Possibly underreported

From Stuff, the headline “Cheating on the rise at Massey.” The basis for the story is that there were 56 incidents from 56 separate students reported in 2012, and 72 incidents from 51 separate students reported last year.

We aren’t told if that’s out of the 35000 total students, the 18000 on-campus students, or the 9000 at the Manawatu campus. Even with the smallest denominator, the cheating rate is only about half a percent. Taking this at face value requires a touching faith in the honest of Massey students, since the rate is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than self-report surveys often find for ever having plagiarised in college, and five times lower than a careful experiment found for a single assignment in US colleges (PDF)

Since reported incidents of cheating are a small minority of actual incidents, it’s hard to say anything sensible about trends from two years at a single university, especially as the story says Massey is taking new steps to combat cheating. There’s no way to disentangle changes in reporting from changes in cheating.