Providing more help

How can institutions work to construct a student experience that is maximally consistent with the norms of academic integrity? Earlier, we represented the structure of relationships in social plagiarism through an onion metaphor. At the core were practices universally condemned – such as opening a contract with an essay mill. Moving towards the outer skin of the onion, the vocabulary of ‘contracts’ seemed less appropriate, and the social relationships involved seemed more innocent. An institution may nevertheless rule that relationships at all layers of the onion should be off limits when an assignment was being prepared. If students do not register the regulations of such a severe regime, then some student outsourcing offences may be based on genuine misunderstanding. In these cases, offending need not be excused, but the first thing institutions should do in ‘addressing the problem’ is review the clarity and the dissemination of its regulations.

That first step is perhaps the easiest. In taking integrity management further, institutions need to understand student motives. Earlier, we urged that social plagiarism should be positioned in relation to the broader practices of student help seeking. When ‘genuine misunderstandings’ of regulations have been ruled out, then ‘addressing the problem’ will mean exploring why and when help seeking draws on those social relationships that students understand are forbidden by their institution. To make progress with this, institutions may need to start from a perspective that was often articulated by individual staff in our project interviews. Namely, that the actions of students who knowingly turn to social plagiarism are more often actions of the desperate than the devious.

If the solution to some assignment problem is sometimes judged ‘devious’, we usually mean that the student did possess the resources necessary to research the assignment through legitimate means – but chose not to recruit them to do so. Therefore sympathy is not appropriate. On the other hand, we associate desperate solutions with a lack of relevant resources or a perceived loss of agency in relation to them. We may not condone, but we are more likely to be sympathetic. In between these two states there can be cases that may leave us ambivalent – if you will, cases of ‘desperation that’s rationalised’. These can involve a student casually blaming their felt loss of agency on judged shortfalls in the teaching and learning environment. This tendency has been discussed in a previous section as students ‘neutralising’ their offence.

In short, an institution has a difficult job to do in managing the problems discussed in these pages. Effective management of its regulations is an early step. Distinguishing the motives of offenders is important, but not easy. A further step would be to reflect on the adequacy of the help that is made available to students tackling assignments. Some aspects of this challenge are reviewed below.

What do students need help with?

This sweeping question will, at any useful level of detail, be answered differently for different academic disciplines. But asking it nevertheless turns out to be useful. In our survey of student assignment experience we gathered many free text comments (many more than expected) that identified a range of student felt needs. Interestingly, these were often different from the concerns that we thought to interrogate with our own Likert-style agree/disagree questions.

Our survey addressed assignment obstacles and so, unsurprisingly, responses dwelt on stress and unease. It may be the case that the majority of students had positive and productive assignment experiences. But it is not a “majority” that resort to social plagiarism. A useful split on these stressed responses is one that distinguishes those problems that were endemic to the routine circumstances of assessment, and those problems where the student could have been helped – or certainly where they felt that they deserved help. In the endemic category were familiar complaints centred on, for example: word limits, the imperative for group work, spacing of deadlines, relative weighting of tasks, poor links to the syllabus, and inconsistency of marking. Such matters may be solved by agile curriculum review rather than providing extended academic support. However, through tone of expression, we do know that they were real sources of frustration. As such, they may still offer routes for students to justify, or ‘neutralise; integrity offences and so their comments on curriculum management still deserve attention.

Of the two largest categories of concern, one addressed inadequate assignment feedback. This, of course, does count as a provision of personalised help – perhaps the most labour-intensive form. In many previous research surveys, assignment feedback has been identified as something that disappoints students, although also a form of advice that they tend to neglect (Winstone et al, 2017). However, that should merely remind us that assignment feedback is a professional practice that deserves continued monitoring – in terms of its scope, personalisation and granularity.

The second major topic of student concern was striking for both its frequency and the vigour of its expression. it identified frustrations aroused by not understanding what an assignment required. This was expressed in two broad ways. The first, and less frequent, referred to student uncertainties about either expository style or appropriate research strategy. However, there were only 8 of these in a sample of 811 comments. For instance, the following were identified as “obstacles”:

A particular coursework assignment relying on scientific writing, when we have never been taught or shown properly how to do it.

Being given a new type of coursework (research proposal) that we had not experienced before

Understanding how a lot of the university resources work eg the library resource

These are concerns that seem well matched the responsibilities of an institution’s library and information services communities who, traditionally, have played a central role in how a university organises academic support (Beisler and Medaille, 2016). However, a far larger category of comment (170/811) referred to students failing to understand what was expected of the assignment:

The biggest obstacle to doing as well as I wanted on coursework assignments was the fact that I spent half of my time trying to work out what the marker wanted.

Assessment guidance was sometimes brief so we asked for more detail, but our lecturers declined to give anymore. Coupled with vague feedback and lack of rubric it seems as though some members of staff didn’t really know what they wanted from us, or at least didn’t communicate this to us at any point before, during, or after the assessment.

…not having a clear structure to follow was also frustrating. I did research to find out, but always found contradicting information in books. What would be useful is for Tutors to provide a more concise skeleton structure of the assignment requirements

…you are expected to interpret the question yourself and find the relevant or interesting articles yourself. As opposed to having the question interpreted and being giving hints and guidance

The last comment anticipates some likely defences that academics might propose. They might argue that a certain degree of ‘constructive ambiguity’ needs to be part of the assessment challenge, part of how confidence with the material is evaluated. Whether a learner has adequately broken free of the sort of instructional scaffolding sought in the above comment is what is being assessed. Nevertheless, help seems needed here, but from where does it come?

Who can provide help, and how?

Support of the kind required by the final comment in the set above might stretch the capacities of even ‘subject specialists’ in library services. Therefore, in considering who can provide such support, ideas may be developed from studies that investigate how students currently are seeking assignment help.

In an interview study with UK undergraduates, Clegg et al (2006) report that students rarely drew on the formal supports of their institutions but: “They had all, with varying degrees of success, created for themselves networks of support which included friends, family members, peers and combinations of university staff”. The support required seemed to be course or module related; these being findings that suggested “a model of educational support, which focuses on the challenges of the pedagogic, not the therapeutic…. Students appear to accept, and indeed pride themselves on being able to cope with, the exigencies of life. What is needed are mainstream pedagogic practices that will enable them to have productive encounters with the challenging realities of learning”.

Arguably, universities have been diligent in furnishing that more “therapeutic” support, while their approach to “pedagogic support” may often have been to concentrated on library services alone. Yet In a survey study of 222 US undergraduates, Beisler and Medaille (2016) find that students rarely get help from library staff – a finding endorsed by a number of other studies. Students most commonly received it from peers and family members, usually seeking that help after they had already drafted their assignments. Of course, such practices risk violating some institution’s collusion regulations; nevertheless peers can be a potent source of support, including for offering more empathic advice on assignments. However, Pillai (2010) found that students may use such informal support less as a positive choice and more as a “result of uncertainty or anxiety about disclosing study difficulties in a more formal setting”.

This last observation is a reminder that students may differ in the ease with which they go about seeking support. Karabenick and Dembo (2011) have summarised the various factors that shape effective help seeking, approaching it as a disposition that varies across individuals, and one which often needs to be teased out. Arco-Tirado (2019) have described an intervention to build confidence of this kind in 102 first year UK students. It consisted of 20 highly structured individual weekly tutoring sessions delivered by senior and doctoral students. The results showed encouraging improvements in help seeking assurance.

There needs to be deeper discussion of how academic staff can provide economic (and convivial) support for study more generally, but assignment demands in particular. It may be that campus surgeries of the kind developed for Mathematics could provide a model for other subjects. Of course, there is an existing practice that is supposedly well developed for such purposes, namely academic ‘office hours’. Many of the staff in our own research interviews commented that these were not always reliably provided and, where they were, student attendance was often infrequent (the two observations may be related). But this may reflect the often haphazard manner in which these opportunities are organised. It is surprising that the now highly digitised nature of campus communications has not generated a practice whereby staff can advertise their office hours (which often are variable) online, and even incorporate a booking system. Students’ temptation to neutralise their integrity offences by invoking staff unavailability might be well addressed that way – with relatively little change to (assumed) current practice.