This paper explores the perceptions of academic staff and students to student cheating behaviours in online exams and other online assessment formats. The research took place at three Australian universities in July and August 2020 during the emergency transition to online learning and assessment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study sought to inform decision making about the future of online exams at the participating universities. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected using online surveys. The findings of the study led to seven key observations, most notably the need to redefine the characteristics of academic misconduct to account for changes wrought to examinations in a digital world. The study concludes with lessons learned in relation to enhancing academic integrity in digital examinations and assessments.

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Responding to the COVID-19 emergency: student and academic staff perceptions of academic integrity in the transition to online exams at three Australian universities

Because research in science, engineering and medical fields advances incrementally, researchers routinely write papers that build directly on their prior work. While each new research article is expected to make a novel contribution, researchers often need to repeat some material—method details, background and so on—from their previous articles, a practice called ‘text recycling’. While increasing awareness of text recycling has led to the proliferation of policies, journal editorials and scholarly articles addressing the practice, these documents tend to employ inconsistent terminology—using different terms to name the same key ideas and, even more problematic, using the same terms with different meanings. These inconsistencies make it difficult for readers to know precisely how the ideas or expectations articulated in one document relate to those of others. This paper first clarifies the problems with current terminology, showing how key terms are used inconsistently across publisher policies for authors, guidelines for editors and textbooks on research ethics. It then offers a new taxonomy of text‐recycling practices with terms designed to align with the acceptability of these practices in common research writing and publishing contexts.

Standardizing terminology for text recycling in research writing

Due to COVID-19, universities with limited expertise with the digital environment had to rapidly transition to online teaching and assessment. This transition did not create a new problem but has offered more opportunities for contract cheating and diversified the types of such services. While universities and lecturers were adjusting to the new teaching styles and developing new assessment methods, opportunistic contract cheating providers have been offering $50 COVID-19 discounts and students securing the services of commercial online tutors to take their online exams or to take advantage of real-time assistance from 'pros' while sitting examinations. The article contributes to the discourse on contract cheating by reporting on an investigation of the scope and scale of the growing problems related to academic integrity exacerbated by an urgent transition to online assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The dark reality is the illegal services are developing at a faster pace than the systems required to curb them, as demonstrated by the results. The all-penetrating issues indicate systemic failures on a global scale that cannot be addressed by an individual academic or university acting alone. Multi-level solutions including academics, universities and the global community are essential. Future research must focus on developing a model of collaboration to address this problem on several levels, taking into account (1) individual academics, (2) universities, (3) countries and (4) international communities.

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Contract cheating: an increasing challenge for global academic community arising from COVID-19

Text recycling, sometimes called “self-plagiarism,” is the reuse of material from one’s own existing documents in a newly created work. Over the past decade, text recycling has become an increasing...

Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recently published research articles.

Over the past decade, text recycling (TR; AKA ‘self‐plagiarism’) has become a visible and somewhat contentious practice, particularly in the realm of journal articles. While growing numbers of publishers are writing editorials and formulating guidelines on TR, little is known about how editors view the practice or how they respond to it. We present results from an interview‐based study of 21 North American journal editors from a broad range of academic disciplines. Our findings show that editors' beliefs and practices are quite individualized rather than being tied to disciplinary or other structural parameters. While none of our participants supported the use of large amounts of recycled material from one journal article to another, some editors were staunchly against any use of recycled material, while others were accepting of the practice in certain circumstances. Issues of originality, the challenges of rewriting text, the varied circulation of texts, and abiding by copyright law were prominent themes as editors discussed their approaches to TR. Overall, the interviews showed that many editors have not thought systematically about the practice of TR, and they sometimes have trouble aligning their beliefs and practices.

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Text recycling: Views of North American journal editors from an interview‐based study

...................................................................................................................................................... 5 Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 9 Background and Definitions .................................................................................................................... 9 Origins and Purpose of This Report ......................................................................................................... 9 Methodology ............................................................................................................................................. 10 Intended Audience ................................................................................................................................ 10 Research Questions ............................................................................................................................... 10 Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria ............................................................................................................. 10 Typology of Evidence ............................................................................................................................ 12 Search Method ...................................................................................................................................... 12 I. Attitudes, Behaviours and Perceptions ............................................................................................. 14 II. Academic Integrity in Professional Programs ................................................................................... 21 Education/Pre-service Teaching Programs ........................................................................................... 21 Pharmacy Programs .............................................................................................................................. 25 III. Understanding and Supporting International Students .................................................................... 27 IV. Pedagogical Implications: Instruction and Prevention ...................................................................... 29 V. Focus on Technology ......................................................................................................................... 36 VI. Institutional considerations: Policy, law and case management ...................................................... 40 VII. Methodological Considerations: Plagiarism Research .................................................................. 46 Conclusions ................................................................................................................................................ 47 References ................................................................................................................................................. 48 Academic Integrity in Canada: An Annotated Bibliography Eaton, Crossman, & Edino, 2019 | UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY 4 A Message from the Researchers We are grateful to the Werklund School of Education who provided funding for this project through a Research Development Grant (2017-2018). Further, we are grateful to the librarians at the University of Calgary who assisted us in locating and providing us with copies of materials listed in the institutional research databases, but were not easily accessible. The librarians tracked down and provided us with copies of these sources through the institutional document delivery service and we offer our gratitude for their efforts. Finally, we owe a debt of gratitude to those who provided feedback on this work. Sarah Elaine Eaton, Ph.D., Principal Investigator Katherine (Katie) Crossman, Ph.D., Research Associate Rachael Edino, Ph.D. Candidate, Research Assistant

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Academic Integrity in Canada: An Annotated Bibliography.

Text-matching software has been used widely in higher education to reduce student plagiarism and support the development of students’ writing skills. This scoping review provides insights into the extant literature relating to commercial text-matching software (TMS) (e.g., Turnitin) use in postsecondary institutions. Our primary research question was “How is text-matching software used in postsecondary contexts?” Using a scoping review method, we searched 14 databases to find peer-reviewed literature about the use of TMS among postsecondary students. In total, 129 articles were included in the final synthesis, which comprised of data extraction, quality appraisal, and the identification of exemplar articles. We highlight evidence about how TMS is used for teaching and learning purposes to support student success at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

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A Scoping Review of Text-Matching Software Used for Student Academic Integrity in Higher Education

Pre-service teachers and study abroad experiences: Don’t forget about them when they come home

This institutional self-study investigated the use of text-matching software (TMS) to prevent plagiarism by students in a Canadian university that did not have an institutional license for TMS at the time of the study. Assignments from a graduate-level engineering course were analyzed using iThenticate®. During the initial phase of the study, similarity scores from the first student assignments (N = 132) were collected to determine a baseline level of textual similarity. Students were then offered an educational intervention workshop on academic integrity. Another set of similarity scores from consenting participants’ second assignments (n = 106) were then collected, and a statistically significant assignment effect (p < 0.05) was found between the similarity scores of the two assignments. The results of this study indicate that TMS, when used in conjunction with educational interventions about academic integrity, can be useful to students and educators to prevent and identify academic misconduct. This study adds to the growing body of empirical research about academic integrity in Canadian higher education and, in particular, in engineering fields.

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An Institutional Self-Study of Text-Matching Software in a Canadian Graduate-Level Engineering Program

Self-plagiarism is a contentious issue in higher education, research and scholarly publishing contexts. The practice is problematic because it disrupts scientific publishing by over-emphasizing results, increasing journal publication costs, and artificially inflating journal impact, among other consequences. We hypothesized that there was a dearth of empirical studies on the topic of self-plagiarism, with an over-abundance of editorial and commentary articles based on anecdotal evidence. The research question was: What typologies of evidence characterize the literature on self-plagiarism in scholarly and research journals? We conducted a scoping review, using the search terms “self-plagiarism” and “self-plagiarism” (hyphenated), consulting five social sciences research databases, supplemented by a manual search for articles, resulting in over 5900 results. After removing duplicates and excluding non-scholarly sources, we arrived at a data set of 133 sources, with publication dates ranging from 1968 to 2017. With an interrater reliability of over 93% between two researchers, our typological analysis revealed 47 sources (34.3%) were editorials; 41 (29.9%) were conceptual research (including teaching cases); 16 (11.7%) were editorial responses; 12 (8.6%) were secondary research; and only 8 sources (5.8%) were primary research. There is little guidance in the available literature to graduate students or their professors about how to disentangle the complexities of self-plagiarism. With primary and secondary research combined accounting for 14.4% of overall contributions to the data set, and primary research constituting only 6% of overall contributions, we conclude with a call for more empirical evidence on the topic to support contributions to the scholarly dialogue.

Katherine Crossman

Papers

Academic Integrity in Canada: An Annotated Bibliography.

A Scoping Review of Text-Matching Software Used for Student Academic Integrity in Higher Education

Pre-service teachers and study abroad experiences: Don’t forget about them when they come home

An Institutional Self-Study of Text-Matching Software in a Canadian Graduate-Level Engineering Program

Self-Plagiarism Research Literature in the Social Sciences: A Scoping Review