Academic integrity an issue

According to a recent nation-wide study, cheating has reached epidemic proportions at Canadian universities, with 73 per cent of students admitting to cheating on a written work.It was these findings, put out by Canadian members of the Duke University-based Center for Academic Integrity, combined with recent controversies over anti-plagarism tool Turnitin.com, that convinced members of the Brock University committee to strike a taskforce on academic integrity and conduct an internal survey to find out how widespread cheating is at Brock.

Nick Brown, vice president of university affairs for Brock University Students' Union (BUSU), is one of three student representatives on the Academic Integrity Taskforce.

"The Academic Integrity survey is designed to measure specific feelings and experiences with academic integrity," said Brown. "[A question like], is working on an assignment with someone else something that they do? Is this OK? Is this not OK? ... that type of thing. It's a national survey that came out of the States ... and is being used in a number of universities down there and a number of Canadian universities. It allows universities to get a perspective on their students' feelings and experiences with academic integrity."

According to John Mitterer, a professor with the department of psychology and taskforce member, the idea to bring the survey to Brock originated with concerns over the use of Turnitin.com being brought up at a university senate meeting.

"There was a case ... at McGill where objections were raised about some of the presumptions of guilt that are made when plagiarism-checking software's use is required," Mitterer said.

"So, one of the local Student Union members or ombudsmen ... raised it as a concern here ... and the Brock University Senate struck a sub-committee whose job was to look at the whole question of the use of Turnitin.com," said Mitterer.

"I was on that sub-committee, and we argued that this wasn't just about Turnitin.com or plagiarism on essays, or presumptions of guilt, but in fact was about academic integrity in general," he said.

"So we then urged the university to adopt a procedure whereby a student who has a principled objection to the use of Turnitin.com will have an alternative ... But we then said we have to go past this, we have to look at academic integrity in general, and the best way to start that is by getting involved in U.S. Centre for Academic Integrity."

Mitterer suspects that, unfortunately, Brock students will be close to national average when it comes to cheating, and says he sees academic cheating as part of larger problems within our society.

"We look at government and business leaders throughout North American society and we find that they're not always acting on the up-and-up, and it's sort of hard to think that you should be honest every little step of the way if those people aren't," said Mitterer. "So, we think there's been a general decline in integrity."

"Also students nowadays are much busier [than students of previous generations]. It's quite common for students to be taking a full course load, carry a part-time job, have other responsibilities ... it's understandable that under more and more pressure, you'll do what you need to get you through," he said.

"I think also that when cheating becomes common enough, people that wouldn't really be that predisposed to cheat almost feel they have to. This is one thing I hear from my PSYC 190 students all the time, that 'So many people boast about cheating, that I feel that even though I don't want to do that ... I better because otherwise I'm going to end up with a poor grade' ... that's not an excuse, but it provides me some context for understanding," Mitterer said.

John Radue, an associate professor of computer science and the chair of the Taskforce hopes that the survey will bring a new focus on teaching academic ethics.

"There should be a push to teach ethics through the curriculum, so whenever get ... an ethics moment in class, you take the time to illustrate," said Radue.

Brown says that much of student cheating stems from a lack of understanding on the part of students as to what counts as academic dishonesty,

"Professors, especially in first year courses, either have the attitude that 'This student is taking four other courses ... someone else will cover it' ... or, 'I've only got 26 classes with this student, I can't spend an entire class teaching them about this stuff,'" said Brown. "So they do the bare minimum, which is a little bit varied depending on the class, depending on the student and depending on the professor, so that's something that the Academic Integrity Taskforce is looking at as an issue."

Radue says that cheating may be, in part, a crime of opportunity, made far too easy by the way Brock sets up its exams.

"One of my biggest concerns at Brock is that we've got a wonderful fieldhouse, with four basketball courts that we can't use for exams," said Radue. "Instead, we put exams in tiered classrooms, which makes it very easy to cheat. So it's not fair to the students or the faculty."

Whether academic dishonesty is a result of misunderstanding or a need to keep up in an increasingly competitive academic arena will become clear following the survey, which will take place Oct. 25 - 29. Students will be able to access the survey online at www.brocku.ca/integrity.