Colleges and Universities in Ireland Agree to Uniform Integrity Standards
Plus, a must-read letter regarding questionable research on integrity. Plus, international quick bites.
Issue 243
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Irish Colleges and Universities Set Uniform Integrity Standards
Like most countries, Ireland is way ahead of the United States on issues of academic integrity and security.
Ireland, for example, has made selling or using cheating services illegal - not so in the U.S. Ireland has the National Academic Integrity Network (NAIN), which is run by the county’s main education accrediting body. America, not so much.
Now, according to news coverage in the Emerald Isle, the nation’s colleges and universities are agreeing on common integrity definitions and practices. That’s a big deal because it keeps a focus on academic integrity as a national issue and because inconsistent policies and practices are integrity weak spots.
In the United States, absent any kind of national awareness, concern, or effort, policies are left to individual schools. Some care. Some care a little more than others and many simply say they care, but do not do much of anything to demonstrate it.
As such, Ireland leading in this area could be a good model. Or at least one can hope.
Moreover, based on the coverage, there are several things in the newly unified standards to actually like. For example, it sets “on the balance of probability” as the new standard for adjudicating misconduct cases instead of the previous “beyond all reasonable doubt” standard. That feels big, especially as national policy.
I also like that the new standards adopt, “a three-tier classification system for cheating” which is:
The least serious, Level 1, would be “poor scholarly academic practice/conduct”, followed by “academic misconduct” or “minor infringement”, and, at Level 3, “severe academic misconduct”, or “major infringement”.
Among the advice is that academic misconduct within an exam setting would not typically be considered a Level 1 infringement.
I like it. There’s a big difference between bad citation and paying Chegg for answers.
And I absolutely love this:
The new cheating framework advises that all suspected cases should be investigated, and that investigations should be based on the action of the students rather than a defence of not intending to engage in academic misconduct.
All suspected cases should be investigated. All. That’s really big because in a great many cases, especially in the United States, suspected misconduct is never investigated at all. Most cases of suspected cheating are left to the discretion of the instructor and the incentives against action are abundant and well-documented. So, inquiry of all suspected cases feels monumental.
Likewise, placing judgment on student action over intent also feels like a significant step up. And though I don’t know exactly how that would play out, I sense it may mitigate the hardly believable excuse that someone, somehow, did not know that buying exam answers from Course Hero was cheating.
And while those guidelines feel like a hammer, the reporting also says:
The framework stresses the imperative of a supportive approach, and helping students who may have crossed a boundary, to engage in good academic practice.
Of course, the goal should always be to do it right. No question. At the same time, the guidelines also stress that previous issues related to misconduct should be considered in every case. If you are investigating every case, the intentional, repeat violations should surface quickly.
All I can add is, good for Ireland. Good work. I am jealous.
A Must-Read Letter on Some Pretty Questionable Research
I did not know letters to the editor were possible in academic journals. But in this case, I am delighted they are because you have to read this one.
The letter is from Phil Newton, a known researcher and expert on academic integrity and, for the record, no relation to me. As far as I know.
Newton writes about this piece of published research on online assessment and misconduct, which I also pretty much eviscerated in Issue 229. Or at least I hope I eviscerated it. I meant to.
Briefly, the authors of the original study posited that unproctored, online assessments were valid as assessments because the relative rank order of outcomes was largely unchanged when compared with in-person, proctored exam deliveries. It is important to note that the researchers did not find that cheating did not happen, as was incorrectly reported. They implied that it did not matter in terms of outcomes - that good students still did very well, average students did average, and so on. So, their core premise was that, despite whatever cheating may have happened, online, unsecured assessments were still “meaningful.”
To this, Newton starts right off:
I propose an alternative view—that unproctored online exams are not meaningful due to their inherent insecurity.
If people mic drop in academic journals, there was one.
Seriously, go read it.
Newton must have had a few mics because he drops another:
The authors state, “…an important implication of these data is that cheating was perhaps uncommon when students took their online exams”.
This contrasts with studies where students are actually asked whether they cheated during online exams. I have reviewed these with a coauthor and found that many students report cheating, roughly a quarter, and this doubled during lockdown. [The authors] cite our review as "limited" evidence that cheating is increasing. There are certainly limitations with self-report studies of challenging behaviors such as cheating, but these are generally associated with an underestimation of the behavior
Newton is right, of course. The idea that “cheating was perhaps uncommon when students took their online exams” is entirely unsupported. In fact, all available evidence supports the exact opposite conclusion.
Or - what he said. Or - what I said in Issue 229. Same thing.
Also, not for nothing, circle those numbers - roughly a quarter cheated in online exams. And it doubled.
Like I did, Newton also points out that the authors of the original study found grade inflation in the online, unproctored exams - a strong indicator of misconduct. Although the authors actively dismissed that the better results were due to cheating.
Newton says also:
a major contributor to the likelihood of students engaging in cheating is simply the ease with which it can be committed. It is clearly easier to cheat in unproctored online exams than in proctored, in-person exams.
I propose that the most parsimonious interpretation of the supplementary data provided by the authors, in light of the broader literature on the topic, is that cheating increased substantially in unproctored online exams.
Seems obvious. But worth repeating, especially when people are implying otherwise.
Note: In reviewing Newton’s letter and my initial writing on the original research, I noticed I incorrectly identified one of the original authors - Jason C. K. Chan - as “Jason C. K. Chana.” I have no idea where that extra ‘a’ came from. That’s my mistake and I apologize.
International Quick Bites
Reporting in Keyna says that a woman taking a test hid notes and exam answers in her baby’s clothes. I did not watch it, but apparently there is video.
Not to be outdone, a man taking a civil service exam in India was reportedly caught hiding a cell phone in his underwear. Thankfully, there is no video.
In Toronto - yes, that counts as international - a police superintendent has pleaded guilty to helping officers cheat on promotion exams. She texted exam answers to six officers.
In Pakistan, at least 219 people have been flagged for cheating on the Medical and Dental College Admissions Test. Arrests have been made.
From Morocco, police arrested 242 people for cheating on the “standardized national baccalaureate examination.” Police seized, “177 mobile phones, 148 wireless calling cards, 93 headphones, 426 batteries, 16 laptops, and cash suspected of being the payload of these criminal activities.”
In Spain, teenagers are accused of hacking a computer system to get questions for the national baccalaureate exams. They were caught when a teacher realized their scores were suspiciously high.