Cheating Academic Integrity. Группа авторов

Cheating Academic Integrity - Группа авторов


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cheating and plagiarism.

      As noted earlier, in addition to the reviews of academic integrity interventions, three studies have tracked academic integrity interventions over extended periods. These studies overlap in time over the period 2007–2019: 2007–2011 (Owens and While, 2013); 2010–2015 (Levine and Pazdernik, 2018); 2014–2019 (Perkins et al., 2020). In two of these studies, a variety of methods to improve academic integrity, including text‐matching software, structured educational modules, mastery tasks, and policy changes were used (Levine and Pazdernik, 2018; Owens and White, 2013). The third study focused solely on the impact of an academic English course (Perkins et al., 2020). All three studies examined cases of academic misconduct as their outcome, and all three studies found a significant reduction in cases over their five‐year durations. These studies reinforce the conclusions of the reviews by Marusic et al. (2016) and Stoesz and Yudintseva (2018) that skills‐based interventions, accompanied by text‐matching software, appear to be effective in reducing academic misconduct.

      In this chapter, I have reviewed the best available evidence of trends in the prevalence of plagiarism and cheating over the 30 years from 1990–2020. Specifically, I aggregated and compared the results of three time‐lag studies of plagiarism and cheating, where each study surveyed similar student groups with similar questions, allowing for like‐with‐like comparisons. These studies indicated that students’ engagement in plagiarism and cheating has trended downward since at least 1994. Two main explanations were considered for the downward trend in cheating and plagiarism: 1) whether students are switching to commercial contract cheating to avoid “detectable” forms of plagiarism with the rise of text‐matching software and 2) whether interventions designed to reduce plagiarism and cheating are effective and, if so, what types?

      It is important to point out that despite the downward trend in plagiarism and cheating, only one data‐point in Figure 1, Stiles et al.'s (2018) 2014 survey, shows less than 50 percent of students engaging in some form of academic misconduct. For all of the other time‐lag studies, most students engaged in some form of plagiarism or cheating at least once. Therefore, the finding that plagiarism and cheating is trending downward should not make higher education providers complacent. Every year, new students start their learning journey in colleges and universities, and every year these new students must be trained to understand and apply the expected standards of integrity in their work. In addition, it is worth considering emerging threats to academic integrity that may stop or reverse the downward trend.

      There are several reasons to think that some of the factors associated with the Covid‐19 pandemic that may increase academic misconduct prevalence will persist. Optimistic estimates initially predicted an end to the Covid‐19 pandemic in late 2021, but the emergence of variants of the virus and the need for worldwide vaccination suggests that it will persist as a public health threat for much longer than initially hoped (Charumilind et al., 2020). Numerous commentators have speculated that some substitution of face‐to‐face with online delivery, and proctored with unproctored assessments, will persist for years beyond the pandemic and may become “the new normal” (e.g. Champagne and Granja, 2021; McMurtrie, 2021). It is, therefore possible that students may develop new habits of cheating and collusion on unproctored tests that will solidify as new norms of behavior that are subsequently conveyed to other students.


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