A modest proposal for international student cheating

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The Guardian is onto a very important issue today:

The housing crisis, cost-of-living pressures and language barriers are prompting university students to turn to “contract cheating”, where bespoke essays and assignments can be bought online, experts say.

Cheating websites advertise heavily on social media, target Australian students and promise “ghost writing” work that will not be picked up by anti-plagiarism software.

In August, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) used its new powers to block academic cheating websites for the first time. The agency blocked 40 websites that were visited about 450,000 times a month. The education minister, Jason Clare, said the cheating services threaten academic integrity and expose students to criminals who often attempt to blackmail students into paying large sums of money.

Now, that’s not fair. How can the students be expected to complete their work when they don’t speak English, live in student-share accommodation, and work for a living?

We either need to open those sites back up or think more creatively.

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My favoured solution is to outright sell the kiddies their degrees. We can create a bell curve for results based on how much they pay. The quid pro quo can be that they stay and work as pseudo-slaves for twenty years or until death, whichever comes first.

To further level the playing field with local students, we should also scrap primary school-level English studies.

Voila! Fixed.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.