Bretag and I agree academics must know their students. That makes it harder for the students to cheat.

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Burt that's not easy when class sizes are huge, or worse, too brief. The tendency to cram 25-plus students (and in some cases 40) into tutorials to cut costs provides an environment where academics find it difficult to remember all the Sams, all the Nours. Combined with tutorials or labs only an hour in length, the impacts are multiplied.

Some universities now have teaching periods of only 10 weeks. The academic spends just 10 hours with those students.

I have tenure. I can make as much time as I like to provide extra support where needed. Most academics are piece-workers. You cannot expect them to do what I do when they do the work for free. Universities need to reflect on that exploitation (and not just by reducing the number of assessments – more on that later).

“Teachers need to know their students and students need to know their teachers,” says Bretag.

Just a note: I’m employed at the University of Technology Sydney where a robust discussion took place and the folks in charge stuck to their guns – we have 12-week teaching periods.  We need every minute of that time.

The text-matching software Turnitin goes some way towards checking on cheats. But it uses the unpaid labour of students. Their assessments, at no cost to the company, build the database. I hate using it and despise the assessments (largely essays) that make Turnitin the crutch for modern academia. Bretag disagrees and says it’s a useful tool in the absence of anything else. Such as actually knowing your students.

Which brings me to assessments. In my first year as a student, we received a pass or a fail. My transcript, filled with passes (and two fails), never stopped me from doing anything, although eyebrows were raised when I applied to do my PhD.

The focus on marks is poisonous and encourages students to cheat; and the new move towards just two assessments in a truncated study period invites cheating. Those two tasks are just too big to fail. Bretag says her research found students report a higher likelihood of outsourcing their work to contract cheating organisations.

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Even so, too many assessments in a short study period puts pressure on students, and also encourages cheating.

Assessments must be more than the same essay set year after year, allowing students to Google the answer. While regular changes stop cut-and-paste plagiarism, they don't solve the problem of outsourcing.

Instead, assessments that are authentic, such as vivas – in which students are interviewed about their work – are less likely to be outsourced than essays. So are reflective tasks – how do I know what I know and how can I do better? Yet when we do this, we must also provide the support for those tasks.

Back to the students. Some are whingers. Some are bone-idle. Much like the rest of the population. Of course, make cheaters take individual responsibility for their lying, cheating ways. Punish the companies  that provide cheating services. But recognise that in many cases, the system facilitates and enables those lying, cheating ways.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney and a regular columnist.