Student cheating is always with us – as are university responses, using either adversarial (assessment security) or cooperative (awareness and honour codes) approaches.
Cath Ellis (Uni Sydney) and Kane Murdoch (Macquarie U) suggest using both. “The challenge that remains,” they argue in a new paper “is how to get the balance right.”
“Higher education institutions need to know when to use which approach and with whom.”
The researchers propose that the best way to address cheating is to use “responsive regulation” a concept developed in the 1990s, which they argue provides a useful approach to enforcement of assessment security, but doesn’t prescribe when to punish vs when to persuade.
Ellis and Murdoch create a pyramid model to resolve that issue, with a hierarchy of escalating responses to cheating, matched to levels of student “willingness and ability to do the work of learning.” At the base are those who are and will. Higher up are others who at various times and in various ways can’t and at the top others who won’t.
The task is to calibrate penalties so that students at the apex of evil (sorry) respond by moving to the lower levels.
“Ultimately, the problem higher education institutions have in challenging cheating is a direct result of not generating enough downward pressure. As a result, many higher education institutions probably have a pyramid with an ever-widening bulge heading further and further up whether they know about it or not,” they write.
