Currently reading Macfarlane (2022) on “The distrust of students as learners: Myths and realities”
What is it with all the distrust in students? Macfarlane (2022) answers this question before the raise of ChatGPT when things probably got even worse… But that doesn’t really matter, because his main argument is that there is really very little evidence that cheating has gotten any worse over time, despite the introduction of the internet etc., so why would it be different this time?
But universities do distrust students, and this manifests, Macfarlane (2022) argues, for example in signing in to proof mandatory attendance, routine use of plagiarism checkers, and tracking student behavior with learning analytics. With these measures, “trust is being undermined through the changing relationship between universities and their students“.
A report from the 1960s, Macfarlane (2022) describes, states that “long vacations were important to retain in order that students could develop intellectual independence“. So at that time, there was a “sense of trust that the time away from university, and hence little in the way of regular surveillance of their learning, would be used fruitfully“. And indeed, Macfarlane (2022) quotes from that same report: “’if one of the main purposes of a university education is to teach students to work on their own, reading by students must be preferable to attendance at a lecture unless the lecture is superior in presentation or content to the available literature’” (Hale, 1964: 96). Love this! A focus on student engagement is then, he argues, and indicator of the declining trust in students as learners (well… Could also be the attempt to make the quality of the teaching session “superior in presentation or content to the available literature“?).
Macfarlane (2022) conceptualizes trust as competence, benevolence, integrity/honesty, and predictability, and discusses those facets of what makes teachers (dis)trust students.
Competence can be understood as “confidence in the intellectual capacity of an individual to undertake studies successfully at university“. This confidence is often lacking; broadened recruitment has for a long time been read as “more-means-worse”, both when it comes to prior knowledge, intelligence, and emotional competence “to cope with being at university and managing the various demands that this entails“. To compensate for this assumed lack of emotional competence, many universities require attendance: “This has become a routine element of the culture of surveillance at university and is commonly used as a pre-condition affecting student progression and graduation even though attendance is rarely, if ever, included as a learning outcome or objective within the curriculum“. But there is little or no evidence to support that assumption, and students being now often more mature and/or working in parallel to studying puts it into question. Samuelsson et al. (2025) show that at least for our students here at LTH, absence is often an informed and strategic decision, so there is not a lot that supports a general lack of competence in students these days.
Benevolence is explained as “[i]n higher education, trust is placed in the student by the university teacher as someone worthy of his or her place at the institution“. This means trusting that students will learn “in the right way”, working hard, using a deep approach, etc.. But “if students are perceived, or perhaps more accurately labelled, as acting instrumentally by not engaging ‘deeply’ in learning the subject or being lazy this is akin to a breach of trust demonstrating a disrespect for the virtues of academic life at the heart of which is a desire to pursue truth and understanding. Students are accused of lacking motivation or, perhaps more accurately, the right type of motivation (i.e. an intrinsic as opposed to an extrinsic one).”
I find this a really interesting thought, that we might be (unconsciously?) judging whether students have the right kind of motivation. Yes, I want students to be intrinsically motivated because I think everything is more fun then, but does it really matter if they are not as long as they reach the intended learning outcomes? What is really the purpose of education?
Integrity/honesty are often put into question, not only when we work with plagiarism detection software, where “it is the electronic detection service that is trusted rather than the student and it is up to the students to prove that they are not cheating when a high proportion of ‘matching’ material is detected by the software in one of their assignments“. That is very sad if you think about it! Nevertheless, “assumptions prevail that cheating behaviour has increased due to access to the internet and the associated use of ‘cut and paste’ techniques“, despite little research into and even less evidence for this. What if detection has just gotten better and now we see something that we weren’t aware of before?
A point that Macfarlane (2022) makes is that even the signed statements of academic integrity that students have to submit with major work (I did at least for my Diplom and PhD theses) are also indicators of the distrust in students. I never thought about it, but it is true. Shouldn’t it be enough that I submit a thesis with my name on it, what is the purpose of stating explicitly that I wrote it by myself?
And I worry that the distrust based on the dishonesty facet has grown even worse after that chapter was published in 2022, now with GenAI there seems to be a new wave of fear of student cheating.
Predictability, lastly, is then about having an idea of what students will do. But there tends to be a lot of negative predictability assumed these days: students will not read, students are only learning for the exam, students will refuse to participate in class, students are not interested in reading feedback on their work, … What is this based on, actual observation?
So what is it that happened to trust? According to Macfarlane (2022), there is little to no evidence that students are less trust-worthy than in the past. But what happened is that culture at universities changed from a reciprocal exchange culture where expectations were directly discussed and negotiated between a teacher and their students, to a negotiated exchange culture, based on institutional rules that binds both teachers and students, where the teacher has to deliver; for example return feedback within a prescribed timeframe, make learning materials available online, etc, and the students have to attend, their work has to run through plagiarism checks, etc. So the whole relationship has changed from a personal to an institutional one. And as Macfarlane (2022) writes: “If someone is not a name, or perhaps not even a face, it is much easier to distrust them and their motives for studying in higher education.”
Macfarlane (2022) concludes by describing “a chain of distrust that stems from governments funding of higher education systems downwards. Governments do not trust universities, who no longer trust their academic staff as professionals to teach who, in turn, no longer trust their students to learn. It is a sad state of affairs.”
I really enjoyed reading this chapter, and I think it is super important to think through what we are communicating by certain rules and ways of doing things. If we communicate to students that we don’t trust their motivation and competence to learn, that they will do it with integrity and that we can rely on them to do the work, but rather give them a list of boxes they have to check, can we blame them if some decide that checking the boxes is all they are going to do?
Macfarlane, B. (2022). The distrust of students as learners: Myths and realities. In Trusting in higher education: A multifaceted discussion of trust in and for higher education in Norway and the United Kingdom (pp. 89-100). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Featured image on top of this post is the site for a planned dive this morning, but despite the beautiful sunshine, we decided that it was too windy to proceed. No point in getting seasick laying on a buoy…
Instead, I had a fun afternoon of blogging! You might recognize the spot below where I went to take the featured image for my Liberating Structures App post…
At the exact same time, a picture taken from the exact same spot, except turned slightly more to the left, looked so much more cheerful!
