Cheating in the name of academic integrity: CRADLE Seminar Series
24 June 2019
The latest presentation in the 2019 CRADLE Seminar Series saw our own A/Prof. Phillip Dawson discuss the timely topic of academic integrity in higher education. Here, visiting academic Dr Jiming Zhou reflects on Phill’s seminar and shares her key takeaways. And a recording and Phill’s slides are now available to view here.
Since the first day I visited CRADLE, my Deakin mailbox has been receiving junk mail from contract cheating companies, at least three letters per week. The commercial advertisements boasted about their undetectable, individually tailored and authentic products – ‘just turn to us’, in short (Rowland et al., 2017).
Photo: Jason Ng
Can we educators design some real cheating-proof assessment tasks to safeguard academic integrity? It was with this question that I attended Phill’s seminar.
Phill listed a range of existing approaches to addressing the cheating problem, ranging from the radical legislation trying to imprison people who help students cheat to using time pressure to avoid contract cheating. However, there is no evidence supporting that any of these approaches function well. Even worse, the increasing time pressure may even drive students to plagiarize or outsource their essays.
The pursuit of THE perfect solution to contract cheating seems to be futile. This argument reminds me of an old Chinese saying: “as virtue rises one foot, vice rises ten”. The good news shared by Phill is that where we fail to find THE perfect solution, a BETTER solution is always possible. The concept of ‘assessment security’ is proposed, as is the need to compare the relative security of different assessment options. Four types of assessment (in-class tasks, personalized tasks, oral defenses that explicate a written task, and reflections on practical placements) were perceived by university students to be the least likely to be outsourced (Bretag, et al., 2019). It is more feasible, and better facilitates learning, to consider assessment security at a macro or programmatic level, instead of being preoccupied with cheating prevention in every act of assessment at the expense of enhancing students’ learning.
Phill’s seminar has convinced me of the importance of more studies about academic integrity in the field of assessment for learning. Further research could include the use of technology in cheating detection, and empirical studies comparing the degrees of ‘academic security’ for different assessment tasks. We need evidence-based research to inform assessment design. Then we may be able to say: “As vice rises one foot, virtue rises ten”.
Photo: Jason Ng
There were a lot of excellent questions and comments at the end of Phill’s seminar. An educator shared students’ voices from the student unions – students are unhappy about contract cheating too. Other audience members touched upon issues like the impact of using markers to evaluate students’ works (possible misalignment between teaching and assessment), the long history of contract cheating (ever since the existence of writing and assessment), international students’ needs for institutional support, and teachers’ scaffolding.
Some interesting studies mentioned in Phill’s seminar can be found below:
