Why Academic Integrity Means More Than Just Honest Work
I started this piece in early 2019 with one question in mind: Why do students choose to cheat? I realized there were different reasons but I wanted to explore, as a student myself, to understand the aspects that come into play when a student makes this choice. Over time I learned that more often than not, it is a difficult choice to make. Looking at Canadian universities, I try to paint a picture for the reader to recognize that academic dishonesty isn’t black and white, but academic integrity is something we should strive for as students and faculty in order to hold up the value of our own work.
Why do students cheat?
In February 2019, I Skyped with, Assistant Professor in the Werklund School of Education and Research Professors at the University of Calgary, Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton, whose research has focused largely on academic integrity. Eaton has played a pivotal part in the Academic Integrity research and the academic community surrounding it. On screen Eaton sat in her office, her bookshelf filled with books on the subject. Eaton said there is a number of reasons students may decide to cheat.
Academic misconduct is not black and white, Eaton said, unintentional and intentional cheating are the broad categories, saying, “One is unintentional plagiarism, students don’t have the skills or the writing skills or the knowledge. For example, if they come from somewhere else before taking up a university degree in Canada, they might not know cutting and pasting is not okay here, they might not have the citing and references skills so they might not know how to do a reference list.” As well as Canadian students not having the skills to understand when unintentional plagiarism happens. As for intentional academic dishonesty, Eaton said, “It can have to do with anything from lack of time, what they call the cheat to complete syndrome. Some students who have a lot of pressure on them to get good grades might just say I can’t say this any better so I’m just going to copy what this other person wrote. Then there might be other stressors that might push them to do that even when they know better. And then there’s a very very small percentage and I’ll emphasize very small, of people who know better and don’t care. But the literature shows that that’s not actually the majority of the students who cheat, that the majority that will report that, either don’t have the skills or training or, yes they knew better but there were other external pressures that pushed them into it.”
In February 2019, I met with Griffin, an anonymous student who has graduated from Guelph University in Ont., he is referred to as Griffin for this article. Griffin spoke with me at one of his clients’ offices over his lunch break about his experiences with contract cheating. Griffin asked one of the staff as they walked past us if he’s ever cheated, to which he replied, “Of course, that’s why I’m a Real Estate Agent.” In his fourth and final year, Griffin took an online elective that he hoped to be a “bird course” in order to boost his GPA, however, the “bird course” turned out to be harder than he anticipated. Griffin said, “At the time I was running a business. I was in fourth year, and I had a full course load as a student. I knew what I knew and I also knew what I didn’t know. This course was new, it was an elective and I didn’t know any of the things in this course. I did think it through, I wasn’t this guy who was like prone to cheating, I never skipped a class in high school and things like that. But, because I realized I don’t really want to learn this stuff, I don’t think this is gonna be a valuable skill based on my chosen career path. It became really opportunistic for me to find an alternative solution.”
I met with Will, a student from Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ont. who for the purpose of anonymity in this article is referred to as Will, at a bar in Oakville, Ont. Will, a clean-cut, unassuming 20-something-year-old, provides a service of writing papers or taking online courses for students. Will said, “I’ve done a lot of really dumb courses like the whole [online] course I did was about how dance and music is portrayed in film, it was such a weird class and that’s going to engage maybe like .01 percent of the population. Like nobody cares about that stuff. And I do think that there’s definitely a society pressure to go to school and maybe people should think about like am I doing this because I actually want to do it or because I feel like I need to do it.”
Contract Cheating
A 2017 University Affairs article wrote, “A Google search using the terms “Canada” and “write my essay” returns more than 47 million results. Among the top results are services offering to write essays for between $19 and $25 per page.” The websites such as ehomework.ca and writemyessay.ca offer original written content that follow the guidelines of the assignment, making it hard to determine that the work is not theirs. Eaton said, “It can be harder but professors can also be trained in what to look for. So for example, I put together a tip sheet for instructors and it was 15 strategies to detect contract cheating. So there are things instructors can do if they pay attention to it and they’re aware of it. It’s not impossible.” The University Affairs article also found that social media plays a big role when finding contract cheating since it remains hidden in an “online black market.” The University Affairs article determined contract cheaters are often located offshore in countries like India or parts of Africa. However, some of the websites I contacted for interviews, such as Homework Help Canada had their address listed in Toronto. From the 18 sites I contacted, none were willing to respond for an interview to discuss their contract cheating services, one site even ended an online chat when I asked for an interview. Several websites also offered their service to write this piece, ironically. Eaton also found contract cheating in Canada was on the rise and in her research project done in 2018, Contract cheating: a Canadian perspective, “An Estimation of the Possible Extent of Contract Cheating in Canadian Postsecondary Institutions,” shows…
According to Eaton, “We now have some evidence to support that this market is being targeted here in our own country and there’s some evidence to suggest that maybe as many as one in seven students are getting there work done online.” The question is who is on the other side of contract cheating? One website service called unemployedprofessor.com allows students to pay for an assignment done by an unemployed professor, others having offshore cheaters as previously mentioned, but apart from these sites some students have a closer relationship with their cheater. Will from Laurier, spoke about his services, how he offers papers and even completes full online courses for students, Will discussed the service he provides and how his pricing system works. “Usually I ask the students what kind of grade they want and what they are willing to pay, for a paper it’s around $20-$40 a page, for the class I think I got around $500.” Will notes that, students come to him for a variety of reasons, “Some people would just rather pay someone else to do it, I did one for someone recently because he was sick, or at least that’s what he said.” Will started his service in high school, doing a single paper for a friend who then brought home her A to show her mother. It wasn’t until university that Will began doing people’s work on a regular basis.
https://soundcloud.com/haeley-dirisio/willlaurieruniversity
According to Will, his services are found through word of mouth, friends directing contract cheaters in his direction. “I like to work when I feel like I’m ready to work, whether its early in the morning or late at night, so when I write papers for people I can do it at 2 in the morning.” Will found having a scheduled job conflicted with his school work. Doing papers or online classes can be done when he’s available or turned away when he is busy with his own school work, providing him with some extra spending money for the weekend.
Griffin, the now graduated student from Guelph University, admitted to minor cheating before the incident like keeping formulas on the back of calculators during tests. Something he said, “everyone was doing.” Griffin gave his insight on his first experience with using online contract cheating services after his difficulties understanding the material in his online elective. Griffin used the course code to start a Facebook group to discuss the course, meeting with students who joined the group in the library to understand the material together. “The first iteration of that was creating groups. It was innocent.” However, Griffin was contacted via Facebook message by someone claiming to be in Africa, offering to do his work. “I got this broken English ass message from a random African guy online. I can’t even pronounce his name, I would if I could. And then over time he revealed to me I could just pay him $10 to write my essays and pretty much do the projects for me. So I said OK, what do I have to lose. I’ll try it. So I tried paying him 10 bucks for the first project and I actually ended up doing the first project myself as well, just in case. But I looked at his and it was better than mine. So I submit his and then I got an 90% on it and I just kept on doing that.”
Does Disengagement or Lack of Interest Play a Role in Cheating?
Although Griffin, the Guelph University graduate, committed academic dishonesty by having someone else do his work, he believed, “School is systematically failing most people at this point. It’s ritualistic, school has tended in that direction for a long time.”
https://soundcloud.com/haeley-dirisio/griffin-guelph
And according to Professor Eaton, “Often profs just assign a paper and the students either not interested or they have no sense of ownership over the project. It’s kind of almost an invitation for them to get someone else to do it. So I think there is something we can do as professors to ensure that our students are engaged in a learning process.” Eaton continued in a follow up Skype interview saying, “I think one of the big things is how we design the assignments for our class. If we design the assignment so that students have independence and infancy, they can get to use some of their own creativity and direct the assignment in a way that makes sense for them, so that they can get interested in it. I think that has a big impact because if we just keep giving the same assignments over and over again, it’s not really about the students. It’s about the professor creating an assignment that’s easy for them to mark, but if we say OK this is about the students and their learning and we need to be able to highlight what’s of interest to them. That changes the game entirely so that students become more interested in learning than if they get some cookie cutter assignment that doesn’t mean anything to them.”
James M. Lang, author of Cheating Lessons and professor at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, chatted with me over the phone about how professors can think about tackling contract cheating. Lang said, “I think the solution there is to make sure that what happens in the class or the assessments that students do are unique to that class, that semester and that time period. So again not just rehashing stuff that someone could contract out but you can’t do this assessment unless you’ve been sitting in this class, working with these peers and these unique materials that I’ve assigned. Like that to me is the ideal solution for contract cheating, is to draw from the class and the experiences of the class even for example doing some in-class writing so that the papers and projects they have opportunity to work on them in class and then that’s something they can’t contract out unless you’re sitting there in the class.”
Why International Students May Choose to Cheat
Amanda McKenzie who manages the Quality Assurance Office and the Office of Academic Integrity at the University of Waterloo, as well as represents the Canadian branch of the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI) notes, “There are some cultural pressures from I think different parts of the world where they send students from abroad to Canada with a high level of expectation on them to succeed and get a high grade and a degree in a program that maybe some of these students don’t even want to be in. But it’s a familial or a cultural expectation that they have this high level of success. And when you have such high levels placed upon you, the stress and expectation to perform higher or as good as you can really put students in a hard spot.”
According to Professor Eaton, “there’s also an extra industry, if you will, that exists outside of Canada and US, UK where there is a test taking industry, where students can pay someone to take their English test for them before they arrive here. So they get their test scores, they submit it and then those test scores aren’t their own. But let’s say for example a student took a test on their own legitimately, got a certain score and came to Canada. Just because they got a certain score on a test doesn’t mean that they can cope in a Canadian education system.” The Globe and Mail reported in 2011, the University of Toronto’s legal aid office saw that 50 per cent of their clients were international students. Also saying the University of Windsor reported in 2008–09, 82 international students were accused of academic misconduct. Will from Laurier University said, “I had a roommate from Mexico and his English sucked, so he got me to do all his English papers.”
Does Academic Integrity at Canadian Universities Go Unnoticed?
According to Professor Eaton, academic misconduct can be “hard to detect.” Although Eaton remarked on a case a fellow professor faced where there was a change of voice in a students writing, saying, “An example that a colleague shared with me, was she was reading a student’s work and the word heretofore showed up. Well the word heretofore is a word that nobody uses in modern English, [my colleague] was like where is this from? Because this student didn’t use this word, I don’t use this word, profs don’t use this word. So she kind of did some digging and found that it was from a really outdated text that was available online and there was some cutting and pasting that had happened.” Software like Turnitin can determine when plagiarism occurs or recycled papers are used. Dr. Julia Christensen Hughes, Dean of the College of Management and Economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, believes there is a large gap between those caught and those getting away with academic misconduct. In Faculty relations to academic dishonesty,Hughes wrote, “…of the 60% of faculty who said they had witnessed student cheating, only 65% had penalized the student and, contrary to university policy, only 20% had formally reported the incident.”
In a CBC article from 2014, Christensen Hughes said, “We have large classes, faculty are not necessarily familiar with their students’ writing for example.” Similarly, Griffin the student from Guelph University, was never caught for his academic misconduct in his course, said, “I don’t even think [my professor] knew my name. They look at it on the other end of the screen, looking at your student number.”
Speaking personally, McKenzie notes that the challenge in determining academic dishonesty can arise, again, with obtaining evidence. But McKenzie explained the University of Waterloo’s disciplinary process, saying, “they’ll sit down and have a conversation with that student to see what else is going on and sometimes it’s a learning opportunity, even if they don’t have evidence, just to touch base with the student, make sure they know what the rules and the expectations are and they can also point the student in the direction of resources if they feel that they need some extra support. Maybe they need to perhaps look at a tutor or maybe they’re suffering from some personal issues. Maybe they would benefit from seeing a counsellor.” As for the University of Calgary’s disciplinary process, Eaton notes, “If a case of academic misconduct is suspected, then it comes before a decision maker who have some experience doing that case management and that person would try and understand exactly what were the things that happened or what was the incident and then discover why did it happen, and was it a first offence or a second offence or multiple offences. Because the sanctions that can be imposed, it can get a little bit more severe.” Eaton continued to explain how punishments are evaluated depending on the misconduct, “If it’s a person’s first time and they go before the decision maker and say I took this off Wikipedia without citing it, I copy and pasted it because I just ran out of time and I couldn’t get my assignment done. So that’s what we would call a first attempt. But if it is the person’s second third or fourth time. Clearly by then that person should know better. And so they may not get as lenient a response as if it was their first time.”
Discipline and Changes
In 2017, the University of Waterloo revised their disciplinary policy. As noted by McKenzie, “In our system we’ve worked hard in the last two years or so to really rejig our plagiarism penalties.” The reason for the change being, “I think the people implementing the policy just knew that there was a very large penalty for sometimes a very small or smaller plagiarism offences. The rule treated a very small copying to an extraordinarily large amount of copying the same. So they didn’t feel that that was very fair for students. We wanted to make sure that number one, people would appropriately apply the penalty. The more severe the offence the higher the penalty. Adding that other revisions are being implemented for academic misconduct that may be unintentional, McKenzie notes, “We’re also working on new guidelines for excessive collaboration or unauthorized collaboration and group work. We realized that students have some issues with knowing where the line is not the cross with working too much with other students. So these guidelines again will also be a little more detailed about providing some expectations on what good collaboration looks like and also where it becomes excessive collaboration that’s unauthorized. Some concrete examples and those guidelines really make it clearer for students so they understand when they might be breaking an educational role.”
The University of Calgary has workshops and one-on-one writing support at the Student Success Centre as a resource for students, as well as encouraging faculty to review academic integrity in the course outline as a proactive measure in combating academic misconduct. As for situations involving contract cheating Eaton said, “We have our academic policies that state that a student needs to complete their own work for themselves and that they can’t have a third party complete the work for them. So if it was discovered then the student would be subject to academic misconduct.” Although, discipline varies depending on the situation. “It would depend on; partly the faculty, where the student is in their academic career, if they’ve had previous offences. But there is a process at the university where usually academic misconduct cases are sent up to an Associate Dean and the Associate Dean will decide on the level of sanction that’s appropriate for this circumstance.”
Lang spoke about his book Cheating Lessons, in which he wrote about “modifying the learning environment.” Lang has modified his own classroom, in the U.S., to reduce stress of high stakes assignments and give students, “opportunities for them to fail and get feedback and try again in ways that would not hurt their grade.” Lang’s book discusses the issues with cheating in large classroom settings, writing, “In other words, since students in large courses typically cheat more than students in small courses, we should be more vigilant in proctoring exams in large courses.” Speaking to him on this, Lang said, “I think institutions have to be willing to put the money behind it so that in classes there are a smaller section where teaching assistants or graduate assistants can be more engaged with the students and help them do these other kinds of things that are going to reduce cheating. But I don’t think there’s an easy answer for this to be honest with you. I think as long as the Higher Education wants to save money by having large classes this is going to be a problem.”
Why is it important to recognize the values of Academic Integrity?
For Lang, in the U.S., “When students perceive other students cheating or they feel that cheating has no consequences for it they’re more likely to cheat. So for that reason it’s really important to call it out and respond to it. That doesn’t mean it has to be really harsh punishments for it but it has to be called out and addressed. And if we don’t do that than it’s more likely to happen so the more you ignore it, the more you’re going to see it.”
Will from Laurier said, academic integrity is important because, “If you are going to do something I think you should do it honestly. You’re cheating yourself more than anything. If it comes to the point where you feel like you can’t manage it, maybe you should take a step back, maybe think of dropping a course.”
Finally, Eaton believes academic integrity is important to have because educational institutions should in still values. “So I think university, post-secondary and high school it’s not just learning content, it’s not just having material shoved down your throat as a student so that you have to memorize stuff and regurgitate it because that’s not how the real world works.” The practice of learning academic integrity is a value that will guide students past university and into their careers, beyond memorizing the material learned over a students post-secondary years. Eaton continued, “So all of those choices are choices that you were to make in those really important years, I think between say 16 and 24 and the decisions that you will make as a professional, and beyond that you start practicing those decisions as a young adult. So that’s why I like to talk about integrity being rooted in values because the values can guide the behaviour. And when you have those clear values explicit in your mind, it could be that you’re less likely to make poor choices later on.”
Eaton also mentioned the lack of research on academic integrity in Canadian universities is partly because of the lack of media attention compared to other countries. “I think we’ve trailed behind other countries for sure. Some countries have had major scandals that have made the media like the UK and Australia. And once it becomes a scandal in the media then people really start to pay attention.” Eaton mentioned, Calgary is holding a national symposium on April 17th and 18th, 2019 to discuss having more research done and opening up the conversation of Academic Integrity more in Canada.
Self Reflection
As my fourth and final year of college comes to an end, this piece has made me reflect on the hard work I have put into journalism school. Times of success and failure have guided me and strengthened who I will become. What I am most proud of is that the work has been a reflection of me and no one else. Even the times of failure I am able to learn from and connect with as my own. For me, academic integrity is more than just honest work. It is the integrity of owning my own work that gives me confidence in exiting college and starting my next chapter as a journalist.
