Blog 2: Supporting academic integrity in remote teaching and assessment contexts
Teaching and assessing students remotely presents new challenges for academic integrity. Action is especially needed to respond to the problem of contract cheating sites which are using the crisis to full advantage by offering students immediate online assistance with exams and extra support while they are off-campus. Opportunities for inappropriate help are also being created much more on social media with these sites or between students. I present four main current challenges for academic integrity and suggestions for dealing with them below:
1. Contract cheating upsurge
Contract cheating sites adapted more quickly than universities to the lockdown situation. Marketing from contract cheating companies immediately promoted extra services and ‘support’ away from university with slogans such as ‘don’t let coronavirus affect your grades’ and ‘we provide the support you need to graduate 24/7’.
Suggestions: Make it clear that using contract cheating sites is cheating and recommend students continuously ask themselves the question: Is it all your own work? Remind students of why they came to university. Emphasize to students that support from university services is available and free, how to access it, when it is available, and that it is a better option, through module/programme support and the links below:
Centre for Academic Development
Regulations regarding cheating
2. Social media abuse
There has been an increase in students using social media for study support, rather than consulting university staff. Contract cheating sites are extremely active on social media, for example they reply to Twitter posts by students about anxiety, problems or questions about assignments. Contract cheating company employees also pose as students and join Facebook and Whatsapp groups, even at pre-registration stage. They share links and promote contract cheating sites. Students are also offered money for selling their past essays using file-sharing sites that are promoted via memes on social media, using seemingly official university pages. See recent research by Lancaster and Cotarlan (2021)
Suggestions: Monitor any university pre-induction groups, warn students about these companies and how they act. Suggest they use university support services, as above. Remind students that they should not do any file-sharing of academic work. Involve students as 'academic integrity champions' to spread the message to other students about the importance of following good practice and doing their own work - social media could be used for this. Sign up to the International Day of Action against Contract Cheating on 20 October 2021.
3. Cheating issues with time-controlled assessment
Contract cheating companies are responding to online time-controlled assessment by offering ‘exam solutions within 30 minutes’ with ‘expert Q&A’ and ‘immediate responses to exam queries 24/7’.
Suggestions: Include explicit instructions that these services are not allowed. Remind students of university regulations and that they should be getting the grades they deserve and demonstrating their knowledge. Give the link below to the regulations and get them to do the academic integrity course on Moodle. Ensure the assessment questions are framed specifically around the module content, personalised and linked to the student and their programme, rather than questions that someone with general knowledge not specific to the module could answer. See more ideas in Designing out plagiarism for online assessment (Lawrence, 2020). Check Regulations regarding cheating, general Regulations and the Brookes Academic integrity course on Moodle.
4. IT related issues
Students may be experiencing more IT related problems which they do not or cannot resolve in the usual ways. If they are away from campus, students are more likely to seek help from those immediately around them, rather than IT services. It can become an academic integrity issue if by borrowing laptops from friends or family, there is collusion or inappropriate help with assignments. Submissions could arouse suspicion if the student’s name does not appear as the author in the properties.
Suggestions: Remind students about IT services that are still operating at a distance and provide help and advice online. Suggest they check advice on the programme pages and Brookes website. Remind them of the Regulations regarding cheating especially related to submitting other’s work and collusion.
These means of providing clear instructions and information to students through available support and links at Oxford Brookes should help them to make good decisions and avoid risks of cheating in the current remote learning situation. Please contact me with any queries marydavis@brookes.ac.uk
References
Lancaster, T. and Cotarlan, C. (2021). Contract cheating by STEM students through a file-sharing website: a Covid-19 pandemic perspective. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 17. Available at https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s40979-021-00070-0
Lawrence, J. (2020) Designing out plagiarism for online assessment. The SEDA blog. Available at:
https://thesedablog.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/online-assessment/