Call for papers: “Challenging Cheating”
14 November 2022
A special issue of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education
Special issue editors: Phillip Dawson1 and Mollie Dollinger1,2
1 Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, Deakin University
2 Deakin Learning Futures, Deakin University
There is a vast literature exploring different types of cheating, the prevalence of cheating, why students cheat, and approaches to address cheating (Barnhardt, 2016; Curtis et al., 2021; Harper, Bretag, & Rundle, 2021). Cheating is often framed as some sort of existential crisis to higher education (McKenna, 2022). Underpinning much of this literature is a shared set of assumptions, including: that we know what cheating is and is not; that cheating is wrong; and that we know whose wrong cheating is (Bouville, 2009; Kohn, 2007). Some scholars have questioned some of these assumptions, but their articles or chapters mostly sit as islands inside journals or books that largely focus on other issues, or take more traditional views of cheating.
This special issue call is titled “Challenging Cheating”, which intentionally can be interpreted as having many meanings – from the challenges that cheating poses to education, to challenging the very idea of cheating, and beyond. It is meant to open discussion, pose problems, and create space for a range of diverse and potentially contradictory perspectives to contribute. We seek contributions that pick apart the taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding cheating, and chart a new way forward.
We invite both conceptual and empirical contributions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:
- The definitions of cheating, academic integrity and/or assessment security, the utility of these concepts, and the potential for other concepts to be more useful.
- The causes of cheating, including individual, educational and societal factors.
- Justifications for, or challenges to, the wrongness of cheating.
- Tensions between positive academic integrity and adversarial assessment security.
- Use of disciplinary or theoretical perspectives to challenge cheating as a concept, such as criminology, science and technology studies, ethics, emotions, epistemic crisis, artificial intelligence, and surveillance studies.
- Connecting cheating with other concepts from higher education assessment, such as standards, failure, validity, feedback, authenticity, ungrading, professionalism, inclusion, assessment for learning, and programmatic assessment.
- Critiquing and/or justifying the current level of resourcing and prominence afforded to cheating by higher education institutions.
- Analyses of the discourses of cheating, which might span research, policy, legislation, news media, popular culture, academic integrity courses, or teaching and learning practice.
- Syntheses of research relating to the effectiveness of various approaches to address cheating.
To provide a space for advancing this agenda, we will not be accepting submissions that focus primarily on the prevalence of cheating, or on small-scale case reports.
Timeline
| 13 January 2023 | 1000 word extended abstracts due by email to the editors |
| 20 January 2023 | Selected authors invited to submit a paper to the special issue |
| 30 July 2023 | Full papers submitted to Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (via the journal’s online system) |
| 2024 | Special issue published |
Note that articles accepted to the journal will be published online ahead of print as per the usual processes; this means that most articles will be up online ahead of the special issue’s publication.
Contact Us
Questions from interested parties are invited via email to the editors.
