Framing Students’ Perspectives on Academic Integrity

Abstract

This chapter comprises a review of the higher education literature on academic integrity and misconduct, with a specific focus on students’ perspectives. The literature on academic integrity in higher education reveals four dominant framings of students’ misconduct: misconduct as a moral issue, misconduct as a regulatory issue, misconduct (specifically plagiarism) as an issue of learning to write in academia, and more recently misconduct as a threat to academia. In this chapter, each of these four framings is explained from the students’ perspective. From a moral and regulatory perspective, students express anxiety about being caught “cheating” unintentionally. Many understand academic misconduct as plagiarism, and they focus on the mechanical act of referencing, rather than on citation. From a learning to write perspective, students again focus on plagiarism. They express a desire for more information on how to avoid plagiarism and for the opportunity to make mistakes as they become competent academic writers. When considering academic misconduct from a threat to the academy framing, the practices that institutions deem to be unacceptable are accepted practices in other aspects of students’ lives, leading to a disjuncture between what institutions expect and how students undertake their learning. This chapter reveals differences between what students understand about academic misconduct and good academic practices and what institutional expectations of students are. Understanding this disjuncture can inform how we frame institutional policies and processes.