Transcript ppt - Academic Integrity Standards Project

“I heard you get expelled for
plagiarism”
Student in Starbucks, Fremont Seattle (Wonderlane 2005)
Purpose of case study
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Target audience: Target audience: Academic integrity
decision makers, senior academic staff, policy makers
Key issue being addressed: Concerns about disclosing
academic integrity breach outcomes to students.
Purpose of the case: To assist academic staff to consider why
students may wish to know how academic integrity breaches
are dealt with at their university.
Materials and preparation needed to answer case:
Appropriate policy and academic integrity resources at your
university
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Our research
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Policy analysis of academic integrity policies at 39
Australian universities:
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Many policies lacked basic information relating to types of
breaches and associated outcomes/penalties.
only 44% of policies provided details relating to severity of
breaches (minor/major)
in 18% of policies no breach outcomes were stated
Survey: 15,304 student respondents from 6 Australian
universities
One of the key findings:
 4.4% of students stated that they had ‘never heard of academic
integrity’ and could not work out what it means.
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Case Study: ‘Joyce’
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Joyce is an 18-year old Indigenous student from
Central Australia.
She is the first member of her family to attend university.
During Orientation, Joyce learns that the university takes
breaches of academic integrity very seriously.
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Penalties range from resubmitting assignments through to expulsion from the
university.
Joyce is worried that she may have accidentally plagiarised in
the past.
She could not face her family if she was expelled from university
and determines to be scrupulous in referencing every aspect of
her assignments.
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Learning the standard
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Joyce completes her first assignments carefully.
Joyce provides quotes with references in nearly every paragraph
of her assignment.
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Joyce has not demonstrated ‘critical thinking’; cutting and pasting
quotations does not demonstrate her understanding of the topic.
For the next assignments, Joyce rewrites all the material in her
own words, and provides appropriate in-text references.
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She fails every assignment.
Again, she fails every assignment.
Her arguments were ‘incoherent’ and lacked a central thesis.
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Learning the ropes
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Joyce’s friends teach her a new strategy to write her
assignments.
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Joyce now receives Credits and Distinctions for her next
assignments.
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They advise her to copy the words directly from the source, provide in-text
references, but only occasionally use quotation marks for longer, indented
quotes.
Her tutors provide positive feedback and encourage her on her ‘excellent
progress’.
Her family and community are very proud of her achievements.
The university sets up a new assessment process - all
assignments are automatically submitted to text comparison
software.
Joyce signs the mandatory statement “I declare the work in this
document to be my own, except where acknowledgement of
sources is made”.
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Intentional or inadvertent?
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Within a day of submitting her first assignment under this new
process, Joyce receives an automatically generated email,
stating that her work has been forwarded the Academic Integrity
Officer for investigation.
Frightened and anxious, Joyce goes online and trawls through
the university’s 100 page academic integrity policy.
Nowhere can she find examples of similar situations and details
of how the university responded.
Joyce cannot determine whether she has committed an
‘intentional’ breach of academic integrity requiring a serious
penalty or an ‘inadvertent’ breach which has an educational
response.
Joyce recalls her Orientation earlier in the year and is convinced
that she will be expelled.
Not wanting to shame her family, Joyce decides to quit her
university studies and return to her hometown.
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Questions for discussion
1. Based on your own university’s policy, do you think Joyce committed
an academic integrity breach?
2. How would your university respond to this situation?
3. What do you think would be an appropriate outcome for Joyce’s
actions?
4. How might the academic integrity process provide reassurance to
students that they will not be unduly penalised?
5. Do you think universities should make available to students and the
broader academic community information about academic integrity
breaches and the associated outcomes/penalties?
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a. How might this be done?
b. What are the advantages of providing breach outcome information to students?
c. What are the disadvantages?
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Conclusions
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Universities need to ensure that their
academic integrity policy provides easily
accessed, extensive but not excessive detail.
Clear information needs to be provided which
describes specific breaches, and the
associated outcomes.
Initial correspondence with students who
have potentially breached AI policy should be
carefully worded so that students are not
made unnecessarily anxious.
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References and resources
Bennett, R. (2005). Factors associated with student plagiarism in a post-1992 university. Assessment & Evaluation in
Higher Education, 30(2), 137-162.
Bretag, T. (2008) Responding to plagiarism: The need to engage with students’ ‘real lives’, Refereed paper presented
at the ATN Assessment Conference: Engaging students in assessment, University of South Australia, 20-21
November.
Bretag, T., Mahmud, S., East, J., Green, M., James, C., McGowan, U., Partridge, L., Walker, R. & Wallace, M. (2011).
Academic Integrity Standards: A Preliminary Analysis of the Academic Integrity Policies at Australian Universities,
Australian Universities Quality Forum, 29 June-1 July, Melbourne, Australia.
Bretag, T., Mahmud, S., Wallace, M., Walker, R., James, C., Green, M., East, J., McGowan, U. & Partridge, L. (2011).
Core elements of exemplary academic integrity policy in Australian higher education, International Journal for
Educational Integrity, Vol 7(2), pp. 3-12, available online:
http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/IJEI/article/viewFile/759/574
Carroll, J. & Appleton, J. (2005). Towards consistent penalty decisions for breaches of academic regulations in one UK
university. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 1(1). Retrieved 28 May 2008 from:
http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/IJEI/article/viewFile/15/5
Devlin, M., & Gray, K. (1995). In their own words: A qualitative study of the reasons Australian university students
plagiarize. Higher Education Research & Development, 26(2), 181-182.
James, R., McInnes, C., & Devlin, M. (2002). Assessing learning in Australian universities [Electronic Version].
Retrieved 18 August, 2004 from http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning
Park, C. (2003). In other (people’s) words: Plagiarism by university students - literature and lessons. Assessment &
Evaluation in Higher Education, 28(5), 471-488.
Wonderlane (2005). Student in Starbucks, Fremont Seattle, digital image, accessed on 29 August 2012,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/37529792/. This image is used with permission under an AttributionNonCommercial 2.0 Creative Commons License.
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For further resources from the
Academic Integrity Standards Project, please go to:
http://www.aisp.apfei.edu.au
Support for this project/activity has been provided by the
Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. The
views in this project do not necessarily reflect the views of the
Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
Australia License.
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