“The educational integrity enforcement pyramid: a new framework for challenging and responding to student cheating” by Ellis & Murdoch (2024)

When Rachel writes she agrees that an article is brilliant and important and a ’must read’ for anyone in higher ed involved in/concerned about academic integrity and assessment security, guess I have to read it…

In “The educational integrity enforcement pyramid: a new framework for challenging and responding to student cheating”, Ellis & Murdoch (2024) explain why the current response of teachers and institutions to cheating isn’t working, and how to approach cheating behaviour instead. So far, there have been two main pathways to addressing cheating: The “rule compliance” one of punishing cheating, and the “integrity” one aiming to reform and giving second chances. A third option is to focus on “assessment security”, where assessment is designed to make cheating difficult, and easy to detect. Ellis & Murdoch (2024) suggest that higher education should consider learning from how other industries deal with cheating, for example, they state that in the gambling industry, up to a quarter of the budgets goes into preventing cheating!

Ellis & Murdoch (2024) suggest using a the “this-for-that” approach, where different motivations for cheating are considered and that they need to be addressed by different measures or consequences, in order to both enforce rules and work towards academic integrity. They conceptualise this in their “enforcement pyramid”. Most students are at the bottom of the pyramid, where the public and institutional risks are low, and also financial and emotional costs are low. The students at the base of the pyramid are able and willing to do the work, and by increasing awareness of academic integrity and making compliance easy, the institution can help students self-regulate towards (or often probably just stay with) the desired behaviour. A little bit higher up in the pyramid are students who are either careless or confused (or, I guess, both), and they need more support from the institution for enforced self-regulation, in form of monitoring their behaviour with for example automated cheating discovery techniques, and intervening with remedial training and reporting. These students here are on the intersection of where an academic integrity approach that was successful for the students at the bottom of the pyramid stops working, and an assessment security approach needs to be taken. At the high risk, high cost tip of the pyramid, students display criminal behaviour like contract cheating or admission fraud. For them, the institution should according to this model “use the full force of the strongest available penalties“.

If you, like I was, are a bit put off by classifying students as criminal or “unwilling to do the work of learning”, I have a nice quote for you. Ellis & Murdoch (2024) write that “Importantly, we are not suggesting that individual students will always fall into a particular group; that students can bring different selves to different learning contexts at different times means that the ability and willingness of the same student could place them into different groups at different times and/or contexts.” Phew, people can change! And in fact, the whole system only comes together by applying downward pressure and thus assuming that it is possible to change student behaviour, to move them along the continuum in the direction of the desired behaviour.

I think it is also extremely important to point out that wrongly accusing, or disproportionally punishing, students is always going to backfire, so having a very nuanced approach,”contingently ferocious and forgiving“, seems absolutely sensible! And it is very helpful to think about the different interventions at our disposal, and if they are used at the right instances. We should probably map out our own pyramid and see if we want to adjust!

But now on to other important news: No waves today, and not even a horizon, but the water is beautiful as always!

Well, some very few waves (clearly travelling in from further away since they are all fairly uniform and wave lengths get sorted over distance travelled, and there is no wind and no ripples or other locally generated wind waves).

And a fun picture for you: Stairs, reflection of stairs, and shadow of stairs. And if you look very closely, overlaying the sand ripples on the sea floor, you can see how there are more lit and more shadowy areas at the bottom of the stairs from the sunlight being refracted by the small waves that were generated by walking on the bridge and then transferred into the water by the vibrating stairs!

Ellis, C., & Murdoch, K. (2024). The educational integrity enforcement pyramid: a new framework for challenging and responding to student cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 924–934. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2329167