Academic integrity - a dishonest term?
It's not really about integrity, and it's not really about academics. It's about students who cheat on assessments.
The Australian Tertiary Education Quality & Standards Agency (TEQSA) defines academic integrity as…
the expectation that teachers, students, researchers and all members of the academic community act with: honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility.
But when we talk about academic integrity, and when we flag academic integrity concerns, what we really mean is…
somebody is cheating.
And what is cheating? Cheating is not playing by the rules. Trying to win through illicit means. The rules, as cryptically implied by TEQSA’s academic integrity definition, are:
Don’t lie about how you did your work or where you found your information.
Don’t mislead us into believing you’re good enough when you aren’t.
Don’t accept rewards you don’t deserve.
Don’t be mean.
And don’t try to cover it up — you will be found out.
Plenty of folk will argue that there’s far more to academic integrity than not cheating. I respectfully disagree. Academic integrity, in theory, applies to all members of the academic community (students, researchers, teachers, administrators, leaders, etc. etc. etc.) but the conversation and the practices are overwhelmingly about students’ academic misconduct. Which, let’s face it, is about cheating on assessments.
Yes, sometimes this happens without the student’s intent (say they don’t realise they needed to cite something). Yes, we emphasise educative approaches over punitive ones. But it’s still a matter of cheating, because it’s a breach of the rules.
Because we don’t openly admit this, we’ve created an immensely complex, bureaucratic process around academic integrity. We’re terrified that if we let it go unchecked, students will get degrees that misrepresent their abilities, and in turn erode the value of all degrees.
Which is rather idealistic of us, isn’t it?
Who really believes degrees are proof or security of graduates’ capabilities? It’s well established that university study is a cultural signal. It’s well established that university does not ready students for the practical world beyond it. Yes, knowledge is taught there. Yes, certain skills are taught there. But a grading system in which 50% represents a pass is not a grading system that produces much confidence in its graduates’ abilities, especially when we’ve based the grades on values that are not shared off campus (like correct APA referencing and the ability to drag an argument out into 3000 words).
But if academic integrity is not serving us (and it’s not), what do we need instead?
It seems to me that we need to be a bit more honest about what really matters to us.
First of all, if academic integrity really is about student cheating, then we should call it that, and do away with this label that implicates all the employed academic staff who are citation-stuffing, in-fighting, belittling grad students and competing for limited funds.1 In fact, we tacitly endorse this kind of shocking behaviour, because it’s not cheating — in the words of a wise former supervisor of mine, it’s gamesmanship. This behaviour, ugly as it can be, is how we win.
Second, we need to admit to ourselves that academic misconduct isn’t, and never has been, the reason why university degrees are losing value. They’re losing value because we keep trying to sell them as certificates of employability. That is a function they cannot perform — and consequently, they are failing at it.
A tentative proposal
Cheating does matter. But we are terrible at explaining why. The reality is, it’s the context of cheating that determines how much it matters. A marketing graduate who cheated on her assessments? Well, that sounds like she’s a strategic operator. A med school graduate who cheated? Danger — medical malpractice — do not hire.
Cheating matters if the assessed skills themselves matter. Cheating matters if it contravenes the values of society. Cheating matters when competency matters. But university, with its rubric levels of achievement, isn’t about competency.
If we care about competency, we can’t just change the assessment conditions (moar invigilation)! We have to change the assessment standards themselves.
Even so, we shouldn’t throw academic integrity out with the bathwater. Those lovely words honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility do mean something. They are (I hope) academic values, and ones to which we still aspire. But we’re absolutely freaking terrible at teaching values, especially when we don’t embody them.
We need to find a better way of championing these values. They aren’t controversial; nor are they exclusive to the academy. But we don’t tend to reward our students or our staff for embodying them — in fact, the highest rewards go to those who subvert them.
My dream is that members of the academy are supported to understand and access the possibilities of living these values. Everyone will make up their own mind how to live, and many will take the low road.
But let all academics understand that, by choosing this road, there is something they have squandered; something not in their degrees, but in their souls.
A couple of years ago I led a collective grievance which resulted in a senior academic being removed from teaching a subject for bullying, intimidation, abuse of power, and reprisal. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that that person had been a known problem for years.
Twelve months later, I was disappointed and surprised to learn that they were teaching again in the same faculty and engaging in the same behaviours. I suppose if academic integrity means “consistency”, then they’re doing a solid job of it.