The omertà on rampant cheating by overseas students can’t hold forever

Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the number of non-European Union international students pursuing full-time postgraduate degrees in the UK doubled from 161,975 to 320,160, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency – growth achieved in the midst of the Covid pandemic and which will certainly have continued for the current academic year.

This has been widely lauded as good news. It reassures us of the enduring appeal and cachet of UK universities even in the aftermath of Brexit. Intangibly, many provincial universities and further education providers have benefited from becoming more globalised and outward-looking. Tangibly, without the tuition fees that non-EU students pay, it is doubtful if university incomes could have been sustained in real terms without broaching the politically contentious matter of fee levels for home undergraduates.

Campus views: Professors, stop pretending that you never cheat

And universities have responded to these incentives with gusto. They have aggressively recruited non-EU students to postgraduate programmes, particularly business and management, which are cheap to deliver and can be quickly scaled to accommodate hundreds of students. However, in the process, there has been a corresponding disregard for the preparedness or potential of the students being recruited.

For instance, international students are required as a condition of acceptance to provide evidence of English proficiency, most commonly scores in the IELTS (International English Language Testing System). But these can be secured with the simple expedient of bribery or paying an agent to take the test (scroll through “IELTS cheating” on Google). Consequently, most academics teaching on a postgraduate programme will have encountered students unable to converse or write in English.

Perhaps a student’s English will improve during the programme, such that they might be able to complete the assessments? Conceivably, although there is little an instructor can do to help given that there are hundreds of students on core modules. Some universities have abandoned seminar instruction on oversubscribed master’s programmes because they do not have the staff available for anything but large-group lectures. The problem is exacerbated when enrolment remains open for months after instruction has started.

And so, given that many students have no chance of passing assessments on their own merits, it is an open secret that cheating on assessed work is now endemic. On a relatively small, optional module (dozens of students rather than hundreds) that I delivered for a business master’s programme at a mid-ranking UK university recently, half the students admitted to having had their assessed essays ghostwritten – and this was before AI-generated text became freely available.

The problem only gets worse as one moves down the university rankings and into private providers. As a sessional lecturer for a private business school, I supervised nine master’s students for their dissertation. Eight had their work ghosted.

Moving beyond circumstantial evidence to assess the overall scale of the problem is difficult, admittedly. First, it relies on detection by the (usually junior) academics who teach on these programmes. But this is much easier said than done. Given the number of students involved, it is vanishingly unlikely that an instructor would be sufficiently familiar with an individual’s previous work to detect ghosting. Nor is there any incentive to engage in the time-consuming, morale-sapping work of detecting student cheating. Promotion and tenure are contingent on other tasks. Indeed, a high incidence of cheating on your module might be taken as evidence of your poor tuition rather than your integrity.

Universities have similar fears for their own reputations, which is another reason why collection and reporting of accurate numbers on cheating is not realistic. Which university executive in their right mind would want to advertise egregious rates of dishonesty on their programmes?

For illustration, my university charges international students in excess of £20,000 for a one-year master’s in business. By the end of June, we had more than 300 confirmed to start in September. With registration remaining open until November, the final figure will be nearer to 500. That is roughly £10 million for a programme that, relative to engineering or medicine, is extremely cheap to deliver. Why jeopardise the cash cow by acknowledging widespread cheating? Much better to engage in head-burying and maintain plausible deniability.

Ultimately, the best evidence of the scale of cheating comes from the multiplicity of essay mills. And, certainly at my university, cheating on assessed work has become endemic on postgraduate degrees, while the chances of a student’s being detected and sanctioned are minimal. We now graduate a significant share of students who have never done any work, cheating legitimate students who have often made great personal sacrifices to study here.

A partial solution would include more stringent enforcement of entry requirements, closing registration before programmes begin, and improving staff-to-student ratios (which would, in turn, enable more creative modes of assessment, curtailing the opportunities for ghostwriting and AI assistance).

This would require universities to prioritise the scholarly imperative over the financial one, which is not on the horizon. However, the sector is in danger of cannibalising itself once it becomes common knowledge that a master’s degree from a UK university is worthless.

The author is a UK academic.