ACADEMIC INTEGRITY TEACHER TRAINING: PREVENTIVE PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES ON THE COURSE LEVEL

Sonja Bjelobaba

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0009

More often than not, academic integrity as a discipline is defined by stating what it is not. Instead of focusing on what we want our students to do, we tell them that they should not cheat, plagiarize, collude, falsify or fabricate data, or engage in contract cheating. When defined in this way, academic integrity focuses on corrections of students’ behaviour, detection, and punishment, still generally managing to avoid explaining to students what we want them to do instead. Academic integrity can – and should – be defined in other ways, as a set of positive values or an agreement with ethical and professional principles, standards and practices that involve the whole institution. Such a change in the definition inevitably changes our teaching of academic integrity: instead of correcting students’ behaviour, different methods of the preventive and pedagogical promotion of academic integrity can be explored. One of them is an integration of academic integrity across the curriculum thus permeating all higher education. In order to achieve that, educational measures should not only be aimed at students, but to their teachers as well. In this paper a structure of an academic integrity teacher training workshop is presented with a focus on the integration of academic integrity in curriculum through constructive alignment and the examples of different preventive pedagogical practices.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY, AXIOLOGY AND BUSINESS ETHICS PEDAGOGY

Caroline Burns

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0019

This purpose of this paper is to outline how values theory can be incorporated into a business ethics curriculum and how academic integrity can be recruited in doing so. The paper presents a pedagogical approach that allows students to reflect on their values, articulate their values stances, and learn how values influence both ethical and unethical behavior. The paper also demonstrates how academic dishonesty is an effective means by which to teach students the pathway from values, to attitudes, to behavior, while also teaching students the long-term ramifications of behaving unethically during their time spent in higher education.

STYLOMETRIC COMPARISON OF PROFESSIONALLY GHOST-WRITTEN AND STUDENT-WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS

Robin Crockett, Kirstie Best

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0035

We report a stylometric investigation of a portfolio of 20 assignments submitted by an individual student over two consecutive academic years. This investigation followed a formal disciplinary investigation which had identified that eight of the assignments had been ghost- written, with seven of those showing explicit ghost-writer ID information and three of those showing ID information from the same commercial provider. The stylometric investigation involved a conventional word and bigram frequency analysis and a prototype word complexity analysis. The word and bigram analysis identified four consistent groups of assignments, which associate other assignments with the eight known to have been ghost-written, indicating that those were probably also ghost-written. One of those groups comprises the three assignments from the same provider, plus another assignment, implying that the provider has a ‘house style’ and that the other assignment also came from that provider. The prototype analysis clearly categorised the core members of two of those same groups, including the group from the identified provider, adding further weight those associations. More generally, this investigation shows that it is possible to categorise assignments according to aspects of writing style: we would have obtained the same groups even if we had not possessed the ghost-writer ID information. Where such consistent groups are identified it implies, on balance of probabilities, multiple authorship of assignments and that the student concerned cannot have written all the submitted assignments and that some were ghost-written.

DE-EMPHASIZING PLAGIARISM WITH BIG DATA: MODERN APPROACHES AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Daniel Dusza

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0050

This article introduces present trends in Big Data analytics and how they might be implemented to de-emphasize plagiarism. Regrettably, academic institutions have continued to rely on essay-based coursework and written reports as a basis of assessment. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a mass migration into online learning, and with it, a further increase in the reliance on textual content. With more writers now composing online in the absence of face-to-face accountability to peers and teachers, the risks to academic integrity through plagiarism and contract cheating should be expected to increase. Three empirical research studies were used to investigate how the writing process might be automatically and covertly monitored to measure the dynamics of compositions. The areas of interest include the equipment, the method of data management, and the information that could be gleaned from the recorded data. Each study is progressively more complex, and presented in a manner to support the future formulation of a framework for implementation into education. The results indicate that the equipment that is readily available to most students is capable much more than composing and transmitting a written manuscript. Currently, technology is capable of identifying writing problems and providing assistance to help writers navigate even the most difficult tasks in composition. The technological solutions suggested in this paper provides far more than plagiarism detection. The results in this paper indicate that future writing will be supported through process verification, semantic network authentications, and other certifications that will form part of the future requirements of assessment and academic integrity.

WHY DO STUDENTS PLAGIARIZE? THE CASE OF MULTICULTURAL STUDENTS IN AN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Ajrina Hysaj, Abeer Elkhouly

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0064

The increase in plagiarism cases among university students is a great concern for educators and policy makers within the federal and private universities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Research suggests that students’ attitudes toward academic integrity are characteristically more tolerant than the policies already in place in most universities. This assertion can hypothetically intensify the situation that most universities in the UAE are experiencing. Moreover, the presence of a very diverse student body leaves space for validation of the hypothesis, that concepts of plagiarism or academic integrity are seen differently in different cultures; nevertheless, very little research has been carried out to empirically validate such hypothesis. Moreover, current research in this area has usually been conducted in western universities, in western countries and has been focused in a comparison between international and domestic students or native and non-native speakers of English language. As yet, no studies have directly analysed culturally diverse students’ attitudes toward plagiarism in their first year of study in a western university in the UAE. This study aimed to measure the students’ level of understanding to what plagiarism is. One survey and one quiz were given to 67 students, the data from the surveys was tested against several hypothesis and some descriptive analysis was conducted. The results reveal that students understand the main concepts beyond plagiarism but confuse its application.

PLAGIARISM FROM A DIGITAL FORENSICS PERSPECTIVE

Clare S. Johnson, Ross Davies

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0078

Plagiarism and contract cheating are serious academic issues that ‘undermine the integrity of education’ (Bretag, 2013). There are a number of tools that can help assessors detect plagiarism – particularly where text has been copied and pasted: Turnitin (https://www. turnitin.com), PlagScan (https://www.plagscan.com) and Urkund (https://www.urkund.com) are examples of such tools. The providers of these tools are also developing authorship tools that use stylometrics and linguistics to determine matches between authors (whether the submitting author, or a third party). It is also possible for an assessor to copy passages of text and paste them into a Google search (or similar) with quotes surrounding the passage to see if there are any immediate online matches. In a previous paper Using digital forensic techniques to identify contract cheating: A case study (Johnson & Davies, 2020), the authors began using digital forensic techniques to see if it was possible to detect contract cheating. In that paper, consideration was given to how forensic techniques allow review of document edits through examining the Open Office extensible markup language (OOXML) format of the document. This paper seeks to extend that research by further exploration of the OOXML format to establish whether forensic artefacts can be found to indicate that work has been copied and pasted from online sources. A number of sample documents were created by the authors and the xml analysed. Whilst there were some indicators to suggest work had been copied and pasted, more analysis is required to develop the techniques into a more reliable tool.

AI TRIAGE – HELPING FALTERING STUDENTS REHABILITATE FROM ACADEMIC MISCONDUCTS

Zeenath Reza Khan, Tina Ann Thomas, Vidhi Sharma

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0090

ADDED VALUE OF CENTRALISED PLAGIARISM DETECTION SYSTEM ON A NATIONAL LEVEL

Julius Kravjar

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0103

TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING ACADEMIC INTEGRITY POLICY AMONGST HUNGARIAN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Gabor Laszlo

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0112

This study is the first undertaking of its kind in Hungary, a statistical overview of the practices of Hungarian higher education institutions regarding academic integrity. The study was conducted at the leadership level of these institutions. The survey has multiple simultaneous goals. It was conceived to fill a gap in the information on academic integrity at the national level of Hungarian higher education, paying attention to the currently implemented anti-plagiarism practices and software, as well as to the operation of their repositories. The results and correlations show by this study indicate that there is much to be done in this field, but it is clear that Hungarian higher education institutions are on board with working together and moving forward.

WHAT DRIVES STUDENTS’ INTENTION TO PLAGIARISE IN MONTENEGRO: THE MODERATING ROLE OF TEXT MATCHING SOFTWARE

Sanja Pekovic, Jovana Vukcevic, Dijana Vuckovic, Rajka Djkovic, Marijana Blecic

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0127

We enrich the extended theory of planned behaviour (ETPB), to which we introduced two additional components – academic and computer literacy – to examine how different behavioural, moral and educational traits influence students’ intentions to plagiarise. We argue that the relationship between components of the ETPB and students’ intention to plagiarise is likely to be nuanced – and may display significant divergence depending on the students’ awareness of text matching software utilisation. Using a sample of around 400 students from the University of Montenegro, our results partly confirmed that the extended theory of planned behaviour is an accurate predictor of the students’ intention to plagiarise. More precisely, favourable attitudes towards plagiarism, low perceived behavioural control and low moral obligation influence positively students’ intention to plagiarise. On the contrary, low subjective norms as well as both low academic and high computer literacy are found to be not significantly related to the students’ intention to plagiarise. Further analysis reveals that the introduction of the moderator variable (students’ awareness of text matching software utilisation) weakens the relation between the ETPB’s components and students’ intention to plagiarise. Overall, the obtained findings undoubtedly demonstrate that students’ awareness of the utilisation of the text matching software acts as a strong impediment to the intention to plagiarise, mainly neutralizing the positive relations between the ETPB’s components and intention to plagiarise.

EQUITY IN ADMISSION: COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SECONDARY DATA IN HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM VALUATION

Salma Sadia Rakhman, Zeenath Reza Khan

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0155

A student’s journey from high school to university begins with the admission depart- ment evaluating their credentials. Worldwide school curriculum varies in terms of syllabus, structure, assessment methodology and learning outcomes. This variation in pre-university curricula imposes the challenge of equally benchmarking them in providing university admis- sion. The challenge extends beyond the initial admission process due to existence of improper valuation of quality of students, which co-relates to academic performance and misconducts. So how do universities go about providing admission to students from varied curricula? This study tracks the admission requirements of five local accredited universities in the United Arab Emirates to demonstrate the importance of equity in admission.

USE OF DIGITAL CONTENT IN ENSURING INTEGRITY FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH AT THE SECONDARY LEVEL OF EDUCATION: PERSPECTIVE OF BANGLADESH

Rahul Chandra Shaha, Md Sakhawat Hossain, Md Asaduzzaman

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0166

The use of digital content (DC) in teaching and learning English has become a buzzword. Infusing DC into the English teaching-learning process is really important as it caters the needs of the contemporary learners. At the same time, the availability of DC allows learners to adopt many unfair means by copy-pasting. So, it is important to ensure the integrity for teaching and learning in today’s world. This study focused on exploring the actual use of DC in ensuring integrity for teaching and learning English at grade IX–X of Bangladesh and finding out the challenges of using DC in ensuring integrity. A mixed method design (Creswell, 2012) has been employed to conduct the study. To accomplish the study, data has been collected from teachers, students and content specialists by using semi-structured interview schedule, semi- structured questionnaire, FGD and classroom observation checklist. The data was analysed in mixed approaches using simple statistics and thematic analysis process and presented through tables and graphs. The result and detailed analysis of the study have brought out that most of the teachers use free plagiarism software for tracing out unethical writings in English for ensuring integrity in English subject. This study also brings into light that lack of necessary equipment (there is no plagiarism deduct software in the observed school) and teachers’ negative attitudes toward using DC are the prevalent challenges of using DC in ensuring integrity for teaching and learning English. In this circumstance, the study suggests that schools should be provided with new equipment such as plagiarism deducts software strategically and equitably for frequent and successful trace out, and teachers should get training on how to use DC effectively in ensuring integrity.

ENGAGING MEDICAL AND BIOMEDICAL STUDENTS TOWARDS ETHICS AND ETHICAL CONDUCT VIA CASE STUDY BASED APPROACH: REFLECTIONS FROM AN ONLINE WORKSHOP

Shiva Das Sivasubramaniam, Zeenath Reza Khan

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0178

Ethics and ethical behaviour form an important part in clinical science and biomed- ical research. Ethical education should be comprehensively taught aiming to help gradu- ate/undergraduate students to practice by applying underlying principles. Several innovative types of learning strategies are being employed to deliver these sessions. One such method is the “case study based delivery” in which students are presented with a variety of case studies highlighting the issues to create an interactive learning. In this investigation authors wanted to showcase this approach to the Middle-Eastern medical/biomedical students and thereby (a) validate the effectiveness of this case study based delivery and (b) to explore the effectiveness of delivering case study based ethical education in a virtually online environment. In this manuscript, we share our experiences from this session by a narrative commentary of our observation and analysis on student interactions The study shows that the opportunities for integrated learning and problem solving abilities can be the best solution for learning to apply the appropriate ethical principle in clinical context. Conducting an online interactive session with a large scale of attendees (around 258 participants) can be a challenge which can be tackled by excellent IT support.

VARYING INSTITUTIONAL PROCEDURES FOR DEALING WITH STUDENT ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT: A SHORT COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Shiva Das Sivasubramaniam, Zeenath Reza Khan

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0186

Establishing and maintaining academic integrity has always been a focal point amongst all higher education organisations. A few studies have been designed to compare the efficacy of measures/procedures amongst different institutions. Some other attempts were also made to compare the procedures for academic misconduct investigations amongst different institutions about handling potential plagiarisms and/or academic misconducts. The aim of this workshop based investigation was to show the participants, the importance of pro-activeness and practical awareness to establish institutional procedures for handling potential plagiarism and/or academic dishonesty. We wanted to show the inconsistencies in the approaches of conducting academic investigations relating to plagiarism related misconducts. We have carried out a simple Google® search and selected publicly available institutional policies and procedures of five different international universities representing different geo- graphical representations. The comparison has highlighted the approaches to investigate plagia- rism or academic misconduct are varied amongst these universities. Some institutional policies have established clearly defined processes, others have vague and ambiguous procedures. The study has highlighted the importance of investigating institutional procedures in a comparative manner. In order to provide some recommendation of institutional policies and procedures, we would work closely with the European Network of Academic Integrity (ENAI), and other international stakeholders to expand this study in a larger scale.

JOURNEY FROM CLASSROOM TO WORKPLACE – ONE STUDENT’S STORY

Swathi Venugopal, Zeenath Reza Khan

DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-772-9-0195

This paper uses narrative writing to track the journey of one student’s perceptions and understanding of academic integrity values through practice immersion and experiences and how that is carried into the workplace. Literature has posited that narratives offer increased comprehension, interest and engagement (Dahlstrom, 2014). The paper uses storytelling as a unique methodology to capture the student’s perceptions and emotions and provides a fascinating insight into the kind of experiences that shape students’ understanding of academic integrity values, thus posing as valuable contributions for academics and research globally.