Confidence in seeking help is a quality to be welcomed in university students. While willingness in responding to it is something to be hoped for from student peers and to be expected from university staff. Yet in various sections of this website the seeking of help has been discussed as a problem for institutions. It exists as a challenge because of a pressure on institutions to warrant the work of individual students in terms of legitimately owned achievements. This will apply even to group projects – where what one thing that is thereby ‘owned’ is a student’s effective performance as a collaborator. The present website has covered acknowledgement of difficulties surrounding the management of such warrants. All of which puts pressure on institutions to guide the study practices of students through the construction of suitable integrity regulations.
If this was a simple matter, there would be no need for anxious commentaries, such as the present website. However, a number of circumstances stop it being a simple matter; prominent among them are the following. First, research has shown that many students do not closely scrutinize these regulations. So while the spirit of them may be recognised, the detail may not be widely registered. Second, even if they are consulted, their proscriptions may not be easily understood, or they exist in conflict with other values that students judge take precedence. It would seem to follow that the responsibility for guiding effective practices of help seeking lies with individual academics: institutional regulations are too fragile to work as a singular force of influence. So their regulating announcements must be interpreted and disseminated through the local practices of teaching and support.
Three approaches to social plagiarism
Three sections follow here that each consider how the individual academic might act effectively in those terms. Arguably, they are ordered according to increasing difficulty of implementation. And – as might be expected – in increasing opportunity for making a difference. The first addresses the nature of the assignment regime and how it operates to resist social plagiarism. This might be achieved in part by establishing procedures whereby a student’s trajectory of academic progress can be made more transparent. In this way, unexpected spikes or dips in performance can become the subject of discussion and (hopefully) thereby be detached from any suspicion of outsourcing practices. But addressing assessment should also be matter of designing assignment tasks that would be difficult for third parties to take on. Creativity in this area may then obstruct the use of services such as essay mills, although it may have less impact on inappropriate help arising from more informal input, such as might be found in peers, family, or external tutors.
The second approach reviewed here encourages university staff to take more control of the very help that students are often seeking in relation to assignments. If students can enjoy closer contact with tutors, then this may provide them with the help that they require, and from the most useful source. Moreover, they may be able to take part in more wide-ranging and clarifying conversations – explaining exactly what help it is appropriate to seek for a particular assignment. A student is still free to flout such advice, but it might be expected that this would be less likely in the context of more supportive tutor-student relationships.
Finally, and ideally, conditions might be established whereby students feel part of an authentic academic community and, thereby, internalize the values to which they are exposed. Again, this is not a state of affairs that is easily dictated at the institutional level, although it does amount to creating a ‘culture of practice’ that might be launched (and resourced) at that level. Enriching the student experience in these terms will then depend upon the initiatives of individual staff members through their manifest actions in that culture of academic integrity.
All three of these approaches are relevant to addressing the challenge of managing student help seeking. However, whether any of the actions outlined here are adopted may require more of a bottom up strategy than a top down or prescriptive approach. That is more likely to happen if there is significant consciousness raising among staff regarding the nature of help seeking and the ways in which it can manifest as a ‘problem’. That goal is evidently one purpose of the present website.
