Widespread social plagiarism is a pressing challenge for protecting academic integrity. Across the pages of this website, we have explored a cascade of possible responses to it. Always at the fountainhead will be the provision of institutional regulations: definitions and guidance for students that is clear, firm and consistent. But regulations need a robust means of detecting their violation – with declared consequences that are also clear and consistent. Yet those violations may still occur. Accordingly, assignments must be designed to resist the many opportunities for outsourcing all or part of what is to be submitted. Finally, during the time in which such an assignment is being carried out, there needs to be learner support: resources and engagements that anticipate the consequences for any loss of agency felt by a student, perhaps through ambiguities and frustrations around the tasks that have been set.
In an ideal realisation of such a strategy cascade, what will have been achieved is an environment in which it is hard to do the wrong thing. Yet the best of achievements would surely be an environment in which students do not want to do the wrong thing – rather than one in which it is simply more difficult to do so. This requires addressing the prevailing culture in which assessment relations are set.
Holistic solutions are those that operate at the level of the whole academic community. If they are ever discussed in the research literature, it is to stress ways of declaring some chosen set of academic integrity principles. Attention will focus on how they are publicised, justified and disseminated, creating a coherence that embeds them in all aspects of institutional life. Checklists have been offered to institutions for how they might reflect on their progress in these respects (Stephens, 2015). A natural approach would be to mobilise the communication network of an institution, sharing with its members a thorough review of the results of such reflections. For instance, the Open University developed a web-based resource that articulated its regulations, but also invited all members of the academic community to interact with it, including various self-testing opportunities. Yet Hunter (2010) reports that engagement was typically casual and browsing, rather than systematic; leading to the recommendation that such initiatives need to be much more skillfully tied to discipline-specific practices.
Beyond technical solutions
However, holistic approaches should not be confined to “technical solutions” (Young et al, 2017), i.e., those that foreground only policies and penalties. There also needs to be deeper consideration of how a university creates communities for students: social structures that replicate the academic values and ethics that staff promote in their own practice. This is more a matter of strategies allowing rules to be lived – rather than simply prescribed and policed.
In the study by Young et al (2017) across 23 US campuses, both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered that related students’ experience of teaching and learning environments to their thinking about academic integrity issues. The authors comment:
…it is evident that technical policies tend to invoke awareness and fear, rather than contemplative thinking about the underlying principles of academic integrity. That is, based on the numerous examples that students provided of organizational regulations combined with an environment of punishment that helped stem instances of academic dishonesty, these organizational strategies are instrumentally effective in curbing academic misconduct but seem to be missing the mark in providing a principled philosophy that morally-grounds students’ senses of academic integrity…. This suggests that for true growth, many students need inspiration in the form of a role model such as a faculty member or supportive peer to acquire a deeper sense of academic integrity.
Solutions of this kind highlight the potential importance of fostering closer relationships between staff and students.
Such relationships certainly may define one aspect of a more inclusive and innovating university community, but there are surely others. Here it may be helpful to draw from the ‘community of practice’ framework now so influential within the social sciences (Wenger, 2011). If this does offer a promising model, and if it is to be followed, it may be best executed at the level of the disciplinary unit – the School or Department with which a student is most closely aligned. The following themes might be structurally significant when cultivating a community of practice in those contexts:
- Place: a well-marked physical (or virtual) location in which shared activities are witnessed and pursued. A familiar material context of décor, furniture and space. Many academic units do not offer students membership of an integrated and bounded space in which their core academic activities are organised.
- Relationships: protecting social bonds between members that serve to sustain important community roles and responsibilities, and which support all aspects of individual development.
- Collaborative practices: projects in which small groups of members coordinate towards goal-defined activities that have an apprenticeship or other creative purpose
- Corporate activities: Regular shared experiences in which trust and mutual understanding is strengthened.
- Shared history: the marking of shared experiences, such as to become a source of personal identity formation and a record of common knowledge
Evidently such an agenda risks appearing naïve and, perhaps, romantic – not least because of the tensions that could be felt on existing traditions of interpersonal exchange. Academics already live in a variety of communities, particularly those relating to their professional concerns, and a serious pursuit of fresh membership patterns would make a substantial call on time – and emotion.
The work of Walter Perry (1999) is often remembered when proposals of this kind are reviewed. Yet doing so sometimes manifests only as an approving nod in the direction of ideals recognised as worthy – his is an agenda more often endorsed than followed. His emphasis on the imperative for grounding the student experience in a strong sense of shared community is widely respected but has less often been attempted. Yet investment in such an enterprise may be the most effective and honest approach to building strength in academic integrity.
