Cheating in the Higher School Certificate (HSC) has almost doubled over the last five years. However, experts say that with the rise of generative AI, schools are having difficulty keeping up.
Since 2014, any school in New South Wales which catches a student cheating — plagiarising, getting someone else to do their work or even handing in a late assessment — has been required to record the offence on a statewide malpractice register called the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA).
According to the NESA, approximately 300 schools registered 1302 malpractice offences by 1149 students in school-based assessments last year. Compared with the 595 students with assessment breaches in 2019, the incidents has almost doubled.
Take-home tasks cheating incidents in the HSC rose at the same rate, with 431 offences in 2019 doubling to 841. Meanwhile, plagiarism accounted for 796 breaches.
According to the headmaster of the Shore School, John Collier, teachers and principals are changing up the assessment structure so that students receive fewer take-home assessments and more supervised tasks.
“It can be unfortunate because the point of the HSC assessment system devised years ago was to provide other ways for students who may not do as well through exams to have the chance to show their skills,” Collier told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Another method, suggested in a paper by Catholic Schools NSW, was for schools to do oral interviews (AKA viva voce) so that students would be able to prove their understanding of a concept.
Cheating detection expert Professor Phillip Dawson from Deakin University says that it’s important to use “several methods” to test students.
“It’s take-home unsupervised work that’s really vulnerable [to cheating or malpractice]”, he said, per the SMH.
“I’d also be most concerned about schools reporting zero cases.”
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