Competition and corruption in education: a lethal combination for academic integrity

“If you take me back to 1995, when [cheating] was completely and totally pervasive, I’d probably do it again.” (Lance Armstrong, BBC Sport 2015) It is too simplistic to place all of the blame for cheating on individuals. While individuals do need to take personal responsibility for their actions, their behaviour is often symptomatic of wider and deeply entrenched patterns in society. As this Call for Papers suggests, when the two toxic pressures of competition and corruption intersect, it cannot be surprising that scholars at all levels of the educational spectrum may choose the ‘easy’ path of cheating to gain academic advantage. Recent findings from the Contract Cheating and Assessment Design Project, support the earlier conceptualisation by Bertram Gallant (2011) that cheating is a systems issue requiring a broad, holistic response, rather than an individual behavioural problem which can be solved using a ‘catch and punish’ approach. Yes, some scholars cheat. Students plagiarise or outsource their learning, researchers fabricate results and authors submit recycled or redundant publications. So much research is devoted to understanding the individual motivations for cheating (eg academic, social or financial pressure, poor time management, etc), without addressing the broader educational and social context. As I suggested in 2013: Higher education is a competitive enterprise at every level – from student admissions processes to university ranking systems and ...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Open Access Publishing competition Contract cheating corruption education higher education Source Type: blogs