Hodgkinson et al (2016) have applied a criminologist’s lens to integrity lapses around assessment: they summarise how higher education is responding to this as follows: “University institutional responses tend to comprise a set of definitions of misconduct, some moral persuasion, and perhaps a little training for incoming students combined with the resource-intensive punishment of transgressors”. That is: regulation – induction – punishment.
In the three sections that follow, we dwell on the regulation and punishment issues. Induction is mentioned in passing but practices are wide-ranging and often managed in a local way that is not easily scrutinised from outside. Instead, we also consider a fourth dimension of the institutional response, namely ‘detection’.
The first section concerns the management of regulations that relate to academic integrity, but with special attention to those regulations that concern social plagiarism. It is concluded that there is much variation across HE institutions in how rules and guidance is expressed. In particular, ‘collusion’ is treated in ways that could leave students very uncertain as to what is acceptable and what is an offence. Staff are often found to be similarly uncertain as to how regulations should be interpreted
The second section concerns that manner in which social plagiarism might be detected. Efforts have focussed on the challenge of essay mills – whose products are usually uncontroversially unwelcome. While less insight is available as to how to manage the consequences of more informal assignment help seeking. There are proposed solutions to dealing with ‘borrowed’ material that is not trackable from publicly-available sources. These solutions depend upon manual or AI-inspired text analysis, whereby a given text can be judged as departing significantly from the norms established from a larger corpus of work submitted by that student. Such measures depend upon a well-integrated system of student portfolio development and interrogation. In terms of staff involvement with detection, it is widely acknowledged that staff find this responsibility stressful and that their willingness to follow up cases of possible social plagiarism is limited.
The final section concerns ways of addressing the particular case of essay mills based upon rendering trade with them illegal. The sector has been very supportive of this approach and proposals do exist whereby it might be pursued. However, in practice this approach has gained little momentum and there are a number of obstacles to pursuing it.
