I’m currently a member of the QAA expert group that is creating guidance on academic integrity for the UK higher education sector. The QAA has been doing much excellent work in this area stemming from their previous work on contract cheating.
In order to help to develop and share good practice, they have recently launched a pilot project on academic integrity as part of their enhancing partnerships work. For this project, teams from different UK universities will meet regularly over the course of a year to develop their academic integrity practice.
I presented the keynote at their first meeting, bringing together many of the latest findings and open questions in this field.
The slides I used are available on my SlideShare account. They are also included below.
Academic integrity will continue to offer challenges. During the presentation, I tried to remove the idea that many seem to have that academic integrity just relates to a “battle” where we try to stop students from cheating. The metaphor does not work for me and there are so many more aspects that we have to think about.
I promoted the idea that universities should use their students as part of their academic integrity working group. They, after all, have a vested interest in the results of assessment. I will be following the remaining of the pilot project with interest to see if many of the universities taking part adopted that approach.