Due to COVID-19, universities with limited expertise with the digital environment had to rapidly transition to online teaching and assessment. This transition did not create a new problem but has offered more opportunities for contract cheating and diversified the types of such services. While universities and lecturers were adjusting to the new teaching styles and developing new assessment methods, opportunistic contract cheating providers have been offering $50 COVID-19 discounts and students securing the services of commercial online tutors to take their online exams or to take advantage of real-time assistance from 'pros' while sitting examinations. The article contributes to the discourse on contract cheating by reporting on an investigation of the scope and scale of the growing problems related to academic integrity exacerbated by an urgent transition to online assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The dark reality is the illegal services are developing at a faster pace than the systems required to curb them, as demonstrated by the results. The all-penetrating issues indicate systemic failures on a global scale that cannot be addressed by an individual academic or university acting alone. Multi-level solutions including academics, universities and the global community are essential. Future research must focus on developing a model of collaboration to address this problem on several levels, taking into account (1) individual academics, (2) universities, (3) countries and (4) international communities. In this way, education becomes viewed as a commodity (Gutting, 2015 ; Rawlings, 2015 ) rather than something earned through intellectual labour and through a process of improving skills in academic writing, critical thinking and communication. Internationalisation also contributes to undesired consequences. International students ‘have less social, and As early as 1960, ghost-writers were reproached for writing speeches (Bormann, 1961 ). In 2008, ghost-writing by researchers was litigated against (Ross et al., 2008 ). Academics and universities are aware of the existence of commercial contract cheating services for domestic and international students (Lines, 2016 ; Zheng & Cheng, 2015 ). The most notorious website, MyMaster, is renowned for causing an international scandal (McNeilage & Visentin, 2014 ; Visentin, 2015 ); some students who used it were expelled or suspended (McNeilage & Visentin, 2014 ). Further, Chapman considered the problem an international concern for governments, educators, students and other stakeholders (Chapman & Lindner, 2016 ). While any form of plagiarism corrupts the academic system, contract cheating is particularly pernicious; in addition to breaching intellectual property laws and committing literary theft, the students involved undertake another, illegal form of organised commercial activity wherein someone assumes another’s identity, which amounts to committing fraud. Worryingly, the scale and sophistication of contract cheating practices are growing (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016 ). Universities in Australia and worldwide also had to appropriately manage the risks posed by the pandemic (Bao, 2020 ; Crawford et al., 2020 ; Khan & Jawaid, 2020 ; Wang et al., 2020 ). Most universities had no alternative but to transfer to online teaching, with the associated decision to conduct exams online. Notably, exams are currently the only form of assessment invigilated in person. Invigilation ensures that students’ identities are checked and that someone else is not taking an exam under a different ID. These methods have been previously applied to research issues relating to ethics in management (Bell & Bryman, 2007 ) and academic dishonesty policy (Prenshaw et al., 2001 ); in this case, they were adapted to examine academic integrity and the ethics of student practices. In probing this issue from a potential student perspective, one of the authors chose to go ‘undercover’ to discover firsthand the scale of available services and the processes involved in making use of them. ‘Undercover’ is used here in the sense of a lecturer posing as a student who needs ‘help’ with the assessment. The primary concern for such institutions is that no lecturer can be confident that the person taking an exam is the intended student and not someone else with the student’s login. No lecturer can ensure that only one person is taking the exam and that there are not multiple students in the same room. This short-term solution to a pandemic situation might have far-reaching implications for the integrity of the education system worldwide. A less conventional but more viable option conducive to preserving academic integrity would have been hiring large centres to ensure social distancing or conducting exams outdoors with an increased number of invigilators. To achieve this, it might be necessary to conduct anonymous surveys after exams to discover whether students observed other students partaking in contract cheating practices. The universities can place an anonymous form online to allow whistle-blowers report academic dishonesty. The unique circumstances induced by technology and COVID-19 measures heighten the threat to integrity, for example, the rapid shift to online examinations leading to assessment practices unsuitable for online environments being employed and a consequent jump in test scores (Eaton, 2020 ). Nevertheless, Draper and Newton ( 2017 ) suggest that pursing new laws designed to combat cheating are ethically desirable, practically achievable and in the public interest. While jurisdictional and other enforcement issues will always exist with any legal approach to contract cheating, the increasing rate of legislation at the very least sends a clear message to students and institutions across the world about the seriousness of contract cheating. Conclusion The issues addressed in this research concern ethics, academic integrity and illegal commercial activity.

Contract cheating remains a significant problem for universities and higher education (HE) generally, both within Australia and internationally. In 2020, the Australian Federal Government passed legislation establishing a new criminal offence, criminalising the provision or advertisement of academic cheating services by individuals and businesses. This legislation represents the Australian Government's formal commitment to a criminal justice response to address the problem of contract cheating behaviour, which seeks to prevent and minimise the use and/or promotion of such cheating services within the higher education sector. This paper provides a political discourse analysis (PDA) and interpretive policy analysis (IPA) of Australian Parliamentary Hansard documents regarding debate of the <i>Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019.</i> Our findings suggest a discord between the putative purpose of this legislation and the way the contract cheating problem has been represented in Australian Parliament. We argue that debates regarding the solution to, or at least how to address contract cheating first need to understand and agree on the problem if they are to meaningfully prevent crime. Our analysis exposes the politicisation of the higher education sector and associated discourse, where concern about contract cheating, in this case, was used as a vehicle to further rationalise ongoing Government paternalism and interference in tertiary institutions, underscoring the need for critical evaluation of criminological interventions. In 2020, the Australian Federal Government passed legislation establishing a new criminal offence, criminalising the provision or advertisement of academic cheating services Contract cheating represents a serious form of academic misconduct, involving students either outsourcing the completion of assignments to another person or third-party for submission as their own work, or having others sit examinations or practical tests on their behalf, often for payment within commercial arrangements (Clarke & Lancaster, 2006 ; Clare et al., 2017 ; Curtis & Clare, 2017 ; Awdry, 2020 ). As noted by Walker and Townley ( 2012 :27), engagement of third-parties, particularly within formal commercial arrangements, is concerning for educators because it is extremely difficult to detect, constitutes fraud, and seemingly exposes a series of broader problems within HE (see Sommerville, 2021 ). Contract cheating emphasises universities’ vulnerability to threats against academic integrity, the quality and value of qualifications and the reputation of Australia’s tertiary education sector, both domestically and internationally. The authors (see Nagy & Groves, 2021 ) recently noted that engagement in contract cheating, and academic misconduct generally, is typically linked to an assemblage of events, pressures, settings and opportunities, representative of a form of strained rationality (a meshing and parallel application of rational choice and strain theories) that is often beyond students’ control. This serves to recognise the “continually changing contract cheating marketplace”, including those who provide cheating services and the ‘enabling sites’ that advertise them (Lancaster, 2020 :12). Fig. 1 Amendments to TEQSA Act 2011 , related to provision of cheating services: s114A Fig. 2 Amendments to TEQSA Act 2011 , related to advertisement of cheating services: s114B The TEQSAA(PACS) Act 2020 also defines ‘academic cheating service’ (see Fig. 3 ), perhaps one of the first examples of legislation to do so, which aligns with those in the academic literature (Clarke & Lancaster, 2006 ; Clare et al., 2017 ; Awdry, 2020 ), as well as many institutions’ academic misconduct policies (see Deakin University, 2019 ). This provision addresses one of the concerns outlined in debates in New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK (see Draper & Newton, 2017 ; Irish Legal News, 2017 ). The second, arguably more significant, element of the Australian reforms is its inclusion of a strict liability clause (see s114A, ss(2)) in relation to the provision of cheating services. However, collectively, these issues highlight the increased risk of contract cheating, with significant pressures placed on the HE sector, its institutions, staff and – undoubtedly – its students. Threats to academic freedoms/values Debate also homed in on the need for legislation to account for threats to academic freedom and values, with topics ranging from the principles of academic integrity to policy inclusivity to freedom of speech. In addition to supporting the creation of new legal mechanisms, these calls also provided TEQSA with the capacity to enforce more severe penalties on offenders, for the purpose of deterring those engaged in contract cheating. Deterrence was a consistent theme, with many articulating “…the maximum penalties in this bill have deliberately been set high to create a strong deterrent to the provision and promotion of cheating services” (Hansard, 12 June 2020, 3004, Birmingham [LNP]). Moreover, this framing has allowed discussion of several, arguably spurious political talking points that have served to other, exclude, and neglect the needs of vulnerable students, reinforce national interests and notions of ‘Australianness’, and rationalise paternalistic state intervention through greater regulation of students in Australian HE, despite the acceptance of cheating as a transnational problem. As articulated by Senator Faruqi (Greens) (Hansard, 24 August 2020, 103), this is a “punitive response to academic misconduct”, which compounds the extant challenges of increased monitoring and punishment of students using surveillance software (Zhou, 2020 ), the removal of HECS support from students who fail more than half their subjects (MacMillan, 2020 ) and selective fee increases for certain courses of study not considered ‘relevant’ (Duffy, 2020 ).

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