The capital's largest universities told the Sunday Canberra Times uniform reporting of integrity cases and near universal use of text-matching software in recent years had left little room for lazy students.

The University of Canberra found 115 students guilty of academic misconduct in 2012 - up from about 20 reported cases in previous years - after it switched to the URKUND assignment screening software and reformed its reporting system.

The findings of academic misconduct, mainly plagiarism, then increased by 50 per cent to 173 cases in 2013.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (education) Nick Klomp said he was not surprised when the spike in cases occurred.

"I introduced URKUND and we then made it very clear that we expected cases to be reported more centrally and more readily, and for URKUND to be used, and for it to be provided to the students [for education] as well," he said.

"I'm really pleased that despite the rigour in checking we have so few."

The URKUND software, similar to the widely-used Turnitin program, searches the web for similarities to submitted work and also makes comparisons to the work of students in the same year and assignments from previous years.

Professor Klomp said the university had put a strong focus on educating students about integrity rules and encouraged lecturers to set fresh assignments each year which minimised the cheating risk.

With about 300,000 assessments annually, the misconduct rate at UC was about 0.05 per cent or one in 2000.

In 2013, 120 students failed an assessment piece, six failed the unit and eight received a reduced mark as a direct result of being found guilty of misconduct. No other university provided requested figures on the breakdown of penalties in a year.

"[Cheating students] are very likely to get caught and they will create gaps in their knowledge that place them at a disadvantage in the workforce," Professor Klomp said.

The Australian National University, which has more than 20,000 students, reported 99 misconduct cases which attracted penalties last year.

A spokeswoman said university-wide use of text-matching software began last year, coinciding with its first purchase of a global Turnitin licence and a streamlined reporting process.

"We made a significant change to our policy and practice in 2014, and don't have comparable data for prior to that as we are highly decentralised and academic conduct is managed primarily at a local level directly by academic staff," she said.

A spokeswoman for the University of New South Wales Canberra campus at the Australian Defence Force Academy reported 30 cases where academic misconduct was admitted or found last year, one fewerthan in 2013.

The Australian Catholic University, which has more than 1000 students in Canberra, said it was unable to provide campus-specific figures but reported 271 cases nationally which were investigated for misconduct in 2013.

The UNSW and UC were the only of the four leading universities servicing the capital who answered questions on MyMaster - an underground essay-writing business exposed by Fairfax Media in November - and related assignment-purchase websites this month.

Both universities said there was no evidence their Canberra students had used the essay-writing services.