Online exam cheating rises as students pay for answers

REMOTE exams are driving a surge in cheating accusations as students are tempted to pay for answers or use WhatsApp groups to share information, legal experts have warned.

Kingsley Napley said it has seen a 60 per cent increase in students seeking help to defend themselves against cheating allegations this year.

The law firm has received more than 60 enquiries relating to academic misconduct this year, of which 23 were made in September alone.

During one online exam, a student had used a website Chegg.com, where you can upload an exam question and see if anyone has answered it before or give you pointers, lawyers said.

The university was alerted that they had uploaded the question using their university email address and launched a case of academic misconduct, even though the student hadn’t used the answer.

In another case, a university investigated after it spotted that two students had submitted work from the same IP address, because they were in the same flat and could not prove they were working in separate rooms.

In a separate incident, students doing an online exam were sharing tips in a WhatsApp group when one of them got cold feet and shared the messages with the university.

Lawyers at Kingsley Napley have also seen incidents where students have paid firms thousands of pounds for an essay or project to pass off as their own.

It said that companies are popping up more frequently advertising exam and essay help to students. In one case, when there was a dispute between the company and a student about payment, the firm said it would tell the university that its student was using its services, which resulted in an investigation.

Shannett Thompson, a lawyer at Kingsley Napley, said it had seen a large number of inquiries from international students, who have paid large fees to study in the UK and their visa rests on them keeping their place at a university.

She warned that universities needed to be more fervent in warning students against cheating and said investigations varied at different universities.

“We still haven’t got a proper structure where universities are abiding by the same code,” Ms Thompson said.

A spokesman for Universities UK said: “All universities have codes of conduct that include penalties for students found to be submitting work that is not their [own].”