During UC San Diego’s Virtual Symposium on “The Threat & Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence and Contract Cheating: Charting a Teaching & Learning Path Forward”, Guy Curtis gave a talk on the Scale of Contract Cheating. This blog post is a follow-up to that talk.

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Text-matching software has made blatant copy-paste plagiarism almost impossible for students to get away with undetected. Contract cheating - the outsourcing of assignments to third parties like essay mills - seems like a...

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, I have been immersed in studying generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and its potential impact (positive and negative) on higher education. Obviously, given my position as the Academic Integrity Office Director at the University of California, San Diego, I am particularly interested in the impact that GenAI has, and will have, on academic integrity and have had to figure out how to answer questions from faculty on how to prevent cheating with GenAI, how to talk to students about academic integrity in the era of GenAI, and how to document cases of integrity violations involving GenAI.

However, those that know me and my writings, understand that I see academic integrity as a teaching and...

This blog post is a written version of my opening remarks for UC San Diego’s Virtual Symposium on “The Threat & Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence and Contract Cheating: Charting a Teaching & Learning Path Forward”. Since this is a post, in part, about GenAI, I decided to try an experiment. I pasted my PPT notes into ChatGPT4 and asked it to generate this blog post for me. The content is mine, but ChatGPT4 gave it a title, put it into sections with headers and connected some of the dots normal in a blog post but not necessarily in PPT notes. I edited it and updated it with some new thoughts and adjusted some things for clarity. Did it save me any time using ChatGPT4? I don't think so. ...

Pandora’s box is open. Generative AI (GenAI) exists and will continue to influence academic and instructional settings. For many, GenAI tools feel indispensable as our expectations for how academic work gets done are concurrently changing. How we choose to monitor, detect, and utilize this tool as individuals and at a university level will determine what will come from this technology. To explore the impact of GenAI (e.g., ChatGPT) on educational structure and learning, I participated on a student panel during UCSD’s Academic Integrity Virtual Symposium. This blog post summarizes my reflections on what me and my fellow panelists (Kharylle Rosario, Nathaniel Mackler, Sukham Sidhu) discussed with each other and our Panel Moderator (Avaneesh Narla).

Understanding the Dissonance Between Student and Instructor Expectations

I recently moderated a student panel for UC San Diego's "Threats & Opportunities" Virtual Symposium. Although a student myself, at the doctoral level, I am also an instructor and I experienced  a dissonance between what the student panelists and I perceive to be the essential tasks of the learning procses. While instructors, including myself, believe that certain tasks, such as brainstorming and summarizing, are vital for developing critical thinking skills, our student panelists argued that these tasks can be repetitive, outdated, and therefore may not capture their attention. This poses a cha...

There’s been a whole host of negative attention surrounding the launch of ChatGPT and the impact that will have on academic integrity and student learning. Certainly ChatGPT is technology that can be misused. It is possible for an enterprising student to simply type a suitable prompt into the chatbot and generate an answer to an assignment that they could then hand in for academic credit. If the student has the correct skills and the assessment details are such that simply generating a solution is enough, then the student may be able to get a passing grade with very little work. But, despite these risks, could ChatGPT ever be considered as being a force for good in the educational system?

Much of the research I’ve been involved with throughout my career has considered how te...

It seems safe to say that successful academic endeavors involving working in groups are valuable experiences for students.  The experiences gained from working in groups, and the skills acquired, are generally accepted as being transferable to future employment and are highly valued by employers (see recent blog post: Group Work is not just for Students).  An idyllic group project would have our students effectively planning, communicating, collaborating, and creating to successfully reach a common goal.

More often than not, it seems, group projects are detested by students for a variety of reasons, some of which are perfectly reasonable.  The most often I hear in my own practice is that one (or more) group members contributed virtually nothing during the process....

Academic integrity is a difficult topic of conversation. While every campus is different, most of employ plenty of individuals who are asked to have one-on-one conversations with students about academic integrity. Instructors may need to ask a student about a suspicious incident. Staff members may need to interview a student about a potential violation. Conduct board representatives may have to discuss incidents with students. These conversations might be in person, by email, in a classroom, during a hearing, etc. Most institutions are very intentional in how they go about ensuring academic integrity – how can we be equally intentional when we converse with individuals involved with or affected by potential acts of academic dishonesty?

I arrived at this topic after considering...

Dr. Timothy Paul Cronan was the 2022 recipient of the ICAI Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an internationally known teacher and researcher who also performs a wide variety of service obligations as a professor in the Information Systems Department. He has served as a faculty member since 1979 and has authored many papers and led conference sessions based on academic integrity. He was an early pioneer in recognizing the impacts of academic integrity. He has also published in numerous high-quality journals in the Information Systems field, was a co-founder of the Teaching Center, and has won numerous prestigious awards related to teaching and mentoring during his career. He has developed academic programs and served in a department leadership capacity.

Although he clearly has ma...

The pandemic served as a catalyst for change around the world and across many different sectors. The educational sector was dramatically affected and required us to rethink our long-standing pedagogies and organizational structures. Just as it seemed we were settling into our new normal, artificial intelligence exploded onto the scene and served to play perhaps even a larger role as a disruptor to our set practices across the educational landscape. The initial panic associated with artificial intelligence is slowly being replaced by an appreciation and understanding of the incredible opportunities we have as educators, researchers, and leaders, to positively impact the educational experience of our students.

Both the pandemic and artificial intelligence have created circumstance...