Talking about contract cheating: facilitating a forum for collaborative development of assessment practices to combat student dishonesty

ABSTRACT

Contract cheating presents an existential threat to university assessment integrity and, therefore, to the reputations of universities and their graduates. We report on two workshops, with academic development participants who collaboratively addressed assessment identity verification through problem identification and solution creation. As facilitators, we iteratively reflected on the workshop processes to design and refine subsequent offerings. The corresponding research sought to increase sectoral collaboration and evidence student authorship in assessment. This work provides one approach to developing practice-driven resources and insights for academic developers to encourage others to collaboratively address complex problems that are difficult to resolve, like contract cheating.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic integrity
• contract cheating
• collaboration
• academic developers
• assessment design workshops

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Asia Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity [2016].

Notes on contributors

Christine Slade

Dr Christine Slade (PFHEA) is a lecturer in Higher Education in ITaLI where she is the lead in assessment and academic integrity. Christine’s research interests include innovative pedagogies, application of assessment principles, digital literacy, ePortfolios, and academic practice.

Susan Rowland

Dr Susan Rowland (PFHEA) is an associate professor and the Deputy Associate Dean Academic (Future Students and Employability) in the Faculty of Science. Susan’s research interests include authentic assessment, undergraduate research experience, and student employability.

Dominic McGrath

Dominic McGrath (SFHEA) is the team lead, Higher Education Group Learning Designers, in ITaLI. Dom has broad experience in the impact of technological change on academics’ teaching, and student learning, supporting peer observation, and improving assessment design.