Like many others in my hometown, I have a great love of gardens. Nothing puts the mind at ease quite like strolling through a well-loved garden in the springtime. Soft grass, splashes of colour, rustic lawn ornaments, birdsong, all that good stuff.
And accompanying my love of gardens is a desire to grow one of my own. A green, natural, relaxing space that I can walk through and let the stresses of life blow away on the breeze. And while this is an idyllic goal, the realities of growing a garden can be much less romantic.
Unyielding clay soil, diseases infecting the fruit trees, 40C days, hungry wallabies and inconsiderate chickens that seem not to understand that the mulch I’ve put out is for the trees, and not for them to scratch far and wide. But of all these woes, there is another that I hate the most.
The frost.
Each springtime I spend hard earned money on new seedlings, tube stock and bare root trees in an attempt to create a little Eden to stroll in. I dig, I plant, I treat the soil, and I water. Just like a real gardener. And for the most part all of these new plants thrive throughout Spring and Summer, spreading their roots as best they can through the soil. For 6 – 9 months it goes on like this, and I start to feel like I’ve got a real green thumb as I watch the fruits of my labours grow (pun intended).
But eventually the days start getting shorter, and the nights become colder. And eventually, it comes. On one particularly crisp morning, I’ll wander outside to find that a thin layer of ice has decimated my garden, leaving only blackened leaves and mangled stems. And like any enthusiastic gardener, that’s about the point when I wander inside, brew a cuppa, and start strategizing how I am going to shelter my entire garden before the next evening’s frost descends upon it.
The problem is, much like everything else in life, I only have limited time and resources before the next frost strikes, so how do I best focus my time and energy to help the garden thrive?
If you’ve gotten this far, and have done at least a little gardening, you probably already know where this is heading. Given limited time and resources before the arrival of the next frost, my best bet is to focus on the new plants. Their roots aren’t deep enough, their bark isn’t thick enough, and they are just too fragile to resist the ice. If they aren’t protected first, they’ll keep getting knocked back each winter, and will never grow to be big and resilient enough to combat the cold.
At this point, I think we can drop the metaphor, as my guess is that most of you already understand the point I’m driving at.
Just like external forces acting upon a garden, there are many external forces inhibiting our students from engaging and learning at university. And whether we like it or not, it’s a reality that universities only have limited resources to help students thrive. In the academic integrity context, each year external forces such as contract cheating organisations, are creeping amongst our students and doing damage. They hinder both our students’ learning and our students’ chances of success post-graduation. They are preventing our students from growing and thriving.
So how do we best allocate time and resources to ensure that our students thrive?
In the same way that new plants need more attention than established trees, university academic integrity resources, including detection, ought to emphasise protecting new students from the external pressures that challenge their academic integrity.
A quick disclaimer here, I am not proposing that we should focus solely on first year students. When detecting misconduct, some patterns of behaviour will only become apparent after years of study. Any university academic integrity strategy should address all the classics (education, prevention, assessment design, detection etc) but I do believe having a specific detection strategy for new students is where universities can best influence future student decision making to cheat. This does not mean poring over every word a new student submits, but it does mean keeping a more diligent eye over our new cohorts for concerning data to keep the frost at bay. A first-year student who gets away with outsourcing their first four units to a foreign contract cheating services is obviously a problem, but if universities have the capacity to detect this early on (and we do), we have a responsibility to do so.
There are several other good reasons to believe in the importance of a first-year detection strategy, the first of which is the scaffolding of learning. Second year units are more complex than first year units, and third year units are more complex than second year units. So, if a student cheats their way through their first year, they’ll be less equipped to complete their second year without relying on third parties to do their work for them. And if they cheat their way through their second year, then they'll be really unequipped to deal with third year units, and so on and so forth until graduation.
Secondly, ensuring first year integrity may reduce word of mouth spreading of academic misconduct behaviours. A first-year student who sees a peer succeed by engaging in academic misconduct may be more likely to engage in these behaviours themselves. In this way, a first-year student who succeeds in cheating may create five second year students who engage in the same behaviours.
By allocating specific detection resources to ensure the integrity of our first-year units, we protect both the university and the student (and their future). We won’t stamp out cheating altogether, but we will give students one less reason to cheat in the first place.
As Cath and Kane note in their enforcement pyramid, there will always be those who are unwilling and unable to act with academic integrity, but if you’ll allow me to squeeze a little bit more juice out of my garden metaphor, if we can create enough thriving healthy plants in our gardens, maybe that will help crowd out some of the weeds.
Jared
(Ed: Jared is a Senior investigator in the misconduct unit at Macquarie, and a very naughty boy).
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