All of us involved in education are rightfully alarmed at the contract cheating industry’s growth. In our educational institutions, we hopefully seek out different opportunities to promote academic integrity to our varied stakeholders - particularly our students – and communicate how vital it is to uphold integrity, regardless of the challenges. Today, challenges posed by contract cheating, particularly, make it even more critical that we are vocal about where we stand.

Such reasons are central to why Deree -The American College of Greece, has participated in the International Day of Action against Contract Cheating (IDoA) for the last 3 years. Like most participating institutions in 2016, we too reli...

The 27th Annual International Center for Academic Integrity Conference took place March 8 to 10 in New Orleans.  I, along with my colleague Arturo Becerra, presented on our experience of creating a magazine about academic integrity at Universidad Panamericana (UP ) in Mexico City and expanding this magazine beyond UP to the Latin American landscape.

I work for the  Center for Innovation in Education (CIE) at UP. CIE has the mission of enhancing the teaching talent of faculty by innovating in learning environments. It is a place where ...

In my ICAI 2019 conference presentation, “Improv(ing) Course Design: A Riff on Experiential Learning and Academic Integrity,” I shared the research of James Lang, L. Dee Fink, John Biggs and Catherine Tang, Lion Gardiner, and Tricia Bertram Gallant as underpinning for my redesign experiments with EN 455, an Advanced Studies in Writing course at The University of Alabama. I call my...

The higher education is sector is talking about contract cheating. When a student replaces themselves with a third party for the purposes of assessment, they stand to gain qualifications that they don’t deserve. They are also devaluing the qualifications for everyone around them.

My session at the 2019 International Center for Academic Integrity annual conference - Contract Cheating in the Gig Economy - focused on how the contract cheating industry has been changing (for a copy of this presentation. The industry has become a complex beast, fueled by low-cost writing labour completing the assessments that we would expect students to complete.

When Robert Clarke and I first introduced the term contract cheating in 2006, we focused on how students were misusing outs...

ICAI just held its 27th annual conference. This was the 14th conference I’ve attended and one of the best I’ve attended in recent years. The diversity of attendees in terms of geography (participants from 6 continents!), institution type (For-Profits, NGOs, like-minded associations, Secondary Schools to Higher Education), and positions (students and professionals) enriched our thinking. The diversity in sessions enhanced our knowledge and understanding. And the proactive, collaborative and activist tone emboldened our belief that we can make a difference - with our collected efforts, we can make cheating the exception and integrity the norm.

For those who couldn’t attend, I wanted to share my key tak...

University of Wollongong in Dubai has been participating in the International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating consistently since its inception more than three years ago.

Dr Zeenath Reza Khan, Assistant Professor and Head of Integrity in Academic and Beyond Research & Learning Forum at the university began researching in the area in 2005 and successfully completed a PhD thesis in 2014. When ICAI announced the first International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating, Dr Khan along with her cohort of student volunteers joined in and collectively spread the word on campus and had a great response to the “whiteboard declarations” (see Zeenath's twitter feed for examples!). In fact, by the...

This post is part of  my virtual or information “hoarding” series. As I clear out the tabs in my web browser, I will share with you what I learned and how it can enhance our thinking and practice of academic integrity.

Today, my post is focused on some research about teaching and learning. I am heartened to see growing research avenues that focus on improving teaching and learning, particularly in this era of the 21st century in which technological advances, changes to the educational system, societal needs and employer demands beg for a new kind of kn...

To help students understand when they may be breaking the rules and also to avoid getting scammed by “pay-to-pass” companies, the University of Calgary has developed a new web resource called “What you need to know about paying for academic support”. The resource highlights unscrupulous practices that these “pay-to-pass” (e.g. tutoring; file sharing) companies use to convince students to pay for their services and/or work for them. This post is focused on the behaviors students should look out for if they’re thinking about working for such companies:....

I remember the time when I first came across the issue of academic integrity. It was October 2010 at the IPPHEAE project (Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education across Europe) kick-off meeting. Mendel University in Brno was invited to share its experience with the development of a plagiarism detection tool. At that meeting, I realized that the concept was much more complex than just plagiarism and that UK universities were dealing with issues that Czech universities were not even aware of.

The project identified huge gaps in institutional an...

I feel inundated every day with news, articles, and opinion pieces written on integrity, teaching and learning, or ethics. Directly or indirectly, these pieces all resonate with my view that academic integrity must be framed as a teaching and learning issue, not a student conduct problem. Yet I become overwhelmed because each piece may only stimulate a fragment of a thought, a germ of an idea, or a vague feeling that “I should bookmark this in case I need it for the future.”

I have so many bookmarks and so many tabs open that I feel like an information hoarder. Perhaps I could be the start of  new reality TV show - Virtual Hoarders - but instead of coming into my house to clean it out, they enter ...