Giant cheating service discovered in NZ

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**hotsauceman1**

Interesting to say the least, Not to long ago an my college, we had a problem of student exchanging sex and money to change grades.

An investigation has uncovered a well-organised commercial cheating service for Chinese-speaking students in New Zealand.

» Read the essay Fairfax bought

The long-standing business uses a network of tutors, some outside New Zealand, to write original assignments ordered by Chinese-speaking students attending New Zealand universities, polytechnics and private institutions.

The tutors are paid by assignment and have specialist subjects.

The assignments go up to masters level but the service claims to have tutors up to doctorate level.

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce last night said the police and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) were launching an inquiry into the service following the investigation.

Joyce said the NZQA was anonymously tipped off three months ago and took action to inform universities and polytechs, but failed to tell him.

He said it was now an "open question" whether NZQA's response had been adequate, and chief executive Karen Poutasi was conducting an internal investigation.

The revelation of the cheating service has serious repercussions for the New Zealand international education sector, which earns about $750 million a year from about 93,000 students. China is New Zealand's biggest education market, last year accounting for 27 per cent of this country's international students.

The Sunday Star-Times, using the name of a fictitious Chinese student, successfully ordered an essay for a first-year university course subject from the company, which markets itself under a Chinese-language website called Assignment4U and is run from a unit at 88 Cook St, Central Auckland.

The signage in the office says Ateama Ltd in large, bold letters. The company also offers tutoring, counselling, help and academic "solutions" for overseas students.

A ghost writer, who wrote assignments for Assignment4U in 2007, told the Star-Times about completing assignments for students who were enrolled at Auckland University, Massey University, Auckland University of Technology and AIS St Helens (a private tertiary education provider).

He said he was coming forward now because he wanted to do "the right thing".

Pengju Chen, who is listed as a director of Ateama in Company Office records, initially denied being in charge of the operation when approached in the Assignment4U office on Friday.

He then agreed he was the director of the company and said the business did not help Chinese-speaking students to cheat.

The company provided only face-to-face tutoring and counselling. It supplied students with "examples" or "solutions" on academic assignment questions but made it clear the student could "not hand it in" because the company retained copyright. The examples helped with ideas and structure, he said.

No such warning was provided to the fictitious student used by the Star-Times and the company provided its "solution" just three hours before the indicated deadline.

About 24,500 students from China were enrolled in New Zealand institutions last year; about 10,500 at universities or polytechnics.

Although it's impossible to say how many students have paid Assignment4U for academic assignments, the service has been available for at least five years and hundreds, if not thousands, of students may have used it.

A large network of ghost writers both in New Zealand and overseas has also assisted in what could be one of the largest examples of cheating to hit the New Zealand international education system.

Most education institutions have introduced systems to detect plagiarism but it is still very difficult to check if an assignment is the student's work.

The ghost writer, who asked not to be named and now works overseas, believes universities and polytechnics must have turned a blind eye to the cheating.

He said staff should have been alerted when students with poor English produced competent and grammatically correct essays.

"It would take a colossal amount of looking the other way by the complete legion of tutors, lecturers, course facilitators and teaching assistants to let pass such well-constructed essays and such exquisitely prepared assessments submitted by those whose written and spoken English skills are far from polished."

Safeguards such as plagiarism buster turnitin.com did not detect a well-prepared, well-researched, ghost-written, electronic-based assignment, he said.

"New Zealand, of all the Western nations, is now widely known in the Chinese community as the easiest way to get a bachelor's or master's degree," he said.

In February he sent a letter with his concerns and evidence to a number of New Zealand universities including Auckland University, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Unitec, Massey University and the police but had heard nothing back.

Last night, both Massey and Auckland universities said they were not aware of having received tip-offs. However, Joyce said NZQA had received some "information" anonymously three months ago, but had not informed him about it till last week.

Joyce said NZQA had informed the umbrella group Universities New Zealand at the time, and the chair of a polytechnic advisory group, but "it is an open question as to whether they followed it up hard enough".

The 1500-word essay commissioned by the Star-Times was for a first-year communications paper at Canterbury University and cost $270. It was delivered by email only hours before it was due.

Just days before the deadline, Assignment4U asked for lecture notes and the student's login number at Canterbury University so it could check lecture notes.

The fictitious student requested an essay of B or B- grade and when we had it marked by Canterbury University media and communications lecturer Donald Matheson, he gave it a B+.

"This is a workmanlike essay which shows that the writer understands news values and can apply the ideas to an example," Matheson said.

"Because of the mastery of essay-writing and the effort that's gone into using the academic readings, this would probably get a B+, which is a bit sobering. I'd not have picked this as cheating, other than a sense it was a bit weird that the student was so good at writing but didn't use those skills to really say anything."

Chen appears to have been involved with the business since at least 2007 when a standard agreement for so-called tutors mentions his name as the office manager of Assignment4U.

From 2003 to 2008, Assignment4U Consultant Ltd was a registered company directed and owned by Steven Quan Li, who works from the same apartment block as Chen. Chen and Li own, either personally or through companies, five apartments in the building. The shares in Ateama are owned by Xiaohu Ren who, according to company records, also lives at 88 Cook St.

Joyce said the Government had amended the Education Act in 2011 to make it an offence to advertise or provide cheating services.

The amendment hasn't yet led to a prosecution, but Joyce said police and NZQA would now "work together to ascertain the veracity of the issues and then work together with the appropriate agencies for a prosecution if that was required".

Joyce said New Zealand took its reputation as a provider of tertiary training for international students "very seriously".

THE REACTION

Massey University spokesman James Gardiner said he wasn't aware of any recent correspondence alerting the institution to Assignment4U's activities, but "we take this sort of thing very seriously and would like to hear from this person again".

He said the university had rigorous procedures in place to identify cheats, and uncover some every year, including exam cheats and plagiarists.

He said that assignments were just one of a range of assessment processes, including exams.

"It's not possible to get a qualification from Massey simply by handing in other people's assignments. There are multiple outputs expected from students, including exams."

Gardiner rejected the idea that the university might feel under pressure to enrol international students even if their language skills were not up to completing a degree taught in English.

He said it was not in the university's interest to allow students to start a degree they couldn't complete, and "if anything, there is more rigour applied to international students".

A spokesperson for Auckland University said yesterday was the first time the university had heard of the alleged cheating, and it would need to know more details so "we can look into it".

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/8662224/Chinese-cheats-rort-NZ-universities-with-fakes

**Kilkrazy**

$270 is a lot to get a B+ on what is effectively a mid-term piece of coursework.

At my university -- Birkbeck College, London University -- 90% of marks towards a degree are given on the final exams, which are hand-written papera, so the scope for this kind of cheating is very limited.

We had a lot of international students but they needed to pass a language test because all tuition was done in English.

**SagesStone**

I thought that was the normal as well KK. You have the few assignments throughout the course which are more preparation for the final exams and assignment which made up the majority of your overall grade.

I guess people buying better grades for these lesser tasks is more like taking money from idiots. Though at the same time if they differ too much it could raise suspicion anyway. So that could also be why.

I'm not sure about what they said about the international students, universities love them for the income.

**HiveFleetPlastic**

I don't know. When I went to university most of the subjects, IIRC, had around 50-60% of the mark on the final exam. Having a good result on the other assessments was really important, and I can certainly imagine there being huge pressure to cheat if you're a struggling international student who's having a lot of difficulty on account of the language.

This is OT, so I get bonus points for bringing up guns, right? When I was at university a foreign student came and shot up a tutorial. My understanding was that he had a poor understanding of the language and was having a lot of trouble with the highly complex degree as a result, and ended up under so much pressure that he snapped. Imagine being in that sort of position - gone to an overseas university, probably at great expense, and then starting to fail in large part because you can't understand the language well enough. You'd probably have a limited social network because of it, and it's not like you can just snap your fingers and get mastery of English. You'll fail first and have to go home in disgrace.

I don't think it's hard to imagine that to someone in that position, cheating might seem like the only way out. It might even seem justified - hanging in there just that little bit longer to overcome the disadvantage you had in the first place and learn enough to continue on your own.

**Dreadclaw69**

I think the amount that coursework contributes to a final mark varies by class. I had some that were exam only, exam and coursework, or coursework alone.

I always remember my teachers and lecturers saying that cheating like this, or lifting material wholesale from somewhere else, was relatively easy to detect based on the writing style of the individual from past work.

**SilverMK2**

Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I always remember my teachers and lecturers saying that cheating like this, or lifting material wholesale from somewhere else, was relatively easy to detect based on the writing style of the individual from past work.

The university I did my MSc at has an electronic system that all work is submitted through which automatically compares it to journals, papers and other students work (past and present) to determine if something is plagiarised; they even had an entire module designed to teach you how the system worked and how to write essays/papers/etc, including how to do referencing and so on, as well as showing you samples of reports generated from a piece of work you had to submit where you were told to deliberately plagiarise some papers so you could see just how much this system picked up.

**Kilkrazy**

Plagiarisation is cribbing stuff from other sources without giving the citations. If you give the citations it is good research.

You have to be able to construct an argument using the citations though, or you won't get a good mark anyway. In other words, you are expected to show your own critical thinking that builds on existing literature.

The software that detects plagiarisation will detect direct cribs, however if the person you bought your essay from was clever enough to change the cribs, it might not be discovered.

**SilverMK2**

Kilkrazy wrote:
Plagiarisation is cribbing stuff from other sources without giving the citations. If you give the citations it is good research.

You have to be able to construct an argument using the citations though, or you won't get a good mark anyway. In other words, you are expected to show your own critical thinking that builds on existing literature.

The software that detects plagiarisation will detect direct cribs, however if the person you bought your essay from was clever enough to change the cribs, it might not be discovered.

I'm guessing if they are farming these things out there will be a fair bit of repeating going on.

**Kilkrazy**

Yes. If half the people on the course bought the same essay, it would be hard to avoid them being similar.

**Dreadclaw69**

SilverMK2 wrote:
Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I always remember my teachers and lecturers saying that cheating like this, or lifting material wholesale from somewhere else, was relatively easy to detect based on the writing style of the individual from past work.

The university I did my MSc at has an electronic system that all work is submitted through which automatically compares it to journals, papers and other students work (past and present) to determine if something is plagiarised; they even had an entire module designed to teach you how the system worked and how to write essays/papers/etc, including how to do referencing and so on, as well as showing you samples of reports generated from a piece of work you had to submit where you were told to deliberately plagiarise some papers so you could see just how much this system picked up.

I've heard of that system too. My wife gets a magazine from her alma mater that had an article from the perspective of someone who was being paid to write the papers and it was pretty interesting.

**SilverMK2**

Kilkrazy wrote:
Yes. If half the people on the course bought the same essay, it would be hard to avoid them being similar.

The system that my last university used apparently communicates with the same system in several other universities so even if students at different universities (tied into the same system, obviously) bought similar essays, it would flag them up.

I'm not a professional essay writer and have no idea one would go about writing the same essay in different ways to the extent that you don't start repeating things in the same way over time, though I guess it is possible, and they may not use the same writers too often if there is such a large network behind this.

**Dreadclaw69**

Anecdote incoming;

When I was in university I remember a story going around that may or may not be true, but it did have a certain amount of humour.
Supposedly a lecturer was marking coursework when she came across an essay that was very familiar to her but she couldn't place from where. Perturbed by this she went online to see if it was something that was copy pasted from an article but as it was a a specialised subject many of the articles were behind paywalls so she ruled that out. She then spoke to a colleague and showed him the essay, he too thought that it looked familiar but could not place it. While the lecturer was reviewing the transcript for a new edition of a book she had written she stumbled upon the answer. The student had lifted an entire chapter from her own book, to pass off as his own work.

**Bullockist**

I worked with two Indian students (international) about 7 years ago who took money to do others assignments. It seemed to them to be "standard" practice. Judging by the bs working restrictions they have to live under in this country (still to this day i cannot figure how they afforded tuition fees and food on the ridiculously small amount of time they are allowed to work, although they did manage rent admirably with 9 guys in a 2 bedroom unit) , I at the time figured it was a good way to subsidize their fees.

Hive fleet Plastic I agree, when the poorer families pool cash to get someone to go to uni here, failure is not an option.

**azazel the cat**

SilverMK2 wrote:
Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I always remember my teachers and lecturers saying that cheating like this, or lifting material wholesale from somewhere else, was relatively easy to detect based on the writing style of the individual from past work.

The university I did my MSc at has an electronic system that all work is submitted through which automatically compares it to journals, papers and other students work (past and present) to determine if something is plagiarised; they even had an entire module designed to teach you how the system worked and how to write essays/papers/etc, including how to do referencing and so on, as well as showing you samples of reports generated from a piece of work you had to submit where you were told to deliberately plagiarise some papers so you could see just how much this system picked up.

There are many private companies that offer this kind of service; turnitin.com being the most prolific. However, any student can easily object to that service being used, as the student is not being compensated for their intellectual property being used to help a private business by submitting their paper.

**SilverMK2**

azazel the cat wrote:
There are many private companies that offer this kind of service; turnitin.com being the most prolific. However, any student can easily object to that service being used, as the student is not being compensated for their intellectual property being used to help a private business by submitting their paper.

I was not aware that they could; certainly that option was not raised at any point

I would imagine that it would be part of the contract you agree to when you sign up - your work will be checked via [service name here].

**H.B.M.C.**

I have a friend who taught Law at uni for a while who had many full-fee paying Chinese students in his class, and another who was taking a business class filled with similar students. From their reports most of them didn't even speak kindergarten levels of English, so the idea of them paying something to write something legible doesn't surprise me.

**KalashnikovMarine**

Cheating like this is pretty aggressively handled on my campus. I'd say in most classes 1/3 to 1/4 of the final grade is in the final exam which has commonly been a presentation in the business classes I've taken, research papers tend to happen earlier in the year for some reason. However all papers have to be turned in soft copy, usually through the campus electronic management software, and it automatically goes to Turn It In, (many professors still want a hard copy in addition to the soft copy, because feth trees I suppose) it's always big news on campus when cheaters get busted. Honestly I'm not sure why you WOULD cheat in the first place though... I mean I have something like a 3.5 GPA and I'm a stupid donkey jarhead who's had too many concussions.

**Trasvi**

SilverMK2 wrote:
azazel the cat wrote:
There are many private companies that offer this kind of service; turnitin.com being the most prolific. However, any student can easily object to that service being used, as the student is not being compensated for their intellectual property being used to help a private business by submitting their paper.

I was not aware that they could; certainly that option was not raised at any point

I would imagine that it would be part of the contract you agree to when you sign up - your work will be checked via [service name here].

I'm not sure it is a matter of 'easily objecting'.
There have been situations in the past few years where some students have objected to this. It resulted in litigation, delayed release of student's marks... eventually Turnitin won the litigation as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnitin#Litigation .
Some universities have taken notice of this, but not many. At my university at least there was never an option to say 'no'.

**hotsauceman1**

H.B.M.C. wrote:
I have a friend who taught Law at uni for a while who had many full-fee paying Chinese students in his class, and another who was taking a business class filled with similar students. From their reports most of them didn't even speak kindergarten levels of English, so the idea of them paying something to write something legible doesn't surprise me.

Why go to a place where you know the classes are taught in a language you dont speak? I am not going to norway to take my classes w/o extensive language lessons.
It seems like a failure from the start.

**azazel the cat**

Trasvi wrote:
SilverMK2 wrote:
azazel the cat wrote:
There are many private companies that offer this kind of service; turnitin.com being the most prolific. However, any student can easily object to that service being used, as the student is not being compensated for their intellectual property being used to help a private business by submitting their paper.

I was not aware that they could; certainly that option was not raised at any point

I would imagine that it would be part of the contract you agree to when you sign up - your work will be checked via [service name here].

I'm not sure it is a matter of 'easily objecting'.
There have been situations in the past few years where some students have objected to this. It resulted in litigation, delayed release of student's marks... eventually Turnitin won the litigation as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnitin#Litigation .
Some universities have taken notice of this, but not many. At my university at least there was never an option to say 'no'.

Those judgements in favour of turnitin are not actually related to this issue, however. That litigation was based on claiming royalties from turnitin in spite of accepting the user agreement. However, in all cases (in Canada, at least) the universities have sided with the students on the issue of whether or not a professor can force a student to use Turnitin. So while you cannot recoup damages from Turnitin due to the click-agreement, you could in theory sue the professor/university for damages if they forced you to to use the for-profit Turnitin system, as the university does not have legal control over how your intellectual property is used.

I happen to know this firsthand, as I had a dispute regarding one assistant professor claiming that either term papers must be submitted to Turnitin or else would not be graded. Now, I'm far, far too arrogant to ever plagiarize someone else's work

but I objected on the grounds that I was not being fairly compensated for Turnitin making a profit off of my work, and I won out without any real difficulty.

EDIT: Saying "no" is oftentimes not presented, but is always an option. The irony of my situation was that it took place in a Tort Law class.

**kronk**

hotsauceman1 wrote:
H.B.M.C. wrote:
I have a friend who taught Law at uni for a while who had many full-fee paying Chinese students in his class, and another who was taking a business class filled with similar students. From their reports most of them didn't even speak kindergarten levels of English, so the idea of them paying something to write something legible doesn't surprise me.

Why go to a place where you know the classes are taught in a language you dont speak? I am not going to norway to take my classes w/o extensive language lessons.
It seems like a failure from the start.

To get the hell out of China?

**Frazzled**

This thread is disappoint. I thought it was about a service on cheating with giants... ;P

**hotsauceman1**

If you want that just move to texas

Automatically Appended Next Post:

kronk wrote:
hotsauceman1 wrote:
H.B.M.C. wrote:
I have a friend who taught Law at uni for a while who had many full-fee paying Chinese students in his class, and another who was taking a business class filled with similar students. From their reports most of them didn't even speak kindergarten levels of English, so the idea of them paying something to write something legible doesn't surprise me.

Why go to a place where you know the classes are taught in a language you dont speak? I am not going to norway to take my classes w/o extensive language lessons.
It seems like a failure from the start.

To get the hell out of China?

Which will be hard if you do not have an understanding of the language where you are going.

**Steve steveson**

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:

This is OT, so I get bonus points for bringing up guns, right?

Yep, ten bonus points for guns, ten for a victim blame and a x2 multiplayer for both if the subject has nothing to do with guns.

Kilkrazy wrote:

The software that detects plagiarisation will detect direct cribs, however if the person you bought your essay from was clever enough to change the cribs, it might not be discovered.

It should be. From what I understand they are quite complex algorithms. They don't just check for simple duplication of work but work with looking at the style of the writing, checking for things like synonyms, structure of the work etc then if it gose above a certain threshold it flags it up for a human to look at.

I have only heard about it by word of mouth though.