Journal of Academic Ethics最新文献

This research investigates whether academic integrity can be strengthened through a holistic educative approach that combines compulsory modules on academic integrity, pedagogy that challenges punitive approaches, and an embedded curriculum. We present quantitative and qualitative data from surveys and interview responses from students to investigate their experiences and perceptions of our approach. Qualitative data suggest students appreciate the educative approach and that it fosters agency in students. Most participants – even those who indicated they had been part of an academic integrity breach process and students who knew someone who had been involved in the process – expressed that the process itself led to a greater understanding of academic integrity generally and students felt they could address the issue for themselves and benefit into the future. Responses indicated students wanted to have a voice in the academic integrity process. This research indicates that a holistic educative approach promotes students’ agency in relation to their academic work and frames academic integrity as a positive and desirable aspect of students’ developing academic identities.

Higher education academic integrity policies are varied, and similarly, the language regarding the act of fabricating citations can be diverse and subjective. With recent calls to align academic integrity policies with practice, the aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how the act of fabricating citations is presented in higher education academic integrity policies by conducting a two-phase content analysis of the web-based, academic conduct policies for undergraduate students at public institutions of higher education in the State of New Jersey. The first phase consisted of a conceptual analysis for language regarding the act of fabricating citations. The second phase consisted of a thematic analysis of the policies that included language regarding the fabrication of citations. This study finds several potential issues. Policies that lack language regarding the fabrication of citations fail to communicate it as a prohibited act, and some policies that include language regarding the fabrication of citations use ambiguous terminology that is subjective, exclusive examples that fail to include all acts of citation fabrication, or phrasing that fails to align with the following commonly used writing styles: American Psychological Association (APA), Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), and Modern Language Association (MLA).

The exposure of scientific scandals and the increase of dubious research practices have generated a stream of studies on Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), such as failure to acknowledge co-authors, selective presentation of findings, or removal of data not supporting desired outcomes. In contrast to high-profile fraud cases, QRPs can be investigated using quantitative, survey-based methods. However, several design issues remain to be solved. This paper starts with a review of four problems in the QRP research: the problem of precision and prevalence, the problem of social desirability bias, the problem of incomplete coverage, and the problem of controversiality, sensitivity and missing responses. Various ways to handle these problems are discussed based on a case study of the design of a large, cross-field QRP survey in the social and medical sciences in Sweden. The paper describes the key steps in the design process, including technical and cognitive testing and repeated test versions to arrive at reliable survey items on the prevalence of QRPs and hypothesized associated factors in the organizational and normative environments. Partial solutions to the four problems are assessed, unresolved issues are discussed, and tradeoffs that resist simple solutions are articulated. The paper ends with a call for systematic comparisons of survey designs and item quality to build a much-needed cumulative knowledge trajectory in the field of integrity studies.

Concerns over students engaging in various forms of academic misconduct persist, especially with the post-COVID19 rise in online learning and assessment. Research has demonstrated a clear role of the personality trait psychopathy in cheating, yet little is known about why this relationship exists. Building on the research by Curtis et al. (Personality and Individual Differences, 185, 111277, 2022a), this study tested an extended Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) model, including psychopathy as a precursor to attitudes and subjective norms, and measures of anticipated moral emotions (shame and guilt), to predict cheating intentions and cheating behaviours. A cross-sectional survey was administered online to university students from around the globe (n = 257). Results from a serial mediation analysis revealed that psychopathy predicted academic misconduct behaviours indirectly through attitudes, subjective norms, anticipated guilt (but not anticipated shame), and intentions. These findings indicate that cheating may be reduced by modifying attitudes to cheating, subjective norms regarding cheating, and anticipated feelings of guilt related to engaging in academic misconduct. In addition, the results revealed high rates of several forms of cheating, particularly in unsupervised online tests, which have been used more widely since the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding raises concerns regarding the poor security of such assessments.

For decades, student ratings of university faculty have been used by administrators in high stakes faculty employment decisions such as tenure, promotion, contract renewal and reappointment, and merit pay. However, virtually no attention has been paid to the ethical questions of using ratings in employment decisions. Instead, the ratings literature is generally limited to psychometric issues such as whether a given student ratings instrument exhibits the statistical properties of reliability and validity. There is no consensus understanding of teaching effectiveness, the very attribute that students are alleged to “evaluate.” What students are actually doing when they complete a ratings form—whether measuring, evaluating, reporting, judging, opining, etc.—remains unsettled in the ratings literature. If ratings are surveys of student satisfaction, they have no logical or ethical connection with teaching expertise. I argue that the administrative use of student ratings in faculty employment decisions violates basic moral principles including nonmaleficence, beneficence, professional autonomy and clinical independence, and multiple aspects of justice including due care, truthfulness, and equitable treatment. These ethical violations rule against any administrative use of student ratings in faculty employment decisions, including the “use with caution in conjunction with other evaluative methods” deployment of student ratings. My conclusion is that such use should be immediately and universally terminated. Formative use of student questionnaires as part of ordinary instructional communication and feedback between instructor and students is a separate issue and outside of the scope of this paper.

To determine the effectiveness of current ethical teaching and to suggest ways to reform the current ethical curriculum in light of students’ perspectives and experiences. Students of Dow Medical College were selected for this cross-sectional study conducted between the year 2020 till 2023. The sample size was 387, calculated by OpenEpi. A questionnaire consisting of 17 close-ended questions was used to collect data from participants selected via stratified random sampling. The questionnaire consisted of two parts. The first part included the demographics. While the second contained 15 questions designed to assess the participants’ current teaching of ethics and effective ways to further improve it. The data obtained were analyzed using IBM SPSS statistics 26. Out of the 376 students who gave consent, the majority of the respondents (64.6%) encountered situations where they felt that their current teaching of ethics was insufficient and (54%) believed that the current teaching of ethics could be improved and made further effective. Practical sessions, PBLs (problem-based learning), case analysis, and ward visits were some of the ways the participants believed could help improve the teaching of medical ethics. Most students (92.8%) agreed that external factors like burnout and excessive workload have an impact on medical professionals’ ethical practices. In light of our study, a refined curriculum with a focus on ethical teaching must be established, with input from students to ensure that the medical students have the necessary expertise to manage an ethical dilemma.

Since becoming independent from the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have established strategic priorities focused on the globalization and internationalization of higher education. These have emphasized the modernization of university systems with a focus on research to produce impactful knowledge and enhance global standing in knowledge production. Yet, the espoused strategic priorities have not been supported by policy development associated with research ethics. This article addresses the need for research ethics policy to facilitate internationalized knowledge production and dissemination. Developing research ethics policy is not without its difficulties. In many developing research contexts, commentators have criticized policy internationalisation which involves the direct transfer of research ethics policy from the Global North rather than engaging with and adapting policy to other cultural contexts. In the light of recent scholarly debates over policy borrowing and translation, this mixed methods study considers how and in what ways higher education research ethics policy can or should develop within Central Asia.

Academic cheating is a pervasive issue in tertiary education, with implications for the competency of university graduates and their future ethical workplace behavior. Past research indicates that understanding academic cheating according to its different levels of severity allows for a more nuanced understanding of its aetiological factors, and an investigation into dispositional traits can further aid this. The primary aim of this study was to explore the synergistic relationships between trait mindfulness, self-regulatory efficacy, and academic cheating intention using purpose-designed vignettes, with a view to providing a foundation for the development of targeted academic cheating interventions. The secondary aim of this study was to examine these relationships in the context of minor and serious academic cheating intention (MACI and SACI), to better capture the nuances of academic cheating. First-year university students from an Australian university (N = 200) completed a questionnaire measuring trait mindfulness and self-regulatory efficacy and responded to vignettes corresponding to MACI and SACI. The results of this study indicated that high self-regulatory efficacy was correlated with low overall academic cheating intention (OACI), as well as lower MACI and SACI. Self-regulatory efficacy also amplified relations between trait mindfulness and OACI, such that high trait mindfulness was associated with lower OACI, in the context of high self-regulatory efficacy. This result was replicated for MACI, but not SACI. Interestingly, no direct associations were found between trait mindfulness and any of the measures of academic cheating intention. These results highlight the necessity of developing nuanced understandings of academic cheating. They further point to the potential role of self-regulatory skills in developing future interventions, while de-emphasizing the relevance previously attributed to mindfulness in supporting students at risk of academic misconduct.

Throughout the history of science, novel ideas that diverge from mainstream thought have often been met with condemnation, derision, and ad hominem attacks. These reactions have sometimes led to the premature rejection of such ideas, only for them to be later revived and even accepted as the prevailing paradigm. While robust debate is essential in science, the use of derogatory language is unethical, for it discourages research on existing hypotheses, deters funders, corrupts the scientific record, and delays or prevents the advancement of science. In this article, I discuss the case of unethical language repeatedly used against proponents of the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial impact event triggered the Younger Dryas cool period.

Academic file-sharing services encourage students to upload materials, sometimes their own study notes for example, but can also include copyrighted university documents, in exchange for access to downloading resources from a common repository. In this process, the lines between legitimate study help and academic misconduct are unclear. Integrity-based strategies to combat these transactions have been limited. Removal by copyright mechanisms has been identified as a potential approach but has been hampered by the enormity of the task and the resource intensity required to make an impact at scale. This explorative study at a large Australian university sought to remove a percentage of copyrighted material from two commonly used academic file-sharing websites and to understand the experience of users in uploading files. Findings from the study were encouraging and informative, resulting in a suite of initiatives being introduced across the institution to prevent uploading in the first instance as well as, where possible, addressing misconduct when it occurred. Limitations included that the study was only undertaken as one university and therefore does not represent the contexts of different institutions. Further, it only investigated two websites out of many available. Future research could explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by academic file-sharing services to retain existing users and attract new ones. This work provides a clearer picture of how an institution’s copyrighted material is hosted on two academic file-sharing websites and offers an effective and potentially scalable copyright approach that could be adapted by other higher education institutions.