Increase of cheating at Massey from 2019 to 2020

There’s been a 10% increase in breaches of academic integrity from 2019 to 2020. In 2019 149 students had an allegation of breaching academic integrity. In 2020 this figure rose to 164 students, or 0.53% of the Massey student population. Is it because of Zoom? Online exams? Those are the kind of questions that a serious journalistic paper would ask. Thank God we’re not like that.  

According to Massey, a breach of academic integrity “comprises all forms of scholastic honesty, and examples of breaches include but are not limited to plagiarism, cheating, and the use of copied or falsified data”. There are three levels of breaches (predictably, 1, 2, and 3. Can you get anymore boring?) and it’s worth noting that only Level 2 and 3 breaches are recorded in the stats. For the Level 1 breaches, those are dealt with “informally”, so I guess we’ll never know how many of those there are.  

Oh, and since 2017, five students have been suspended or excluded since 2017. Stats, everyone! How fun! Who knew, huh?