'Responsible but powerless: staff qualitative perspectives on cheating in higher education' by Rowena Harper and Felicity Prentice in (2024) 20 International Journal for Educational Integrity comments
Since its identification, contract cheating has evolved into a significant interdisciplinary field in higher education, encompassing both research and practice. This field informs institutional strategies, practices to mitigate contract cheating, professional development, and student education (Morris 2020). With many governments enacting legislation to combat commercial cheating industries, and quality assurance agencies establishing legislative standards for higher education providers, contract cheating has become a focal concern in the educational landscape.
In Australia, the location for this study, a series of media scandals in 2015 sparked federal government concerns that students were increasingly using commercial contract cheating services to complete their assignments, and that universities were failing to detect it. Implications in some of the reporting that international students were amongst the users contributed to those concerns, as higher education was Australia’s third largest export industry at the time (behind iron and coal), with international students comprising over 25% of the higher education population. The prospect of reputational or economic damage to universities, or the Australian higher education sector more broadly, by a narrative that suggested compromised integrity led to widespread investment in understanding and addressing the issue of contract cheating at national and local levels. Demands on academics have expanded in parallel, with their roles given new administrative, research and pedagogical dimensions requiring new and evolving skills and resources. Their work requires a growing knowledge base that includes contemporary student behaviours that can undermine educational integrity, the individual, attitudinal and contextual factors that can motivate these behaviours, and security threats and cheating opportunities that may exist in the teaching and learning environment. This knowledge must then be applied in designing an engaging and supportive learning environment that develops students’ academic integrity and academic practice (Gottardello and Karabag 2022), acknowledges and scaffolds students’ diverse academic and linguistic abilities (Bretag et al. 2019; Slade et al. 2019), and utilises assessment practices that are authentic and meaningful, and as secure as practicable (Ellis et al. 2018; Dawson 2021). For the most part these teaching and learning activities align with teachers’ conceptions of their professional identity (Lynch et al. 2021). Less well understood is how teaching staff perceive their role in detecting and managing contract cheating and other forms of academic misconduct, particularly in an environment where academic misconduct responsibilities are increasingly distributed across different institutional roles (Ahuna, Frankovitch and Murphy 2023; Vogt and Eaton 2022). These roles may include faculty-based and/or centralised teams of academic integrity specialists who provide policy leadership, staff training, student education, or have responsibility for aspects of academic misconduct investigation and management. Roles may also include more senior academics to whom teachers are required to delegate certain forms of academic misconduct.
Research into the institutional management of academic misconduct has focussed on the development of policies and procedures to prevent, detect and respond to incidents (Birks et al. 2020; Bretag and Mahmud 2014; Stoesz et al. 2019). These policies and procedures typically position teaching staff as having a policing role that feels inconsistent with and even anathema to their conceptualisations of their role and identity as facilitators of learning. For instance, in a comparative study across six countries, Gottardello and Karabag (2022) found that academics are often required to adopt the role of ‘intimidator’ to ensure students understand the consequences of academic misconduct. With the rise of contract cheating, the act of evaluating assessment tasks has increasingly become infused with a level of suspicion, as evidence suggests that the detection rate of contract cheating improves when academic staff maintain awareness of its potential occurrence (Dawson and Sutherland-Smith 2018; 2019). The gathering of evidence to identify and substantiate a case can require quasi-forensic processes such as linguistic and stylometric analyses (Ison 2020; Mellar et al. 2018), nuanced interpretation of text-matching software reports (Bretag and Mahmud 2009; Lancaster and Clarke 2014), scrutiny of document metadata (Johnson and Davies 2020), and surveillance of Learning Management System traffic to leverage information on user IP addresses (Dawson 2021). All this occurs against a backdrop of challenging organisational conditions that include dwindling resources, increasing workloads and increasing casualisation (Amigud and Pell 2021; Birks et al. 2020; Harper et al. 2019; De Maio et al. 2020).
In addition to their roles in teaching, learning and detection, teaching staff have been described by some as ‘morally responsible’ (Sattler et al. 2017, 1128) for the ongoing problem of student cheating, with others suggesting that a failure to prevent and detect academic misconduct actively is indicative of ‘staff laziness’ and ‘lack of creativity’ (Walker and White 2014, 679). Some of the language used in the literature frames the problem as a combative one and positions teaching staff as the ‘guardians of integrity’ (Amigud and Pell 2022, 312) who are on the front line (Burrus et al. 2015, p. 100; Singh and Bennington 2012, 115), ‘in the trenches’ (Atkinson et al. 2016, 197), in an ‘arms race’ (Birks et al. 2020, p. 13) and ‘waging a losing battle’ (Asefa and Coalter 2007, p. 43) against academic misconduct. The combatants portrayed in this war seem to be the teaching staff and students, staring at each other across a moral divide. Given the critical task of teaching staff to address contract cheating, the ways in which they make sense of and navigate their competing roles and responsibilities needs to be better understood. The project reported in this paper was part of a nationally funded research project entitled Contract Cheating and Assessment Design: Exploring the Connection, which conducted parallel staff and student surveys at 12 Australian higher education institutions, including 8 universities, between October and December 2016. The surveys addressed four research questions:
1. How prevalent is contract cheating in Australian universities? 2. Is there a relationship between cheating behaviours and sharing behaviours? 3. What are university staff experiences with and attitudes towards contract cheating and other forms of outsourcing? 4. What are the individual, contextual and institutional factors that are correlated with contract cheating and other forms of outsourcing?
This paper reports only on the data gathered from the 8 universities. Notably, the data were collected at a time before the COVID-19 pandemic prompted an emergency pivot in teaching and assessment, and most significantly prior to the emergence of Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). However, we assert that the fundamental challenges of ‘cheating’ remain the same, and that the organisational conditions and staff experiences illustrated here are only likely to have intensified as a result of the disruptions experienced since 2016.
