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Student and Staff Understanding and Reaction: Academic Integrity in an Australian University

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Abstract

Academic integrity is becoming increasingly important to managing academic institutions. Accordingly there are efforts to uniformly assess campus attitudes to such issues as cheating in assessments along with the policies and procedures in place to address them. This paper seeks to summarize and understand the attitude of the students and academic staff at an Australian university towards academic integrity, as reflected in the results of a campus-wide survey, using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The main finding of the quantitative results was the disconnect between academic staff and students belief’s about academic honesty and the reactions of students and academics to dishonest behaviour. Four key themes of academic honesty were identified through qualitative analysis, being those of cheating, student, solutions to cheating and general concerns.

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Notes

  1. For instance, the Center for Academic Integrity in the USA (http://www.academicintegrity.org/), and the Asia-Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity in Australia (http://www.apfei.edu.au/).

  2. For instance, the Center for Academic Integrity in the USA (http://www.academicintegrity.org/), and the Asia-Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity in Australia (http://www.apfei.edu.au/).

  3. John Dawkins was the Minister for Employment, Education and Training in the 1980s under the Bob Hawke (Labour party) PrimeMinistership.

  4. The Anglo-Celts (British and Irish ethnicity or ancestry) still form nearly 70 % of the Australian population, down from 98 % in 1900 and remain the dominant group in politics, economics, the public sector, academe, farming, the armed forces and so forth.

  5. John Howard was the Liberal (conservative party) Prime Minister from 1996 to 2007.

  6. http://acad-integrity.rutgers.edu/rutgers.asp (accessed 12/12/2013).

  7. Out of which two-thirds of these academics were satisfied or very satisfied with the way their referrals were handled. One in six academics was dissatisfied and the remainder were neutral.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Assoc. Prof. Abhaya Nayak and Assoc. Prof. Pundarik Mukhopadhaya for their contribution to initial discussions and development of this research project. We also acknowledge the contributions of students and academic staff who participated in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Macquarie University, North Ryde, N.S.W., 2109, Australia

    Peter Busch

  2. Department of Statistics, Macquarie University, North Ryde, N.S.W., 2109, Australia

    Ayse Bilgin

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  1. Peter Busch
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  2. Ayse Bilgin
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Correspondence to Peter Busch.

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Grounded theory map of the Plagiarism hermeneutic unit

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Busch, P., Bilgin, A. Student and Staff Understanding and Reaction: Academic Integrity in an Australian University. J Acad Ethics 12, 227–243 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-014-9214-2

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