Deterring academic cheating services — legislation passed
The Federal Government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019, released for stakeholder comment in early 2019, formally became law on 3 September 2020.
While the draft bill aimed to deter the provision and advertising of academic contract cheating services, there were stakeholder concerns it could inadvertently capture unintended parties and legitimate support for higher education students such as editing.
To present the new legislation without misinterpretation, direct quotes from the 25-page explanatory memorandum accompanying the bill are provided.
A key definition is that academic cheating service ‘means the provision of work to or the undertaking of work for students, in circumstances where the work:
(a) is, or forms a substantial part of, an assessment task that students are required to personally undertake; or
(b) could reasonably be regarded as being, or forming a substantial part of, an assessment task that students are required to personally undertake’.
The definition of substantial is clearly critical. The explanatory memorandum explains:
‘The definition of academic cheating service limits the types of assistance that are prohibited by the Bill to cases where all or a substantial part of an assessment task is offered or provided by the service. In practice, this means that incidental or inconsequential assistance, advice or example answers that might be offered to a student are not at risk of being captured by the new offence provisions. Any assistance that did not change the intent or meaning of the student’s work would not be prohibited by the Bill. For example, while editing of a student’s work by a third party might be prohibited by institutional policy, it would not be prohibited by the Bill so long as it didn’t represent a substantial part of the work.’
The explanatory memorandum further notes:
‘The definition of academic cheating service limits the types of assistance that are prohibited by the Bill to cases where all, or a substantial part, of an assessment task that a student is required to personally undertake is offered or provided by the service. Because of this, no specific exemptions for types of assistance are considered necessary to include in the Bill.’
However, the explanatory memorandum does provide seven examples of assistance that are not academic cheating services including editing, assisting with reference formatting, providing advice and providing tutoring services. Example 3 specifically refers to a professional editor editing a doctoral thesis.
‘Example 3: Debbie is a student at a higher education provider, completing a doctoral thesis. Debbie’s higher education provider allows the use of editorial services for doctoral theses. Claire runs a professional editorial service that fixes formatting, typographical and grammatical issues in higher education assessment tasks. Claire is paid by Debbie to edit Debbie’s doctoral thesis. As editing Debbie’s doctoral thesis does not represent a substantial part of the assessment task, Claire has not committed an offence or contravened the civil penalty provision under section 114A.’
The seven-page addendum to the explanatory memorandum provides a further three examples on students selling study notes and providing old assignments, which are also not examples of providing academic cheating services.
Recognising the seriousness of commercial academic cheating, both criminal and civil penalties of up to two years’ jail and fines of up to $100,000 will apply to commercial cheating services. Unpaid cheating services will only face civil penalties of fines of up to $100,000.
Academic editors and their clients should be aware of three items:
- the new legislation to deter the provision and advertising of academic cheating services
- an individual university’s own policies on editing
- the IPEd Guidelines for editing research theses.
For more information, read the 25-page explanatory memorandum, seven-page addendum and the 21-page Bill. And read the Department of Education, Skills and Employment’s Tackling contract cheating page. Members can find academic editing resources prepared by IPEd’s Standing Committee on Academic Editing on the member portal.
Dr Rhonda Daniels AE
Member, Standing Committee on Academic Editing