Ideal and actual roles of university professors in academic integrity management: a comparative study

ABSTRACT

Unethical behaviour has become an increasingly controversial issue in Higher Education institutes. There have been debates about the reasons for the increase in unethical behaviour. But many of those debates contain problems. A key problem has been the lack of empirical results about faculty members’ perceptions of their role in the phenomenon, how cultural contexts influence the perception of university teachers about their role in the academic integrity field and whether conflicts exist between what they believe their role should be and the types of roles they actually play. The aim of the study is to explore this aspect using a qualitative research design to facilitate comprehensive access to faculty members’ beliefs and practices. The findings suggest that professors believe the teaching role extends beyond encouraging the learning of the subject matter being studied and includes offering education and information to students about the importance of avoiding academic misconduct such as cheating and plagiarism. Implications for university across different countries are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideal role
• actual role
• academic integrity
• plagiarism
• HE
• cultural context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [project number: 2018-00321].