As part of my role, each year I design and run tutorial sessions with award year students carrying out literature research projects where one session specifically focuses on ‘Academic Integrity’. It’s become a more and more important session in my view, especially in recent times. Here's an overview of the journey we go on....
Reflection
It was great to see this contract cheating topic highlighted in national media recently, and I was also heartened by a tweet thread from the CEO of AHEAD, Dara Ryder, when in response to a recent article on the matter, mentioned it’s important to reflect and consider "what pressures are causing students to go there", to get in to a position to even consider these services. In recent times, there has been a real focus on assessment across programmes. As part of this, programme teams work with students to reduce over-assessment and spread and ease the assessment workload, however despite this, contract cheating remains a threat to academic integrity. It’s hard to pinpoint what needs to be changed - is it over-assessment? Is it the time-demands of the particular assessments? Is authentic and/or co-created assessment the way to go? Can integrated or synoptic assessments assist? Is it building more awareness in the HE community? etc. So many more questions come to mind, and it could be through a partnership approach solutions are identified.
As a group, we normally finish this particular session by viewing some parts of Tim Urban’s Ted talk on procrastination, in particular the first few minutes about his thesis planning, very entertaining and a video well worth a watch (at the time of writing, his video has over 47 million views!).
Contract cheating has become and remains a major threat to academic integrity, but also for learning, and for our students. Of course, everyone can make a mistake, but for it to possibly follow you throughout your career, potentially derailing all the good one has done, is an element we need to educate and work with our students on. A good mindset to perhaps emphasise and reinforce, stemming from some the points I made in the library video, is around taking pride in your work, owning what you create and realising how the reward is often in the journey.
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Ronan BreeEducation Developer,Science Lecturer, Archives
March 2023
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Any opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
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