Crime and prevention: plagiarism

Student academic misconduct is a serious problem for higher education institutions. The quality of an institution’s awards relies on assessing the student’s academic performance, not their ability to cut and paste, collude, cheat or pay for essays. Misconduct – in all its forms – is an endemic problem: self-report studies indicate that 70 per cent of students engage in misconduct over the course of their studies. With the increasing size and diversity of the student body, staff find misconduct difficult and time-consuming to detect and manage. Prevention has become a key policy response to intractable problems. Crime prevention science provides well formulated, theoretically and empirically based strategies to address complex problems. There are, arguably, two predominant crime prevention approaches: developmental and situational, each predicated on different understandings of the causes of crime. Developmental responses seek to prevent crime by reducing risk factors, increasing protective factors and providing individuals with the necessary skills and knowledge to negotiate their environments. Situational responses postulate that individuals are rational beings, weighing the costs and benefits of behaviours. Prevention strategies are targeted at manipulating the environment to increase costs, reduce benefits and limit opportunities. Both approaches provided the basis for the prevention strategies identified in Griffith University’s holistic institutional framework for promoting academic integrity among students. Developmental strategies assume that students engage in academic misconduct because they lack the required skills to perform at university. Low academic ability is consistently associated with an increased propensity to engage in academic misconduct. Strategies to prevent misconduct focus on educating students and ensuring they understand what constitutes academic misconduct and have the necessary academic skills to manage their assessment tasks. Additionally, at risk students who are struggling with the expectations of a tertiary education need opportunities to learn from their mistakes. Conversely, proponents of situational strategies conceptualise students as rational decision makers, weighing up the costs and benefits of academic misconduct. They make choices based on the effort of cheating, their perceived likelihood of getting caught and the consequences, or lack of consequences, of being caught. Students are time poor and struggle with competing priorities, providing them with justifications for engaging in misconduct. Situational prevention strategies focus on limiting opportunities for students to engage in academic misconduct, increasing the risks and effort, reducing the rewards and removing the excuses. Opportunities can be limited by designing assessment using local case studies, varying assessment items from year to year and instituting robust assignment handling policies. Students’ perceptions of the risk can be increased by the well publicised use of “text matching” software and making students aware of how often staff identify and respond to concerns of academic misconduct. It would be unrealistic to depend solely on prevention strategies to solve the problem of academic misconduct in higher education institutes. Consequently, robust processes for managing identified concerns of student misconduct are essential. These processes need to be designed for ease of use by busy academic staff, provide targeted and proportional responses to misconduct concerns, and ensure that students’ rights are protected. The processes need to be centrally monitored, including an institutional database, to ensure that students who repeatedly violate academic integrity standards are identified, that institutional responses are consistent and transparent, and to facilitate ongoing policy evaluation. Over the past two academic semesters Griffith has trialled a new approach to managing academic misconduct in three sites (approximately 25 per cent of students). A two-tiered approach enables course convenors to provide a developmental response to students with minor, unintentional or excusable violations of academic standards. More serious or repeat violations are dealt with formally by the faculty-based assessment boards. This approach is centrally monitored by an academic integrity manager, who manages the database and provides support and training for academic staff. Griffith’s previous academic misconduct management regime did not facilitate the rigorous collection of institution-wide statistics. Consequently it is almost impossible to compare academic staff use of the new processes with the old processes. However, data from one of the three trial sites, the Faculty of Arts, indicates that in 2006, eight academic misconduct cases were dealt with under the old policy. During the trial period staff dealt with 88 cases of academic misconduct. Academic staff who participated in the trial were generally positive about their experiences. This semester the trial has been extended to include all elements of the university. Griffith has developed and is trialling several new strategies for preventing and managing student misconduct. These evidence based strategies were developed from a review of the relevant literature, a sound theoretical framework, the experience of other institutions, and the formative evaluation of the trial processes. This holistic approach to managing student academic misconduct is showing considerable promise in providing a systemic solution to this serious problem. Anna Stewart is associate professor and head of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and chair of the academic integrity change management group at Griffith University.