Abstract:

Academic Integrity (AI) has become the focus of multiple studies, especially in the Higher Education (HE) context. Multiple stakeholders are concerned with the increased incidents of breach of Academic Integrity, that have been reported across the globe. Breach of Academic Integrity, is being considered as a crisis in Higher Education, and therefore, different actions have been considered in order to effectively contain this phenomenon. A lot of attention has been directed towards different ways of “catching” plagiarism, mostly through online text matching tools. However, all these tools do have their limitations, and should be used not just for identifying cases of plagiarism, but as tools to guide students in order to properly use and cite sources. There is a general concern of “how much” can technology help, when students turn to paid services which guarantee that their paper will not be “tracked” as plagiarized, automatic translators, online paraphrasing tools, etc.

The response to such practices should be a more holistic approach rather than the typical “policing” one, that we have been using up to now. Therefore, there is a need to devise a methodology which will be capable of responding to these challenges. The aim of this methodology is to divert the focus of the faculty from spotting instances of breach of Academic Integrity, towards aligning our academic integrity practices with our overarching goal, which is to teach. The main contribution of our research is the Academic Integrity Integration Methodology (AIIM), which will enable students to develop a thorough understanding on how to go about writing a research paper considering Academic Integrity, thus eliminating or reducing the possibility of instances of breach of academic integrity.

In the first part of our research paper, we elaborate on the importance of Academic Integrity in Higher Education and we present findings from surveys conducted at international and national levels. In the second part we are discussing findings from the literature in terms of mitigation and deterrence policies, frameworks and methodologies. These findings include limitations of technology and shortcomings of existing practices. In the third part we present the design of the methodology which is informed by our interactions with students, our experiences from participating in academic integrity committees, the use of online tools in our curriculum, findings from the literature, and from relevant surveys. The methodology is taking into consideration, students’ understanding of academic misconduct, students’ self-assessment in terms of content and research paper writing via assessment, project management concepts, formative assessments, document revisions, online tools for originality checking, academic sources evaluation and oral examination. Each step is analyzed within the context of higher education, considering the fact that the research paper is a summative assessment. Finally, we are portraying the importance of a holistic in-class approach and the importance of a multi-step methodology which seeks not to punish but to acknowledge, teach and deliver academic work according to academic integrity values.

Keywords:

Academic integrity, mitigation, higher education, methodology, plagiarism, research papers.