'For $3500, 'Jack' says he can sit your exam. For $5000, he’ll do an entire subject.'

We knew that people were buying assignments online, but hiring someone to sit your exam?

“Jack” has been advertising online since 2012, specialising in finance and accounting, and has 3 years of experience sitting exams on behalf of university students.

“Shu Zhi” guarantees a distinction “or above”, and can sit a range of exams, from basic statistics to corporation law.

These are two of the “exam masters” who are pimping out their brains to students at some of the country’s top universities. For $3500, “Jack” says he can sit your exam. For $5000-6000, he’ll do an entire subject — from start to finish.

Their customers are people like the Deakin University student in Melbourne who says he failed eight subjects in his first year of uni, and then decided it was better to pay someone else to do them for him.

We began our investigation into student cheats off the back of a report by a University of Sydney task force that looked at academic misconduct within its own walls.

The report was surprisingly frank — it acknowledged that there is “clear, and clearly significant, underreporting and under detection at the university”. It admitted that there are gaps in the data because, while some faculties and schools are proactive about recording and weeding out cases of academic misconduct, others are not.

I was interested in the motivations for the cheats, and the nerdy entrepreneurs who are helping them.

Why are they doing it, and how are they evading detection?

As well as plagiarism and ghostwriting, the University of Sydney report mentioned cases of students hiring people to sit their exams. It was something that I’d heard about before. I spent a number of years living and working in China, and cases of students using “exam impersonators” were often highlighted in the media there.

One of my Chinese friends even admitted to me that she had sat an exam on behalf of a mate. She recalled how nervous she’d felt as the exam-room invigilator walked past, but ultimately how easy it had been to get away with it.

I enlisted the help of another friend, Cecily Huang, who I knew would have a unique perspective on the issue. Cecily is Chinese, works as a journalist, and recently came to Australia to study her Masters.

Our initial online searches among the Chinese provided clear evidence that there is an industry here. We found dozens of ads and posts on social media where people were offering to sit exams on behalf of students for a fee. Likewise, there’s no shortage of posts where students are actively searching for people to take certain exams. The posts are often specific, giving the name of the university and subject, and in one case, the time of the exam.

With Cecily posing as student, we were able to meet with “Jack”. He told us he has sat exams for others at a range of higher education institutes, including some Group of 8 universities.

Jack claims it’s as simple as making up a fake student card and swapping the student’s photo with his own.

We initially wondered if he was exaggerating, but we soon found other examples that all involved a similar method — creating a fake student ID that would pass scrutiny in an exam room. We checked with students and the universities about exam room procedures, and found that it was usually a simple visual check to ensure the photo on the student card matched the “student” in the exam room.

So what kind of student would employ an exam impersonator? One with money, and a dire need to pass. Cecily arranged to meet with a student at Deakin University in Melbourne. He arrived in a BMW. He told her he never goes to class, and pays for all his assignments and exams to be done, usually by an exam sitter called “Shu Zhi”. He said that when he first started university, he’d done the exams himself and failed most of his subjects. No one at the university ever questioned his poor performance, he said.

These might be extreme cases of cheating, but in the course of our investigation we also came across those who think that buying an essay online is the best option when you’ve been partying too hard to actually do the work. We searched across languages and found that ghostwriting services in particular are being sold and bought by students from all backgrounds — local and international.

As one cheat who’d bought assignments online told us, “I never felt afraid to do it because it’s something the university never spoke about, so you could see it’s not something on their radar.”

Universities believe that only a minority of students engage in academic misconduct. But the fact is, it’s hard to know. The University of Sydney report says that while detection measures and exam-room checks need to be improved, education and cultural change are just as important.

But this all relies on having the resources to monitor and pick up cheats, something that’s become increasingly hard as more tutors find themselves employed only casually, and the number of students in certain courses has risen.

And, in an era where universities are keen to maintain or even increase income from upfront-fee-paying students, how do you create an environment where all students feel a degree is something to be earned, rather than bought?

SBS 2’s THE FEED airs every night at 7:30pm, with a special edition undercover investigation into academic cheaters on Tuesday November 10 at 7:30pm on SBS 2.