Final thoughts
Thanks everyone for joining us for this coffee course! It has been really interesting for us to hear your thoughts on the issues during the course. I heard a lot of concern from all the participants around the challenges of balancing empathetic teaching and firmly dealing academic misconduct to ensure a fair learning environment for all students. As we’ve seen over this week, this is by no means a straightforward task: there are lots of grey areas! The line between collaboration and collusion was one that was discussed quite a bit in the comments on Day 4 – many of the participants did not agree on whether the cases were acceptable, poor academic practice, or misconduct. In these cases, it’s always a safe bet to ask for advice from your institution’s Academic Misconduct officers (this is ASQO at ANU) as they have many examples of how similar cases have been dealt with in the past and what the consequences were.
Another trend in the discussions was around ghost writing, and the limitations of Turnitin in detecting it. Most of the discussion centered around the importance of lecturers and tutors being familiar with student work, and able to make a judgement call as to whether or not the authorial voice had significantly changed from previous assignments (some resources and strategies were shared in that link as well which might help). But in increasingly larger classrooms, this personal touch can be more difficult to maintain and must be fostered in new ways. You can read more about detecting ghost writing here.
Further help
Special thanks to Vivien Silvey and Debbie Wilson for joining us for this course. We’ve really loved having you! Just a note as well that if you need more individual help with the issues discussed in the course or would like to speak with us about this in more depth, you can find help in the following ways:
- Encourage students to use the ASLC Turnitin Practice site to submit draft assignments, and learn about what text-matches mean to improve their writing.
- Contact the Academic Skills & Learning Centre for advice on workshops and support for students in your class.
- Get advise on plagiarism cases and academic misconduct, including how to discuss it with students and possible penalties, with the Academic Standards & Quality Office
- Get help with setting up and using Turnitin more effectively from ANU Online or your College-based education technology staff.
You’re welcome to continue the conversation and share the information from this course with your colleagues – this isn’t the end!
Join us for coffee
Debbie, Janene, Vivien, and I (Katie) will be at the Biginelli’s Cafe in CBE Building 26C for coffee today (Wednesday 2 November) at 10am if you’d like to join us and discuss the course
further. Coffee is on us!
Let us know what you thought
Please share your feedback in the comments, or you can provide anonymous feedback using this PollEverywhere survey.
Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to chatting more in future courses!
3 thoughts on “Academic Integrity and Turnitin – Thanks!”
Thanks for an interesting week , I learnt a lot.
Sorry I could not make coffee as I work off campus
No worries Michael! Thanks for participating 🙂
Thanks for the information on academic integrity. I found the insights on ghost writing particularly useful. There is one lone academic in my department who only releases assessment questions at the beginning of the assessment timeframe (ie, 2 weeks before it is due if they think 2 weeks is sufficient) in the belief that this will reduce ghost writing. They also strive to provide different questions each semester. In contrast, the rest of the department include the assessment questions in the Course Guide at the beginning of semester, and most recycle the same questions year in, year out. I know one particular course that has been asking the *exact same questions*, including same case studies, for almost 10 years! Would love to somehow conduct research to ascertain whether the lone academic’s strategies are actually working, and if so, is there a notably disadvantage to students in not having the questions available from the beginning of the semester.