The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) has implemented new special protocols to enforce Australia's anti-commercial academic cheating laws.
The move is aimed at preventing students from accessing services that promise 'plagiarism-free' academic assignments or essays in exchange for a fee.
The new protocols, which were finalised in June this year, have been developed with participating ISPs (internet service providers).
A law introduced in 2020 criminalised commercial cheating, and the punishment for those found in breach is two years in prison and up to a $111,000 fine.
Minister for Education Jason Clare said that the blocked websites had been visited about 450,000 times a month.
"Cheating websites are used to sell students essays or assignments or accept payment for someone to sit exams on a student's behalf," said Mr Clare in a statement.
SBS Punjabi previously had an online chat with one such service provider, which revealed that the service's cost varied according to the nature of the degree and subject, number of words, assignment deadline and standard of English expected of the student.
The investigation further revealed how easy and quick it is to buy an academic assignment online that can go undetected by university professors and hi-tech plagiarism software.
Mr Clare said that locking these websites will seriously disrupt the operations of the criminals behind them.
"Illegal cheating services threaten academic integrity and expose students to criminals, who often attempt to blackmail students into paying large sums of money," the minister said.
A previous survey conducted by the University of South Australia revealed that international students were more prone to using these services.
The study found that six per cent of students had engaged in some form of cheating — anything from sharing notes and assignments to paying for an essay or getting someone else to write an exam.
Academic cheating websites are blocked in a bid to curb criminal operations. Credit: Eva-Katalin/Getty Images
An international student who requested to be known only as Ms Kaur* said barring these cheating websites is a good decision but is not a complete solution.
"Everyone in an Australian school or uni knows that it can be bypassed by using another VPN, Global DNS or the Opera browser," she told SBS Punjabi.
She said more advanced anti-plagiarism or anti-cheat software is needed in universities to curb misconduct.
"The decision is a sort of symbolic gesture. The root cause of cheating needs to be examined, and the outdated assessment methods need to improve," she said.
University cheating is widespread, notoriously difficult to catch and fuels a billion-dollar global market.
This is the first time TEQSA has used new protocols it developed with participating ISPs to stop people from accessing cheating services.
