed with the communications industry and internet service providers to stop people from accessing cheating services.
The protocols streamline the process for blocking illegal sites and allow the regulator to enforce Australia’s anti-commercial academic cheating laws.
Laws introduced in 2020 made providing cheating services on a commercial level a criminal offence. Those found in breach face two years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to $111,000.
The laws also allow the Federal Court to force carriage service providers to block access to such cheating services.
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There’s no doubt this cheating is very damaging to the reputation of the universities and their students. It’s not so clear that blocking the sites will make that much difference. AFAIK anyone with a VPN can get around the blocking. It’s also worth considering what motivates many of those who are cheating. The sums of money involved in tuition fees and student debt, particularly for the overseas students who are gouged mercilessly here, puts some of those students in a position where failing their course is a life-destroying disaster that must be avoided by any means necessary. It is also obvious the universities have a huge conflict of interest between weeding out academically inadequate students and milking as much cash from them as possible.
Private Eye magazine occasionally mentions a fictional private school called St. Cakes, whose unusually honest school motto is Quis paget entrat (Who pays, gets in). That appears to be the ethos of Australian higher education as a whole thanks to government policies over the years.