Episode description

High-stakes academic assessments create conditions that motivate students to cheat.  At the same time everyone wants a laudable level of academic integrity in higher learning.  Fair or not, for many years there has been a dismissive accusation that online learning was particularly vulnerable to massive cheating.  Then, when universities made the wholesale emergency pivot from in-person to virtual classrooms in March 2020, there was a corresponding and predictable uptick in anxiety over how to prevent cheating when the instructor wasn’t even in the same physical location as the learners. 

This all conveniently ignores the fact that ensuring academic integrity has been a perennial goal and challenge in all forms of education, regardless of the mode of delivery.

Test proctoring software and plagiarism checkers are offered as high-tech solutions to what has been framed as a problem created by technology.  We will set aside, for the moment, legitimate apprehensions raised by these software solutions – collection of bio-metric data, spyware and privacy, promoting a surveillance culture, malware vulnerabilities, to name but a few. 

The important point is this focus on technology is a distraction from the underlying problem.  High-tech fixes only encourage an arms race where  students improve their methods, and educators increase their policing tactics.  It doesn’t mitigate the reason for cheating – we included in the show notes links to research about this. 

But academic integrity shouldn’t begin with Crime and Punishment, it should start with Sense and Sensibility.   What if, rather than trying to win an academic integrity skirmish, we make assessment activities that promote the original learning objectives?