University of Sydney vice-chancellor Dr Michael Spence will announce on Monday night that he will chair a university-wide taskforce on academic misconduct, following revelations by the Herald that the university may have failed to detect dozens of instances of cheating across its faculties.
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The decision to establish the taskforce, which will be announced at a meeting of the University Senate, comes after it was revealed last week that the university managed to identify only five students in connection with 40 fraudulent assignments purchased on the ghostwriting website MyMaster.
The low detection rates exposed significant weakness in the university's plagiarism detection methods, as well as the institution's ability to identify ghostwritten assignments designed to elude text-scanning software, such as those offered by the now-defunct MyMaster service.
Dr Spence said the taskforce would primarily focus on "new methods for detecting plagiarism and other misconduct", including "changing assessment methods to minimise opportunities for students to engage in misconduct".
"Our assessment processes are designed to minimise the opportunity for misconduct, but we know that the advent of new technologies has led to increasingly innovative methods for students to use, and, sadly, a small number continue to try and use them instead of applying such innovation to their studies," he said.
Last month, the Herald revealed that the university's detection rates were well below those of the other major universities implicated in the MyMaster cheating racket, in which up to 1000 students from 16 universities hired the Sydney-based company to write their assignments and sit online tests.
Documents obtained under freedom of information revealed that "the main factor" for the low detection rates was the inconsistent use of the plagiarism detection software, Turnitin.
"As a result, it has not been possible to identify the students who bought essays through MyMaster and then submitted them for assessment in those units of study," the head of student affairs, Idena Rex, said in an email to deputy vice-chancellor Tyrone Carlin in February.
This exposed a significant discrepancy in the university's stated policy on plagiarism detection software and its implementation, with another document obtained under freedom of information revealing that Dr Spence had assured the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency in December that "the use of the text matching software Turnitin is widespread through the university".
Dr Spence said the Herald's MyMaster investigation "had challenged the methods traditionally used by all universities to detect academic dishonesty" and that it had an obligation "to ensure we stay at the forefront of technology and innovation".
