Innovative cheating: Assessment and quality assurance issues for universities and beyond
2 October 2017
In September 2017, I was privileged to give a keynote presentation as a CRADLE Fellow at the TEQSA Higher Education Service Assessment and Review summit, held in Melbourne.
The summit featured a number of presentations led by very senior academics: Emeritus Professor Kwong Lee Dow, Patron of the Higher Quality Network; Emeritus Professor Sheelagh Matear, the Executive Director of the Academic Quality Agency in New Zealand; and Dr Michael Tomlinson, the Director of the Assurance Group, TEQSA. There were many presentations from institutions across Australia and New Zealand centred on professional learning around assessment, including support for peer review, review of assessment, and calibration and quality mechanisms for learning. Other sessions focused on work-integrated learning and engagement with professional practice and industry.
A slide from my presentation showing media coverage of student cheating
My keynote discussed overall quality assurance issues surrounding cheating in universities and some of the ways in which students cheat, as well as why they do so. The presentation featured two CRADLE-led research studies on contract cheating (conducted with CRADLE Associate Director Phillip Dawson), which explored whether university markers can be trained to detect contract-cheated assignments when mixed with real student work. The studies investigated both the accuracy of detecting contract cheating (sensitivity), and the accuracy of markers in identifying real student work and not falsely alleging contract cheating (specificity). The first study was a pilot study involving one second-year unit and the second study involved four units across three different faculties and across first-, second- and third-year levels. In addition, we ran a contract cheating detection workshop for markers, which appeared to increase accuracy rates, and a viva for students to present both real and cheated work to a panel of markers – again, to see if markers could detect cheated work. The summit audience were most engaged with the presentation, as it offered a quite different aspect of quality assurance in assessment to consider, and many were not familiar with empirical contract-cheating research.
The Higher Education Services organising committee contacted me today to report that 61% of the participants who responded to their evaluation survey wanted to hear more of our CRADLE research, and be kept informed of future projects involving Phill and myself.
Detailed information on our contract cheating work can be found in our recent publication: P. Dawson, & W. Sutherland-Smith. (early view). Can markers detect contract cheating? Results from a pilot study. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
