ENAI Newsletter December 2019

Dear Readers,
Welcome to the last newsletter of the year 2019!

As you will discover, this newsletter contains an exceptional amount of information and interesting news, we have kept some of the articles for the next issue. Nevertheless, we hope that despite the hectic end of the year you will find some calm moments for yourself to enjoy the reading.
On behalf of all ENAI we wish you merry Christmas and a happy and successful year for 2020!

The experience of a successfully building an academic integrity culture on campus is shared by Jean Guerrero Dib, the director of the Center for Integrity at University of Monterrey (Mexico). This is a remarkable achievement because Mexico has a low corruption perception index (ranked 138/180 by Transparency International in 2018). As this response is very extensive, below is an extract from the original text. You can find the complete answer in ENAI database of materials.

In our experience, when this topic was raised in different forums with university authorities, there was no argument against the need to build a culture of academic integrity in educational institutions. However, when the time came to commit resources, few of the institutional leaders were prepared to dedicate serious efforts to this initiative. In theory, it is seen as very necessary and important, but in practice, it is not prioritised or being properly addressed.
The reality is—it doesn't matter which university we are talking about—that there is a serious problem of dishonesty in our classrooms. This has implications for the future professional performance of our graduates that questions the quality of our educational efforts and puts the prestige of our institution at risk. What are we doing about it? Either we promote a preventive approach and ordered effort or, we will be, sooner or later, prey to scandals that will damage the confidence, image and value of our “brand”.
How to move from conviction to action? We are not experts, but we can tell you about our experience at UDEM. We hope this will trigger some insights that will contribute to the achievement of greater commitment and involvement in your university.
Since its foundation UDEM has been committed to integrity in academic work, however, since 2009 this has been done in a more intentional, holistic, and sustained manner. Following, the most significant milestones:

In 2016 the Center for Integrity was established with the mission to strengthen the culture of integrity in the community and collaborate with other educational institutions and civil society organizations in promoting personal ethical behavior in different professional environments.
UDEM Center for Integrity decided to create an honest campus, free of corruption; being the leader in Mexico and Latin America for its offering of programs promoting a culture of integrity; and becoming a point of reference in topics of applied ethics in the different disciplines and professional environments.
The Center has: updated the Honor Code and adapted a short version of it in the form of a Decalogue; established an Honor Council integrated by faculty and students; appointed Academic Integrity Officers for each School; delivered an Academic Integrity Seminar to students found to be responsible for academic dishonesty; developed and offered an Induction Course on Academic Integrity (a MOOC for new incoming students and a program for faculty); designed and deployed communication campaigns to increase awareness; and created an endowment that guarantees continuity of this effort and protects the commitment to fight against academic dishonesty and other forms of corruption. The Center manages a scorecard where it can keep track of the performance indicators and inform its decisions for the improvement of processes and outcomes.
Throughout this time, we have learned many things. Here is a summary of what we consider to be most important:

Our world desperately needs to change, and it can only come from citizens. Educational institutions play a very important role in the shaping of better citizens. As educational institutions we must continuously ask ourselves if we are helping to form honest individuals. Strong support from top leadership must be assured.
Policies themselves, cannot promote profound change. It is necessary to change people’s underlying assumptions, and that will take a long time and effort. Good intentions are not enough, there must be strengthened by resources deployed and led by a team of champions with enough authority to make things happen.
We need to keep encouraging faculty’s commitment. The institutional dynamics keeps them busy with classes, research and accreditation processes. They argue about not having enough time to improve their teaching practice and at the same time, adopt integrity practices in their classroom, disregarding that both are the same thing. It is important to emphasize what Lang (2013) says, that quality and integrity are sides of the same coin, one cannot be found without the other. Faculty plays a key role and they must be on board.
Students are part of the problem, but also part of the solution. We cannot afford to fail to involve them in the construction of the culture of integrity. Students must be the main characters and active change agents.
International standards and strong relationships with leading experts and institutions around the world provide additional ideas about how to work towards a culture of academic integrity. It is worthwhile taking them into account.
We can’t do this alone. It is wise to engage others into this effort, because in the end, this is our contribution to the creation of a better society.

Read the complete original text.

The last two months were very rich in terms of newly published papers related to academic integrity. Here is a selection of publications we think you should not miss.

Tracey Bretag published a column about contract cheating in Nature: Excellent overview of the problem, short and informative, which every HE manager should read.
To defend itself, the scientific community must recognize that contract cheating is not an isolated problem caused by ‘bad apples’. It is an attack on core academic values that necessitates stronger leadership from government departments, funders, regulators and educational institutions. This threat requires a collective response.

Talking about Tracey’s contract cheating research, you should not miss the paper from Cath Ellis, Karen van Haeringen, Rowena Harper, Tracey Bretag, Ian Zucker, Scott McBirdie, Pearl Rozenberg, Phil Newton and Sonia Saddiqui: Does authentic assessment assure academic integrity? Evidence from contract cheating data. Unfortunately, the answer to the question in the title is NO.
In higher education, there is a widespread belief that assessment design is a solution to the problem of contract cheating and that authentic assessment tasks are particularly effective. (...) The authenticity of assessments was determined using five factors derived from the literature: frequency, fidelity, complexity, real-world impact and feed forward. Our analysis found that assessment tasks with no, some, or all of the five authenticity factors are routinely outsourced by students.

And also from Tracey for the third time: From ‘perplexities of plagiarism’ to ‘building cultures of integrity’: A reflection on fifteen years of academic integrity research, 2003-2018
McCabe and colleagues’ advocacy for the development of ‘Honor Codes’ as the means to address cheating resulted in a strongly moralistic approach which centred on students’ commitment to values and ethics. (...) From the late 1990s, the focus in the U.K. was (...) on students’ responsibilities to avoid plagiarism through appropriate writing practices. (...) In most of the rhetoric from this period, the words ‘plagiarism’ and ‘cheating’ were used synonymously.
Tracey reflects her research journey from plagiarism to integrity. She explains that plagiarism is not just a student issue, and points out institutional responsibilities and formulates Academic integrity as a national priority. The last phase is devoted to emerging threats to academic integrity (i.e. contract cheating).
It is evident that much progress has been made in our understandings of academic integrity—what it means, how to promote it, how to embed it in assessment, how to respond to breaches, and how to ensure that it underpins every aspect of scholarly work. (...) Given that the highly commercialised, internationalised and under-funded nature of Australian higher education is unlikely to change any time soon, new and different threats to academic integrity can be anticipated. In light of the achievements of Australian researchers spanning more than 15 years, we can have confidence that such challenges will be met with evidence-based rather than moralistic responses.
Let’s hope this statement would still be true if you replaced “Australian” by “European”.

Kiata Rundle, Guy J. Curtis and Joseph Clare provide a psychological and criminological explanations of Why Students Do Not Engage in Contract Cheating.
Students (n = 1204) completed a survey on why they do not engage in contract cheating as well as measures of several individual differences, including self-control, grit and the Dark Triad traits. Morality and motivation for learning received the greatest endorsement for why students do not engage in contract cheating. (...) This study supports the use of criminological theories relating to rational choice, self-control and opportunity to explain why students do not engage in contract cheating. Practically, this study may inform academic policies and assessment design that may reduce contract cheating.

More technically oriented researchers may be interested in a systematic literature review on academic plagiarism detection by Tomáš Foltýnek, Norman Meuschke & Bela Gipp. The authors have reviewed more than 200 papers on plagiarism detection from a technical point of view, creating a starting point for all researchers in the area of plagiarism detection. The paper brings an overview of the recent development and identified current trends, gaps, and challenges. It proposes a novel typology of plagiarism, which is based on the levels of human communication and introduces three levels for addressing plagiarism: Methods, tools, and policies.
We show that academic plagiarism detection is a highly active research field. Over the period we review, the field has seen major advances regarding the automated detection of strongly obfuscated and thus hard-to-identify forms of academic plagiarism. These improvements mainly originate from better semantic text analysis methods, the investigation of non-textual content features, and the application of machine learning. We identify a research gap in the lack of methodologically thorough performance evaluations of plagiarism detection systems. Concluding from our analysis, we see the integration of heterogeneous analysis methods for textual and non-textual content features using machine learning as the most promising area for future research contributions to improve the detection of academic plagiarism further.

Do you think we missed some papers worth sharing? Please let us know and we will include them in the next newsletter.

Times Higher Education journalists named the people who have shaped the debate in the year 2019.
Among the 12 extraordinary academics and administrators selected by THE, we can find acknowledgement for the research in the area of contract cheating - prof. Tracey Bretag (director of academic integrity, University of South Australia Business School) and Cath Ellis (associate dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney).

Leading scholars and publishers from ten countries have agreed a definition of predatory publishing that can protect scholarship. Don’t miss the comment in Nature. And this is the definition they reached:
“Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.”
The article elaborated aspects of the definition as well as criteria they omitted:
"Most controversially, we omitted quality of peer review, even though negligent peer review is often a prominent feature of predatory journals. We are not saying that peer review is unimportant, only that it is currently impossible to assess. (…) At the moment, journal quality, adequacy of peer review and deceit are too subjective to include."
At the end, the article proposes next steps of collaborative effort to counter predatory publishing:
"We believe that with this consensus definition, we are better prepared to track the problem over time, compare the results of studies on predatory journals and develop and evaluate intervention strategies such as educational campaigns and policy mandates. (…) Predatory journals are also quick to adapt to policies and measures designed to foil them. (…) We invite others to join us in our call to action."

By Tomáš Foltýnek, the representative of Czechia in ETINED
Council of Europe Platform on Ethics, Transparency, and Integrity in Education held the 3^rd Plenary Session in Prague (Czechia) from 28^th to 29^th November 2019.
Here is a short overview of the issues discussed during the meeting, useful ideas, and inspirations that emerged. The sessions were dedicated to education fraud, new tools, and good practices from the field.

Matjaž Gruden, in his opening speech, mentioned a phenomenon known mostly in the Balkans, but which also could be seen in other regions as: Semi-expert. This describes a person who, in the morning, listens to some discussion in a tram, and in the evening, delivers a lecture on that topic. Most of the other speakers reflected on the issue of semi-experts in their contributions ;-)

The crucial point in the agenda was a discussion about a policy framework to combat educational fraud. It is not clear whether this will just be a Recommendation to the member states or even a Convention. It covers a lot of areas - training, codes of ethics, national law, etc., as well as all levels of education from pre-school to university. There is a very strong statement in the preamble: "Educational fraud threatens national security and public safety", which underlines the importance of the issue. According to the document, member states are required to adopt laws against contract cheating.

Lord Storey presented his experience with a Private Member's Bill on essay mills for England and Wales. The bill has lapsed due to the UK General Election, but he is ready to present it again in the new Parliament.

André Hesselbäck shared a threatening case study of a Pakistani company Axact - the largest diploma mill ever, known for blackmailing their former customers. We will bring more details are in a separate chapter of the next newsletter.

Nadejda Snegur talked about anti-corruption efforts in Moldova. The main problem there is informal payments. Moldova actively fights this phenomenon: They have an action plan, the involvement of all stakeholders, and a national anti-corruption center.

Vesna Atanasova presented Capacity building programs in Western Balkans – a joint effort of the Council of Europe and the European Union. The results are, among all, Law on Academic Integrity, Codes of Conduct, Mandatory courses for students, Provisions in the law on higher education, and Certification of University of Montenegro (recent ENAI member) as a "Responsible institution".

Rajko Golovic gave a short speech on behalf of the European Student Union (observer of CDPPE). The message was clear: Students strongly advocate for a culture of academic integrity and are ready to cooperate on building this.

Dita Dlabolová presented the results of the Project on Academic Integrity in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, which identified examples of good practice, challenges, and deficits in these countries. Even though the research was focused on these particular countries, most of the findings are also applicable to other countries.

ETICO (an IIEP-UNESCO web-based resource platform targeting the issue of ethics and corruption in education) recently published a book Información y transparencia: cuadros de indicadores de las escuelas en América Latina (available in Spanish). The book provides a "global exploration of open school data to combat corruption in education is now out, with an in-depth look at initiatives from across Latin America".

We will approach you with the next regular newsletter at the beginning of February 2020. If you want to share with us, and with other recipients, any interesting news from your country or some curiosities from the area of academic integrity, we will welcome your contributions. Please send them to us before 25th January 2020 to info@academicintegrity.eu.
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In this issue:

How can you build a culture of academic integrity at your institution?

Call for proposals: Organisation of the ENAI annual conference in 2022 and beyond

ENAI Awards

Introducing new ENAI working group:
Integrity in Academic Dissemination and Publishing

Aims and objectives

Opportunities and possible actions

ENAI Research Digest

People of the year: who mattered in higher education in 2019

Nature Published a New Definition of Predatory Publishing

Webinar: Academic Integrity Research Insights in Eurasia

3^rd Plenary Session of ETINED

Is plagiarism wrong?

New book on ethics and corruption in education in Latin America