University of Sydney vice-chancellor Dr Michael Spence will announce on Monday night that he will chair a university-wide taskforce on academic misconduct, following revelations by the Herald that the university may have failed to detect dozens of instances of cheating across its faculties.

The decision to establish the taskforce, which will be announced at a meeting of the University Senate, comes after it was revealed last week that the university managed to identify only five students in connection with 61 requests for assignments from the ghostwriting website MyMaster for courses offered at the University in 2014.

The University was among the institutions worst-affected by the MyMaster cheating racket, in which up to 1000 students from 16 universities hired the Sydney-based company to write their assignments and sit online tests, but lagged behind its competitors in cracking down on the cheating.

In a threat to the credibility and international standing of the state's most prestigious university, the low detection rates exposed significant weakness in its plagiarism detection methods, as well as its ability to identify ghostwritten assignments designed to elude text-scanning software, such as those offered by the now-defunct MyMaster service.

Dr Spence said the Herald's MyMaster investigation "had challenged the methods traditionally used by all universities to detect academic dishonesty" and that it had an obligation "to ensure we stay at the forefront of technology and innovation".

Last month, the Herald revealed that only five of the 70 students investigated in connection with the MyMaster cheating racket were from the University of Sydney, despite the Herald providing the University's administration with copies of 40 ghostwritten assignments purchased from the website. Most of the assignments were fully referenced, ready-to-submit pieces of work and cost between $90 and $800.  .

Documents obtained under freedom of information revealed that "the main factor" for the University's low detection rates was the inconsistent use of the plagiarism detection software Turnitin.

"As a result, it has not been possible to identify the students who bought essays through MyMaster and then submitted them for assessment in those units of study," the head of student affairs, Idena Rex, said in an email to deputy vice-chancellor Tyrone Carlin in February.

This exposed a significant discrepancy in the university's stated policy on plagiarism detection software and its implementation, with another document obtained under freedom of information revealing that Dr Spence had assured the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency in December that "the use of the text matching software Turnitin is widespread through the university".

The four other worst-affected universities - University of Newcastle, Macquarie University, University of Technology Sydney, and University of NSW - all cited Turnitin as key to identifying students who used the MyMaster site. The comparative success of their internal investigations further highlights the deficiencies in the University of Sydney's academic misconduct mechanisms.

UTS vice chancellor Shirley Alexander confirmed last week that 15 students had been identified by cross-checking 53 assignments with Turnitin submissions, and it was expected "more students [would[ be identified shortly".

Last month, the University of Newcastle announced it had issued 24 fail grades, two expulsions and eight suspensions, after 18 assignments revealed "high degrees of similarity" when cross-checked with Turnitin submissions.

Dr Spence said that lengths to which dishonest students were willing to go to avoid detection was a problem "with which the entire education sector must contend".

He said the taskforce would primarily focus on "new methods for detecting plagiarism and other misconduct", including "changing assessment methods to minimise opportunities for students to engage in misconduct".

"Our assessment processes are designed to minimise the opportunity for misconduct, but we know that the advent of new technologies has led to increasingly innovative methods for students to use, and, sadly, a small number continue to try and use them instead of applying such innovation to their studies," he said.