Outside-in explanations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
However, explanations that start from the context<\/em> rather than the person, can present institutions with similarly intractable problems. For example, institutions can do little to influence cultural forces such as students\u2019 experiencing an overbearing pressure to succeed in a competitive and expensive education system \u2013 the kind of causal dynamic criminologists address through \u2018strain\u2019 theorising (Smith et al, 2013<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem with that sort of example – as with inside-out dispositional examples – is that such causal accounts can leave institutions relatively helpless in repairing the problem. An individual\u2019s psychological profile is not easily recalibrated. Neither is it easy for institutions to counter the oppressive impact on student experience of prevailing cultural or political forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, \u2018outside\u2019 factors that encourage offending do not only arise from within the overarching culture in which education is embedded. Institutions themselves create cultures. Therefore, research could scrutinise these local<\/em> academic contexts, classifying and quantifying their character. Such description could then be co-related to the occurrence of academic offences and, finally, any \u2018risk factors\u2019 identified might be dealt with. Moreover, such findings may turn out to generalise and so be applicable across institutions. This is a viable approach although often less revealing that expected. Mainly because factors in any complex cultural setting may not act in a direct or mechanical fashion. Their influence may arise from their \u2018chemistry\u2019 \u2013 the interactions between them. So quite sophisticated statistical modelling of such interdependencies can therefore be required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both approaches sketched above explore why students offend by systematising the variables supposedly implicated: that is, factors emanating from either \u2018inside\u2019 or \u2018outside\u2019 the individual. Researchers will often strive for objectivity or detachment in this effort. However, this may constrain their interpretations. Because actors, events and environments may not be understood in the same way by students as they are perceived, measured and classified by researchers looking on. Therefore, the most useful approach may be to consider how offending students do<\/em> report understanding their context and how they interpret their own actions within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, when challenged on an offence such as social plagiarism, what sense-making can students invoke? One approach towards justifying a claimed offence is by supposing that it has, elsewhere, become normalised action \u2013 as in the familiar appeal: \u2018but everybody\u2019s doing it<\/em>\u2019. For example, Rettinger and Kramer (2009<\/a>) found from surveys and from responses to integrity vignettes that \u201cobserving others cheating was strongly correlated with one\u2019s own cheating behaviors<\/em>.\u201d That is, some students were judging cheating as \u2018normal\u2019 \u2013 and thereby acceptable \u2013 because it was witnessed as widespread in their own community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Evidently, institutions can confront this by attempting to control the scale of visible offending in their communities. However, examples have been given in these pages of normalising forces that are less easy to influence or accommodate. This is because they exist in that wider<\/em> culture beyond the institutional community. Ghostwriting is an example: it might be viewed as a kind of social plagiarism. Yet its acceptability and ubiquity suggest a culturally legitimate practice, thereby rendering assignment<\/em> outsourcing \u2018normal\u2019 or respectable. Other cultural practices will normalise social plagiarism in more subtle or indirect ways. We have identified some of them elsewhere on these pages. For instance: the forces of commodification, the fluid nature of exchanges in digital media, and the \u2018learning-is-social<\/em>\u2019 imperative from educational theory. Students\u2019 awareness of these developments as \u2018normal\u2019 in the wider culture may lower the threshold for contemplating a practice like social plagiarism. Because they are trends that seem to complement or overlap it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While such justifying-through-normalisation may underpin some integrity offences, it may not always be a process explicitly recognised or articulated by those offending. Indeed, these examples may belong to a whole family of cultural trends whose influence rarely prompts conscious reflection. It may be for social science to highlight these possible associations and, then, for integrity managers to consider how they can deflect their influence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Normalisation arises from reading the context and judging that your apparently offending practice actually conforms to what others are doing. While neutralisation arises from reading the context and judging that the context is flawed in ways that warrant the apparently offending practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If there are rationalisations for integrity offences that do<\/em> enter conscious reflection, students may not wish to self-report such matters to researchers. Amigud and Lancaster (2019<\/a>) worked around this embarrassment by classifying the reasoning revealed by student customers within their purchasing messages placed on ten contract cheating websites. Five ways of explaining the need to purchase help were given: (my) academic aptitude, perseverance, personal issues, competing objectives, and self-discipline. However, because students were addressing contract authors unaware of that students\u2019 institutional context, these reflections may have favoured a strong inside-out rationalising; focussing on constraints of personal character or circumstance. In other words, explanations that may still risk leaving institutions stranded confronting a gloomy determinism of personality types and traits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If a valid method of questioning could be found, students\u2019 attempts to make sense of their offending actions might be more revealing. Particularly those rationalisations where offenders admit their actions were wrong, but they still respect the moral code that was violated. Understanding this position can help institutional regulators, because rationalisations are often constructed from something felt as troublesome about the particular situation in which the offender acted. Rationalising will typically invoke \u2018local\u2019 features of the educational environment \u2013 forces that somehow overwhelmed the moral code. Institutions could then hope to reconfigure those circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is this pattern of reasoning that has come to be described by criminologists as \u2018neutralisation\u2019. This derives from a theory proposed by Sykes and Matza (1957<\/a>) to systematise the rationalisations of criminal offenders. Neutralising was expressed in terms of five justifying moves offenders might commonly make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This taxonomy has been successfully applied to cases of secondary school cheating (Zito and McQuillan, 2010<\/a>), but also to undergraduates. LaBeff et al (1990<\/a>) found students\u2019 sense-making of their offences fitted three of the above categories. The most common was #1, then #4 and then #5. Condemning in #4 was directed at various shortcomings in the educational provision. While the higher loyalties students invoked were those that other researchers identify (e.g. Ashworth et al, 1997<\/a>) \u2013 namely, friendship, interpersonal trust and effective learning. It does seem that #2 and #3 from this list could be less likely, although McCabe (1992<\/a>) has reported occasional cases of both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research exploring such student reasoning often uses survey methods. Surveys tend to assume that researcher and informant share the same framework for understanding the issue. Therefore, release from this constraint might be sought through interviews or focus groups. These allow for negotiation<\/em> of understandings and thus may give greater confidence when interpreting participant offences. Unfortunately, those methods typically mean participant samples must be small. Moreover, a necessary \u2018focus\u2019<\/em> (say, on assignment offences), coupled with felt pressure to contribute, may prompt participants to invent perspectives or explanations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A still more usefully indirect way of exploring causal processes is to seek students\u2019 critical reflection on their experience of doing assignments \u2013 with no prompting reference to possible offences. Because it is tension or disturbance within those experiences that creates the conditions that tempt violation of regulations. In neutralisation terms, such troublesome experiences provide the raw material for #4 above \u2013 that is, the condemnations of those very individuals (institutional managers or assignment tutors) that condemn the students’ offence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our own research we issued a survey to students at two universities (see our page on \u2018methods<\/a>\u2019): it included invitations to make (anonymous) free text comments on recent assignment experience. 811 students made such comments and, on analysing these, we reliably detected the following seven themes (ranked here in order of the percentage of that sample that referred to each).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Table provides a short definition for each thematic label. It is sobering that the issues raised by students in these free text comments went beyond those we designed ourselves in \u2018strongly agree \/ strongly disagree\u2019 questionnaire formats. This reinforces the case for not assuming an overlap in student\/researcher perspectives. Taken as a whole, the comments that underpin these categories reflect what Harris et al (2018<\/a>) refer to as a \u201closs of agency\u201d on the part of students. We infer that, in some cases, this becomes a stressful predicament and one that can lead to violating assessment expectations. As Harris et al express it: student behaviour becomes more ego-protective than growth-oriented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A loss of agency could be expressed in relation to personal \u2018inside\u2019 factors – such as those exemplified by #1 above, that is cognitive or motivational shortcomings, or in relation to personal \u2018outside\u2019 factors, such as illustrated by #7. Many comments raised in #2 – #6 referred to familiar perceived shortcomings in course delivery. They echoed examples solicited by Beasley (2014<\/a>) to a survey item questioning \u201cWhat would have stopped you\u2026\u201d \u2013 students deflecting blame for their misdeed towards teaching and resource. It may be unexpected that such a large number of comments were made but perhaps it is striking that they were often made very firmly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Poor\/useless feedback, lack of direction, not being told exactly what we were doing. We had an hour long lecture on our coursework and throughout the whole thing they never actually told us what we were doing for our coursework. When we were eventually told it was a literature review it was just assumed that we knew what a literature review was.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Often we were given only about a week or so to do some quite difficult assignments. This would have been manageable if we didn’t also have a few other assignments from other modules due in around the same time. Perhaps module organisers could talk to each other and try to plan to space deadlines apart or give us more time if we have a lot due in at the same time, because we often simply don’t have enough time to do everything to the best of our ability, especially if we would like not to be working every waking hour of the day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I don’t always find tutors approachable and when I have they often seem dismissive so consequently I tend not to ask and try to find my own solutions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 21% of the 811 students making comments referred to an issue of understanding what they were expected to do in an assignment (#3). This is a less frequently acknowledged problem but was one often forcefully expressed. Therefore, it illustrated the very kind of frustration, sense of victimhood, and loss of agency that might easily neutralise an integrity offence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vague instructions leaving you unsure of what was required of your coursework piece.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n There was no advice to what a university-level essay should look like. Throughout all my coursework except creative writing, I was really unsure what was expected and how it differed from A Level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n When the assignment details were confusing, or the tutor was not able to explain the details of the task with enough clarity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Understanding exactly what was required and ensuring I had met the brief, as opposed to working hard but not quite doing what the coursework required.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In this project, comments of the kind shared in our survey coupled with focus group conversations have highlighted two themes that feel significant for shaping integrity offences. The first is recurring reference to the importance of fairness<\/em>. The second is the possibility of being felt a \u2018victim\u2019<\/em> of assignment design or practice. While students might freely endorse the need for integrity regulations and even welcome the form that they take, they represent only one moral code that students might feel obligations towards. Therefore, in understanding and repairing the conditions for offending, this tension between moral codes deserves to be recognised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Student cheating is a topic sometimes addressed in the literature of criminology. Perhaps an understanding of what motivates violating the law of the land might also help us understand what motivates violation of academic integrity. However, asking why someone commits a crime is a question that can be answered in different ways. For those whose … Continue reading “Neutralising the offence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":39,"menu_order":56,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/122"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/122\/revisions\/899"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/deveurope.com\/share\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Students explaining themselves: \u2018normalisation\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Students explaining themselves: \u2018neutralisation\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Loss of agency in assessment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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