Western University students continue to cheat but few getting caught using AI to do it

Hundreds of Western University students failed assignments, courses and exams last year for cheating, plagiarizing, or engaging in one of several scholastic offences, a new report shows.

According to the London, Ont., university's most recent annual report on scholastic offences, covering July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, at least 426 offences were recorded, roughly the same as 2022-23 and 2021-22.

Scholastic offences include plagiarism, cheating, unauthorized collaboration on an assignment or exam, submitting false medical or other such certificate, and contract cheating.

At least 143 students plagiarized assignments or tests, said the report, which goes before Western's senate on Friday.

Another 110 students were caught cheating on exams, while 91 engaged in unauthorized collaboration on an assignment or exam. Eleven engaged in contract cheating, in which a student pays a website or asks a personal acquaintance to complete an essay or assignment for the individual.

In one case, a student was suspended for one year for possessing an exam paper ahead of time, having obtained it "through theft, bribery, collusion or otherwise," the report said.

Kat Henricus, chair of Western's student senators, who advocate to the senate on behalf of students, said the reports provide an opportunity for discussion and finding ways to support students.

"The more supports there are for students, the better academic integrity is going to be," she said, pointing to essay support, peer tutoring and compassionate academic consideration as examples.

"When students feel supported ... I feel like they're less likely to go down a path that maybe would land them on the scholastic offences report."

She stressed the report is not representative of the student body, which numbered more than 36,000 for the 2023-24 school year

In a statement, Susan Lewis, Western's vice-provost for academic programs, said the school was "pleased to have seen a reduction and levelling off in the number of offences for the last three years."

Johanna Weststar, president of Western's faculty union, UWOFA, said the uptick had yet to fall to pre-pandemic levels. At least 182 offences were recorded in 2017-18 and 228 in 2018-19.

A high of 481 were recorded in 2020-21 during COVID-19, when many students were remote. Resolving each costs time and money.

"That these numbers are ... staying high, it does really represent a lot of extra work people are doing across the system to police the integrity of, basically, an academic degree," she said.

Instructors have been challenged over the years by technology allowing students to bend rules — those sources include essay-selling websites, smartwatches and, recently, generative artificial intelligence (AI), she said.

At least 11 offences involved students using content generated by AI tools without authorization or attribution, the report said.

At Western, decisions around AI use is largely left to each professor, Weststar said. Many offences in the report, however, were problems long before AI.

While tools like Turnitin and Proctortrack can help with plagiarism and cheating, "no tool is going to be completely foolproof," she said.

Earlier this year, Western announced it would stop using an AI writing detection from Turnitin over concerns about inaccurate results, according to the Western Gazette.

Lewis said Western provides resources about AI, including ethics around tools like ChatGPT, and instructors are to state in course outlines when generative AI is allowed.

(CBC/Radio-Canada is among a consortium of Canadian media organizations suing ChatGPT's creator for copyright infringement.)

Western's Faculty of Science, it's second most populous faculty, saw the most infractions with 108, including 57 cases of unauthorized collaboration. Twenty-eight students cheated on exams and two received one-year suspensions as a result, the report says. 

Eleven students submitted a "false medical or other such certificate," while four submitted "false or fraudulent assignments or credentials." One student was suspended for two years, while another received an "F" in the course and was ordered to withdraw.

The Faculty of Social Sciences, the university's largest, saw the second highest number of offences at 70. Western's Faculty of Education was the only one to record no scholastic offences.

King's University College recorded 50 offences and Huron recorded 21, most for plagiarism.

At Ivey School of Business, eight students resubmitted work for which they had received credit. Seven received a grade of zero "anywhere that content was plagiarized." A course grade of 55 per cent was applied and students formally apologized to the instructor, the report said.

Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry recorded 11 offences, including one where a student submitted false or fraudulent assignments or credentials. 

At the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, which saw 24 offences, one student was forced to withdraw for "research misconduct."