Our own project: Methods

Our own investigation of social plagiarism was pursued in two universities. There are clear advantages in approaching two sites. First, greater generalisability can be claimed for findings. Second, both sites can benefit from raised awareness of those attitudes, anxieties, and practices surrounding help-seeking. Both sites can also benefit from sharing local management solutions

Documentary sources and methods

The project endeavoured to review research and academic commentary around the tensions that arise for student help seeking. Special attention was paid to the higher education sector. Sources were the following:

(1) The research literature

There is a large volume of research and theory relating to help seeking published in the literature of Psychology and Educational Studies. This was subject to critical review and summary.

(2) The grey literature

Matters relating to plagiarism and, in particular, student outsourcing of assignment tasks have been widely discussed on social media and in other online contexts. These have been searched and systematised for relevance to academic students and colleagues

(3) Institutional regulations

Universities and Schools within them publish advice, guidance and rules as to legitimate practice in relation to the conduct of assessment tasks. Insofar as these documents are accessible online, they have been sampled by filtered internet searching.

(4) Commercial services

A broad sample of web-based help offering services was scrutinised. This included 100 randomly selected ‘essay mill’ sites extracted from a google search. These were considered in order to represent business practices, as well as their promotional rhetoric

The student voice

The project explored ways in which students experienced assessment practices, considering how they might be a source of stress that led to lapses of academic integrity. Also, we explored how students perceived academic models of good practice around collaboration and collusion.

(1) Survey.

An online survey was designed to explore students’ experience of assignment practices. It was advertised as available during May and June of 2018. Posters were widely displayed on the campus. A Moodle banner was designed with a direct link to the survey. Contacts in individual Schools were requested to email students with links to the survey. Publicity was easier to organise in Nottingham than in Birmingham: accordingly, the response rate was much higher at the Nottingham site. Students on the Nottingham China and Malaysian campuses were also alerted to the survey via Moodle. However, response levels were small from these sites and, accordingly, this data will not be reported.

The survey was designed to be compatible with mobile devices and presented question formats that were judged to be accessible and not time consuming to answer. Considerable pilot testing of these questions took place. Responding was anonymous – although an email was required if respondents wished to be entered for small motivational rewards that were available on a lottery basis for completed surveys. Assurance was given that these addresses would not be related to survey answers. The instrument can be viewed here. The structure was Likert-style questions (see below) with text boxes for open commentary

After basic demographic information, it required three sets of questions to be answered as responses to assertions on 5-point Likert scales. All questions referred to the experience of coursework during that academic year. Set 1 concerned perception of the assignment context and Set 2 concerned perception of how easily assignment tasks were completed. All assertions were judged on an “always” to “never” scale. A free text comment box was attached to both Sets 1 and 2. The third set of assertions concerned “fair assignment practice” and more directly addressed matters relating to academic integrity.

(2) Anonymous comment board

The survey described above included an invitation to link to a free text writing space where comments relating to fair assessment practice could be written. It was hoped that this would allow students to comment on their departure from expected assessment practice and/or share their judgement as to how this was managed by others. The source of any comment written at this site could not be traced and this was made clear. Comments were captured for analysis but not made visible on the page once a user had submitted or closed the page. The following header was used as invitation to write:

Universities have little idea how much unfair practice takes place or what form it takes. But they want to understand it. Few students would discuss their own unfair practices (or even that of others) in a survey, particularly if they give an email address for the prize lottery! However, you may still have views or experiences about unfair assignment practices that relate to yourself or to people you know. If you are willing to share them, we have an anonymous webpage for this. Your input about unfair practices, or any other aspect of these questions, is very welcome!

(3) Focus group discussions

Seven groups of undergraduate students were recruited from advertising. The discussion were held in quiet campus spaces. Participants were not known to each other. Normal procedures of informed consent were followed as approved by an institutional Ethics Committee. The scaffold for the conversation is here.