Universities in damage control after widespread cheating revealed
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University students across Sydney have been paying other people to write their essays using a website called MyMaster. Lisa Visentin and Amy McNeilage report.
NSW universities are in damage control following a Fairfax Media investigation that revealed hundreds of students across the state were engaging the services of an online essay writing business.
On Wednesday, the Herald exposed an online business called MyMaster, run out of Sydney's Chinatown, that had provided more than 900 assignments to students from almost every university in NSW, turning over at least $160,000 in 2014.
Yingying Dou, who is the director of the MyMaster website, has taken the site down. Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
A number of universities were holding emergency meetings when Fairfax Media called for comment this morning and most have declined requests for an interview.
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Professor Andrew Parfitt, the deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle, said the institution was "disappointed" but denied the cheating was systemic and said that there were mechanisms in place to catch offending individuals.
"I can't guarantee we can identify individual cases all the time. But we can identify across the course of a full course somebody who is systematically doing this sort of thing," he said, speaking on ABC Newcastle radio on Wednesday morning.
The MyMaster website received at least $26,410 from students at the University of Newcastle who submitted 123 requests for ghost written assignments - the second-highest number of requests from the 16 universities affected.
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Universities in damage control after widespread cheating revealed