In this week’s blog post, I want to highlight a worthy opinion published in the Gulf News by Dr. Jamal Sanad Al Suwaidi. 

Dr. Al-Suwaidi is a Nobel Prize nominated intellectual leader based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) whose most recent opinion piece lamented the problem of fake degrees in the Gulf region. Dr. Al-Swaidi accurately notes that the proliferation of fake degrees “reflects a serious moral crisis” created, in part, by the obsession that a degree (ra...

The International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating is due to run for the fourth time on Wednesday 16 October 2019. It’s an event that I feel is needed now as much as ever.

The International Day of Action, an International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) initiative, brings together universities, educational establishments, staff and students from around the world to discuss contract cheating and the benefits of working with integrity. I’ve been involved with the International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating since it first ran in 2016. Back then, I was working at Coventry University with Dr Irene Glendinning. We r...

When I visited Nanyang Technological University in Singapore a few years ago, I was sufficiently fortunate to discuss academic integrity with several people from across campus - including a group of graduate students. I distinctly remember my meeting with the graduate students because while we were talking about academic integrity, their struggles and their feedback on teaching, one graduate student said to me “we focus too much on the technicalities of citation and not enough on the spirit of citation”.

I loved this phrase because if we are concerned about students writing with integrity, how they cite doesn’t matter, but why and when they cite, does. Of all of my memories of writing as a psychology...

I recently had the good fortune of giving a keynote at the 20th anniversary conference of the National College Testing Association (NCTA). The conference is attended by people who work in educational test centers on school, college or university campuses or in independent testing centers, as well as those who work in the broader testing industry. 

I was there, of course, to talk academic integrity. And I was surprised at how resonate the message was with the attendees.To be sure, testing centers were created to protect the integrity of exams and therefore ...

Have you ever started a new job and thought “I wonder what they expect of me?”, “how will they evaluate my performance?” or “what does it take to be successful here?” Or, perhaps you have tried to play a board or card game with others only to realize that you all play by different rules so the official game rules must serve as the official arbitrar of the disagreement?

When we begin anything, it is natural to want to understand and digest the rules of the particular situation, as well as be on the same page as others. Not just the others with whom you might be competing (to win the game, to get the promotion) but the others who will be evaluating your performance and dolling out praise (or crit...

We know that student leadership can shape academic integrity cultures on our campuses, and we’ve known this for a while. Much of this knowledge has been gleaned from the research and writings of Don McCabe, the founder of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI). Don, best known for studying the impact of honor codes on cheating, repeatedly found since 1993 that students can influence their peers’ perceptions of cheating but this influence is most likely within the honor code context, or at least schools with existing academic integrity cultures. Whil...

I love reading about educators who are continually trying to improve the process and the environment for teaching and learning. It is inspiring and refreshing, I think especially for those of us who more often deal with the aftermath of teaching or learning gone awry. When teaching goes awry, students become frustrated, disempowered, or angry and in response, may act out bad choices implemented in an attempt to right what they see as a wrong. When learning goes awry, faculty become disenchanted, disheartened or tired and in response, may stop trying to reach their students. Neither of these scenarios serve our educational missions well. 

So, when I hear about nuggets of good teaching and learning bein...

The end of a semester signifies the end of a learning experience. How do you describe the experience of sharing and receiving knowledge? When done well, faculty can be proud of facilitating an exchange of ideas that leave students with new perspectives, skills, and confidence. When the semester doesn’t go as planned, faculty are left to examine what went wrong. Often, these thoughts lead to changes in practice and policy to strengthen our courses.

Where does academic misconduct fit? Dealing with violations of academic integrity forces  reflection:

If you do not have google alerts set up to send you pieces on academic misconduct, academic cheating or academic integrity, you might have missed the latest news on the contract cheating front. Legislation being drafted in Australia is set to criminalize the business of contract cheating providers - those people and companies set up to provide students with a way out of doing their own work in college. (I and others have talked about contract cheating several times in this blog, so I won't get into the nitty-gritty details of contract cheating here. But I do invite you to go back through the blog to see any posts you might have missed.)

In theory, this sounds like a great idea. In fact, I have been advocating for making contract cheating providers illegal for a while and ICAI...

If Wikipedia is to be trusted (I know, a risky proposition!), the month of July ushers in several celebrations of independence in countries around the world, from Algeria to Venezuela (not quite A to Z). This week seems especially busy with Algeria (July 5th), Belarus (July 3), Burundi (July 1), Canada (July 1), Cape Verde (July 5), Comoros (July 6), Malawi (July 6), Rwanda (July 1), Somalia (July 1), United States (July 4), and Venezuela (July 5) all celebrating independence.

The celebration of independence is, at its core, a celebration of fairness and respect - two of our academic integrity fundamental values. Fairness, in the sense that independence recognizes tha...