This website addresses student help seeking. Not in terms of library services and office hours, but looking towards a darker side: such as plagiarism, collusion and matters of assessment propriety. The present page provides a less mechanical summary than our ‘General Conclusions’, articulating instead the issues that should be of wide concern to university staff members.
Why you should engage?
A recent focal point for discussing the darker side of help seeking has been the existence of ‘essay mills’ (Section 2.3), Yet it may be unhelpful if matters of academic integrity are dominated by attention to this industry. The phrase ‘essay mill’ can accidentally exclude some colleagues from an important and wider conversation – simply because those colleagues do not set essays. One reason these services still require everyone’s attention is that their repertoire has evolved far beyond the essay (2.4). A further risk of a preoccupation with these mills is that we do not notice the wider ‘industry’ of both professional and casual help-giving that exists on their margins (2.1). Help of this kind can be recruited for all categories of assignment and, therefore, to confront this external help giving, it is important for all staff to reflect on the terms in which the assignments they set are designed, regulated, and assessed.
Beyond text plagiarism
It is widely observed that the concept ‘plagiarism’ defies easy definition. Critics of the concept (e.g., Howard, 2000) wonder how the community can become so animated about a practice that it accepts cannot be properly defined. Yet many concepts become secure by being well understood through their iconic or prototypical examples (i.e., “yes, but we know it when we see it!”), while still being characterised by blurred boundaries and disputes around meaning (cf. elsewhere in Education: ‘bullying’ and ‘intelligence’). Moreover, sceptics do freely admit that there is an integrity issue (“I’m mad when I discover that a paper has been ghostwritten” op cit. p 487). But their proposals to replace ‘plagiarism’ with ‘fraud’ merely deflects the slippery identity of the practice onto a different term.
Accordingly, the frequently contested status of plagiarism offences remains troublesome for the sector. It would be extremely complacent to suppose that text-matching services can nail the problem. Failing to attribute the origin of material submitted as if it was one’s own (i.e., ‘plagiarism’ broadly defined) is a circumstance that goes beyond such solutions as the ones provided by Turnitin. Even the ‘text plagiarism’ that those tools aim to detect is an authoring practice that comes in a range of challenging forms – such as patchwriting or shallow paraphrasing (2.7). However, our concern on this website has been with a family of plagiarism practices that are defined by their ‘social’ nature (1.1). In these cases, the borrowed but unattributed ‘material’ that is submitted for assessment is material that can be more ephemeral in nature. Socially-mediated assignment help can sometimes be textual (although the source may be private and hidden) but it can also be more conversational in form. It may even arise from tutorial interactions with artificial intelligence (2.7). What this family of plagiarism possibilities have in common is the mediation of one or more other persons. For example, a purchased essay is a social contract because it is founded on a socially negotiated task. Evidently there are other help-giving relationships where the partnership runs deeper than that achieved with a contract author. The fact that such ‘depth’ can be so variable is another one of the reasons evaluating these cases can be so troublesome.
Undocumented help is widespread
Professional or contracted help with assignments is one circumstance that may require adjudicating in relation to social plagiarism. However, university staff should remember that study is a highly social experience, and rarely the solitary immersion depicted in popular images (2.2). Often, being a student happens at an age of high sociability, institutions actively foster communities, students are vigorous users of social media, and their family and friends will define a well-established network of social support. Unsurprisingly, this support will often be mobilised at times of assessment pressure (2.6). The challenge for institutions and their academic staff is to develop (and make visible) a policy clarifying the boundaries of legitimacy for such extra-curricular support.
Agents of social plagiarism are persuasive
Websites that offer assignment production services are far more widespread than is often realised (3.3). They skillfully deploy social media to reach customers (2.3) and apply sophisticated marketing messages to seduce interest (2.3). Although their products typically fall short of their promises, mystery shopping research nevertheless indicates that they are usually of passable standard (3.4). More informal assignment help from other sources may be persuasive in a different spirit. Family and friends may feel that the responsibility to provide help with assignments should be prioritised over any principles of academic integrity. Student peers may normalise help giving through an awareness of how, at other times, universities (and employers) advocate the importance of collaboration. Staff must confront uncertainty as to where lines of acceptable support get drawn.
“Everyone’s doing it”
Research confirms that a local culture of frequent cheating around assignments is a predictor of both student attitude and student practices. However, the forces that shift individuals’ integrity thresholds are not entirely local: they may be more widely distributed in the overarching culture of everyday life. For instance, if educational practice increasingly frames students as ‘consumers’ then it may be more likely that assignments are viewed in commodity terms (5.3). Or if successful public figures are known to employ others to enliven their speeches, write their novels, or shape their autobiographies … then recruiting someone to ghost an assignment is not such a culturally eccentric act (5.4). When so many products of other people’s creative activity are exchanged online, then social media may become a natural resource for trading academic material (5.5). Finally, students will have had applied to them various modern theories regarding good educational practice. They may have registered that this involves an imperative for learning through collaboration and an understanding of knowledge as something distributed across both people and technologies (5.6). Against such a background of educational and psychological theory it may seem easier to recruit material prepared by others into one’s own assignment compositions.
Finding reasons for integrity offences
Accordingly, reasons for integrity offences are not to be found in one place. This systemic problem is best thought of as a chemistry of four forces. So, misconduct is shaped by societal (macro), institutional, organisational (meso), or internal (micro) factors. Internal factors cast the student in ‘bad apple’ terms. Certainly, misconduct can often arise as a human (if reluctant) response to intermittent feelings of unusual life pressure. But the dysfunctional actor is, alone, a limited form of explanation. A more complete account of misconduct will be one that recognises the rationalisations that can, when pressure demands it, be invoked by students to ‘neutralise’ an act that they do understand is a misdemeanour (5.7). These meso-level factors reside in practices maintained at the local (‘organisational’) level, or at the institutional level of the HE sector. So, when students are asked to explain what they felt were the obstacles to doing well in assignments, they often refer to obstructive aspects of the teaching and learning environment (5.7). Such latent dissatisfaction can be mobilised to neutralise an offence. The obstacles to study perceived by students therefore need to be recognised by staff – if staff are to undermine the opportunities that such felt loss of agency offers for neutralising acts of plagiarism. Finally, explanations of misconduct also need to look towards shifting cultural trends operating at the societal level (5.1)
How to act?
Action is something needing to be organised at both institutional and individual levels. Institutions will publish regulations and guidelines that intend to manage matters of assignment integrity. Sadly, research suggests these frameworks are not always scrutinised by students and, when they are, they are not always understood in the ways intended (4.2). Moreover, staff often claim that offences of the kind discussed here as social plagiarism are far more frequent than the number of those that are reported (4.2). This may, in part, be a consequence of the stress that staff claim when confronting possible offences of this kind. This challenge of detection will necessarily remain in the hands of individual staff members, as institutions are not able to provide tools for detecting social plagiarism that complement those available for text plagiarism (4.3).
Individual staff members can construct their own strategies. They may feel most able to act in terms of setting assignments that are simply more resistant to help by third parties. There are designs that offer some potential of this kind (6.2). In addition, social plagiarism is an appeal to others for help; therefore, one way in which staff can respond is to be more active in their own provision of help (6.3). This may sometimes need to be highly specific to individual assignments. But it may also be more generic – in terms of the responsibilities adopted by personal tutors. In all such strategies, workload pressure is a significant obstacle. Although there may be opportunities for optimising staff contact through more innovative use of digital tools and personal technologies.
Ideal worlds
The management of academic misconduct is a costly process. Solutions appropriate to the problem of social plagiarism discussed here are particularly costly in terms of staff time invested in assessment-related activity. Even where, independently of this motive, they are worthy educational practices, they may not fit comfortably with the pressure on academics to be productive in other arena. An ideal higher educational world would be one in which students were led towards not wanting to offend – rather than led towards situations where it was made less possible to offend. This is a matter of addressing the status of the academic culture that is offered to students: doing more to create for them a sense of authentic participation in an academic community (6.4). This may entail strengthening forms of legitimate participation, but also finding ways in which the products of study can be critiqued, valued and circulated with the same care that is expected more widely in academic life. With a shared, community-decided model of offence, those students may thereby develop greater confidence and certainty in the authority of their creative work but also a more mature sense of responsibility and transparency towards peers and tutors in the academic community.