Ten Years in the Academic Integrity Trenches: Experiences and Issues

1. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of, and support for, front-line teaching colleagues in the Higher Education sector who face systemic threats to academic integrity. These threats have been brought about by changes including pervasive access to digital technology, the internationalization of Higher Education, a shift from public to private funding, and an increasing reliance on large and culturally diverse student cohorts who require academic and cultural support to study at their chosen host institution. While this paper is situated in the Australian context, there have been similar changes in Europe (Glendinning, 2014) and the United States that either precede or lag the changes described in this paper. Thus, there is an international relevance to the issues raised in this Australian context as all Higher Education institutions have to make decisions regarding the management of academic integrity which will influence their ability to attract and sustain quality students, courses, and faculty. A decade ago, we began researching the introduction of plagiarism detection software in our IS Faculty to deal with the rise in plagiarism that accompanied digitization (Atkinson and Yeoh, 2008). Through pervasive digitization there is an increased opportunity and ability for students and staff to create texts through searching, cutting and pasting, translating, synonym generating, sharing, and contracting online authoring services. Most of the issues raised in the earlier research, including fairness for students and workload for academics, are still relevant, and the research model consisting of education, detection, and prosecution is still useful. However, the scale has changed in our institution from ad-hoc, bottom-up efforts from individual faculty to an institutional approach with centralized provision of resources, policies, and programs to support academic integrity. Among the changing learning contexts from face-to-face, to blended, and to fully online, there are still students and staff engaging in learning, teaching, and completing assessments, some of which fail academic integrity. The following questions are raised: What have we learned from our experiences? What do we recommend for the next ten years? We pursue these questions based on the experiences of the authors who are teaching academics with a combined 60 years of experience teaching and supporting small (20 enrollments) and large scale (1,000 enrollments) IS courses. The metaphor of battle (Leask, 2006) is deliberately chosen as at times this is what it feels like for teaching academics "in the trenches" who, in order to support honest students interested in learning, have to constantly fight to protect academic integrity against newer threats such as contract cheating (Clarke and Lancaster, 2006) brought on by the increasing corporatization, commoditization, and globalization of Higher Education. This paper provides some background and context, and then uses four illustrative cases, experienced by the authors, that describe cases of plagiarism (using others' work without proper acknowledgement), collusion (working with others' to deceive an assessor), and contract cheating (contracting for services with intention to deceive assessors), and which threaten academic integrity (honesty in valuing others' work). For comprehensive definitions of these terms, we refer the reader to our institution's academic integrity documentation (Academic Integrity, 2016) which in turn references Carroll (2002) and The Center for Academic Integrity (1999). Some tactics, issues, and responses are described with the cases. The role of academic culture and English language proficiency is discussed. Further, quantitative data is provided from the faculty Plagiarism Recording System (PRS) with some comparisons with other universities' data. Next, the Academic Integrity Program (AIP) is described as an educative entry point for new students. …