3 The Panoptic Gaze and the Discourse of Academic Integrity

The Discourse of Academic Integrity

The ideas of “mitigating cheating” and “preventing academic misconduct” exist within the framework of what is commonly referred to as “academic integrity,” used as a shorthand for responsibilizing students to act in ways expected by the institution—to exhibit obedience to authority, particularly in the assessment of learning. Cheating and plagiarism are the two main rallying cries of academic integrity, which signals the officially sanctioned role of students under these headings. The role of faculty members and institutions in the discourse of academic integrity is superficial; they are expected to “promote a culture” of academic integrity at their institutions or “foster environments” in which students can behave correctly.

An exploration of how higher education institutions frame their institutional approaches to academic integrity is informative, and I will draw examples from two institutions that I consider home: the University of Miami (UM), an ostensibly elite private institution where I lead a team of instructional designers and faculty developers, and Florida International University (FIU), the large, Hispanic-serving state school a few miles down the road from UM, where I teach as an adjunct in the Honors College and the Department of Educational Policy Studies.

The University of Miami (2020) has published an eight-page honour code that articulates precise definitions of cheating, plagiarism, collusion, and academic dishonesty and outlines a complex process of investigations, charges, hearings, and sanctions. The purpose of the honour code is couched in the neo-liberal language of competition and presents no responsibility for the instructor other than to indicate requirements:

These Codes are established for the student body to protect the academic integrity of the University of Miami, to encourage consistent ethical behavior among students, and to foster a climate of fair competition. While a student’s commitment to honesty and personal integrity is assumed and expected, these Codes are intended to provide an added measure of assurance that, in fulfilling the University’s requirements, the student will never engage in falsification, plagiarism, or other deception regarding the materials he/she presents. Each student is responsible for completing the academic requirements of each course in the manner indicated by the faculty. (para. 6)

FIU takes a different tack. Its academic integrity page features a flashy, interactive, branching story video with high production values (Florida International University, 2020). The viewer takes the first-person role of a student named Jim confronted with three scenarios: the possibility to reuse a friend’s old essay, the chance to use a test answer key found on the internet, and the opportunity to pay a mysterious, anonymous figure to take the course. In the video, for each scenario, the viewer can click to select one of two paths (e.g., reusing the friend’s essay or working hard to do one’s own work). The “wrong” path invariably leads to a bad outcome (getting caught through plagiarism detection with the threat of misconduct proceedings), and the “right” path leads to a favourable outcome (praise from the teacher and an offer of a recommendation letter). The ultimate lesson—and the title of the video—are Learn It to Earn It.

The common denominator in these two approaches—and likely those of the vast majority of institutions—is that the responsibility for maintaining academic integrity invariably falls on students. Meanwhile, instructors are meant to employ technologies and strategies to mitigate and catch cheaters—by using invasive proctoring, plagiarism detection tools, and so on—not to examine their own pedagogical practice. Faculty members, academicians by trade, have only reactive and superficial roles within academic integrity.

The scholarly literature on academic integrity and academic misconduct has focused similarly on and responsibilizes only students, commonly using language that problematically hyperbolizes the issue of cheating. Singhal (1982, p. 775) suggested that “cheating has become one of the major problems in education today.” Haines et al. (1986, p. 342) referred to cheating in college as an “epidemic” and, based upon survey research, found that the underlying factors that prompt cheating include student immaturity, a lack of student commitment to academics, and a “neutralizing attitude” that justifies their immoral actions to themselves and others. Manly et al. (2015, p. 579) suggested that “college faculty members face a continual battle to maintain integrity in their classrooms,” employing the language of violence and war in relation to their interactions with students. Some of the more recent literature has increased in nuance, with discipline- and region-specific research studies on cheating or the relationships with more complex variables such as religiosity, but these studies remain similarly problematic, almost inevitably positioning academic integrity in relation and opposition to students’ moral failings (Manly et al., 2015; Nelson et al., 2017). Furthermore, the increasing prevalence of online courses and communication technologies in recent decades has certainly exacerbated concerns about cheating (Corrigan-Gibbs et al., 2015; Malesky et al., 2016).

In the institutional and scholarly frames, students are the moral equivalent of criminals. Returning to Foucault (1977), though the panopticon is ostensibly designed to punish criminals and prevent crime, the prison, as he explains, serves to create criminals by forcing inmates into meaningless work, subjecting them to the “arbitrary power of administration” (p. 266), creating conditions amenable to the formation of criminal organizations, and releasing them under conditions that leave them unable to find legitimate employment (pp. 264–268). The invasive disciplinary technologies of virtual proctoring and other surveillance technologies in the context of high-stakes assessments do not mitigate cheating as much as they create cheaters by shaping environments that bring them into being. In other words, high-stakes assessments—and the pervasiveness of technologies to ensure their “integrity”—cause the circumstances in which students “cheat” by virtue of their implementation. Why would any student cheat if it weren’t for the artificially high stakes enacted by the teacher?

One can hardly blame students for cheating in some circumstances. Systems of higher education serve to reproduce social inequalities (Boliver, 2017; Marginson, 2016), and many students enter learning environments at significant structural disadvantages in relation to their peers. When a low-income student who is employed full time to take care of her family and relies on the maintenance of a certain grade point average to keep her scholarship is faced with a high-stakes exam worth the majority of her grade in a class with a faculty member who has no pedagogical preparation, why shouldn’t she “cheat” if her future and the well-being of her family depend on her ensuring her grade? We owe it to this hypothetical student—and to all students—to do better.

To clarify, my goal in raising these issues of high-stakes assessments and cheating is not to blame or vilify individual teachers but to problematize certain pedagogical practices related to popular understandings of academic integrity as well as to foreground other practices that might exist beyond the boundaries of some teachers’ pedagogical paradigms. In the next section, I suggest an alternative conceptualization of academic integrity, one that transfers the responsibilization for abiding by academic integrity to instructors and frames students not as the perpetrators of crime but as the casualties of high-stakes environments.

Reimagining Academic Integrity

An approach to working with students grounded in critical digital pedagogy necessitates an alternative to the problematic discourse of academic integrity. In keeping with the basic idea of “integrity” as a term meaning “doing the right thing,” this alternative framing of academic integrity transfers the responsibilization for its creation and maintenance from students to teachers. Teaching faculty, as the primary conduits of power and the bearers of authority in academic environments, should imagine how they might uphold academic integrity—should do the right thing in academic contexts—by designing learning environments that do not cause the creation of cheaters.

The panoptic gaze imbued in the traditional discourse of academic integrity is typically realized through high-stakes testing (which can be proctored and surveilled) or closed-ended written assignment prompts (which can be processed through a corporate database of the products of other students’ unpaid labour for quantitative machine comparison). A reimagined conceptualization of academic integrity incorporates forms of teaching that privilege authentic creation and critical thinking rather than high-stakes testing. Furthermore, the traditional understanding of academic integrity creates false binaries: a given student is labelled honest or dishonest, a scholar, or a cheater. In contrast, this reconceptualization of academic integrity, upheld by teachers, is not a binary but an ideal. We must strive—continually—to foster learning environments of integrity for our students.

In the sections that follow, I outline four possibilities—by no means an exhaustive list—that college teachers might consider in the pursuit of academic integrity: privileging learning over grades, honouring a plurality of experiences, embracing open-endedness, and enabling students as creators. These are not intended to be specific strategies as much as they are philosophical considerations, though their translation to lessons, activities, and general classroom approaches is possible across subjects and disciplines. However, to better illustrate the practical potential of these considerations, I relate my own efforts in striving for this new conceptualization of academic integrity, drawing from my own experiences as an educator and professional faculty developer. I make no claim of being an exemplar and render myself open to critique and improvement, but I hope that a discussion of the ideas in the previous section is actualized in a real-life university class.

At the FIU Honors College, I teach a fully online seminar course entitled “Urban Inequality and HBO’s The Wire,” which uses the television program widely lauded for its gritty and realistic portrayal of urban crime and policing as well as its commentary on institutional dysfunction. Also using academic journal articles and other resources, students in this class explore issues related to race, class, policing, poverty and economic inequality, and neo-liberalism; it is from this particular class that I will share specific examples of my own teaching approach.

Privileging Learning over Grades

As discussed, the high-stakes context of assessments is one reason that some students feel compelled to “cheat.” The goal of these students is presumably to obtain good marks, which will enhance their overall course grades, their transcripts, and their grade point averages (and then career prospects and so on). In these environments, the process of teaching and learning is purely transactional. As Bowles and Gintis (1977) suggested, a correspondence exists between the school environment and the social relations of capitalism: teachers are akin to the bosses of a company, and students are the workers, trading their labour for currency—in this case, that of grades.

The system of grading and grades, now seemingly unassailable in contemporary higher education, shifts the purpose of the classroom (whether in-person or online) from learning to the achievement of grades, which are not necessarily equivalent. Grades and high-stakes assessments are also drivers of student anxiety, which has a self-defeating effect on academic performance (Barrows et al., 2013; Numan, 2017). But what would our classes look like without grades, in which the goal is learning, discovery, or even occasional epiphany?

Ungrading is an increasingly popular (but still relatively uncommon) approach to teaching and assessment in which traditional letter grades are abandoned in lieu of detailed, individualized, narrative feedback (Blum, 2017; Stommel, 2017). This strategy acknowledges the problematic nature of grades, including their poor fit in providing feedback and their role in causing anxiety. Productive alternatives to assigning a letter grade include providing input and constructive critique, asking follow-up questions, sharing one’s own experiences and perspectives, and starting a conversation.

An ungrading approach works well with a revise and resubmit protocol. Ultimately, learning is a process, not a product. Why should anything be perfect the first time, especially from non-experts and neophytes? Students are better than we might think at receiving input and improving projects, and surely this approach leads to a more meaningful and productive learning experience than high-stakes assessments.

I practise ungrading in my class, providing detailed and personalized feedback on every student submission. Logistically, in Canvas, FIU’s course management system, I achieve this through the comments feature on assignments. In addition to narrative feedback and despite ungrading, I do use Canvas’s grading options of “complete” and “incomplete.” Complete is shorthand to indicate my sense that a student’s submission addresses all of the prompts and is suitably well thought out and justified. Incomplete is an invitation to the student to revise and resubmit the assignment based on feedback. Students are encouraged to incorporate their own opinions, perspectives, and experiences as they relate to any given assignment as well as to indicate to me what was confusing or where they struggled. Since I am required to submit a final grade to the institution for each student, I ask my students at the end of each semester what grade they think I should enter on their behalf with a brief reflection on their engagement with the class. Many students report an initial uneasiness with this approach, but most indicate, by the end of the term, a feeling of having a pressure removed and a newfound freedom to express their perspectives and their processes of struggling with difficult material without fear of penalty or judgment.

Honouring a Plurality of Experience

Both the preparation for and the auditing of teaching with digital platforms (e.g., Quality Matters) emphasize the display to students of measurable behavioural learning objectives (Acevedo, 2019a, 2019b): that is, what they should “be able to do” as a result of instruction. Although our students come to us from all walks of life and different sorts of backgrounds with different goals, expectations, fears, and hopes, these standardized learning objectives assume that all of our students represent a singular form and funnel them into a generic educational experience. The panoptic technologies used in the pursuit of “maintaining academic integrity” perpetuate and reproduce this genericism.

Honouring a plurality of experience means acknowledging and embracing the fact that each student will engage in her or his own experience. Different aspects of any given course or lesson will resonate differently with students. Individual students will struggle with particular aspects. Four or five years after their time with you, students will remember something unique that stood out to them. Critical digital pedagogy offers us the ability to embrace the plurality of experience; students can and should be afforded the space to learn in different ways, times, and places and to express their understanding of the material in ways that resonate with them.

My class on The Wire culminates with a project in which I ask my students to synthesize themes from the class. In the guidelines that I provide to the students, I try to create a balance between providing helpful guidance and allowing space for creativity, expression, synthesis, and dissent. As with the other assignments in the class, I do not “grade” these projects or use rubrics; I position myself not as an evaluator of their work but as a supporter of their journey by elevating guidance over critique.

For this project, I attempt to honour a plurality of experience by creating space for students who prefer to engage creatively (multimedia production, fiction writing) and those who prefer to engage through more traditional academic ways (book reviews, position papers). Some students choose the “negotiated project,” in which they tell me how they want to demonstrate their engagement with the issues that we tackle in class. There is no particular way that I expect the topics and themes that we cover to resonate with my students, so there is no single way that I expect them to demonstrate their engagement with these ideas.

Embracing Open-Endedness

In high-stakes assessments such as examinations, closed-ended prompts are the norm. Tests often employ multiple choice or short answer questions; even essay prompts commonly result in nearly identical responses with changes only in wording, prose, or organization. Similarly, rubrics for papers or projects, often praised for their utility in setting clear expectations and providing a veneer of objectivity to a purely subjective form, foreclose opportunities for what students can and should produce by setting more boundaries than guidelines.

The world that we want to prepare our students for is much less clear-cut. If we expect them to leave us with the ability to think critically and solve complex problems, then we should create the opportunities for them to learn these skills. Part of this is embracing the open-mindedness of the world by incorporating open-mindedness in our teaching. Our assignment prompts, guiding questions, conversation starters, and even feedback methods should encourage our students to think in divergent, critical ways and respond with different—and differently correct—answers (for more on types of feedback, see Chapter 2 of this volume). These opportunities could prompt students to reflect on their own lives and experiences as they relate to the material, to interrogate their own biases and assumptions, to make judgments and provide critiques, to seek different viewpoints, and to engage in their communities. Privileging open-mindedness is more than just “moving up,” Bloom’s overused and often misunderstood taxonomy of learning; it is a matter of unpacking what we value and our expectations of our students as democratic citizens.

In my class on The Wire, many of the activities involve reflective writing that synthesizes journal articles with what students have watched in the show. For example, one of the major themes in the show is the War on Drugs. I assign an article entitled “Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the War on Drugs Was a War on Blacks” (Nunn, 2002), which extends Marx’s theory of surplus labour to argue that black Americans have been disproportionately targeted in the War on Drugs. In a reflective writing prompt, I ask students to evaluate this argument, using references to the show and to real life. This sort of evaluative thinking in relation to potentially divisive and controversial topics is a notable example of embracing open-endedness.

Enabling Students as Creators

Rather than verify students’ learning through high-stakes assessments, we should give students the opportunity to express their learning through acts of creation. As designers of learning environments in which we strive for academic integrity, it is our responsibility to activate students’ potential as creators by providing them with opportunities for expression. These are also valuable points at which students can relate topics from the class to their own experiences, lives, and perspectives. With a grounding in critical digital pedagogy, there are seemingly innumerable ways that digital technologies can facilitate creation: podcast-style audio projects, documentary or narrative videos, interactive presentations, websites, and digital documents. Creative opportunities are also collaborative opportunities. Collaborative assignments can lead to greater academic achievement and more positive attitudes toward learning (Springer et al., 1999; Terenzini et al., 2001). Students can work together, leveraging each individual’s unique skills and talents, toward the generation of creative products that express analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of topics and issues related to their learning experiences.

In the final project for my class on The Wire, the many different engagement options are intended to elevate students’ position as creators. Some options involve the use of multimedia and digital tools, whereas others are more traditionally “scholarly” in the form of written work. This flexibility in giving students agency over their creations has led to an amazing array of projects, from original empirical survey research on peers’ perspectives on various social issues, to compelling and entertaining podcast-style audio productions, to an original video documentary by an international student who spent time with a police squad in Brazil. Every time I teach I am astounded at the calibre of these projects as well as their creativity, maturity, and nuance. As a teacher, there is no more rewarding result than to learn from my students, and this happens often as I engage with their work.

Conclusion

Critical digital pedagogy challenges us to consider “how teacher authority might be mobilized against dominant pedagogical practices as part of the practice of freedom” (Giroux, 2011, p. 5), and as critical educators we have an opportunity to imagine new possibilities for creating environments that promote discovery, divergent thinking, skepticism, resourcefulness, and creativity. This entails rejecting the traditional discourse of academic integrity that activates technologies that create and reproduce a panoptic gaze premised on distrust and surveillance. Possible avenues for reimagining academic integrity include privileging learning over grades, honouring various experiences, embracing open-endedness, and enabling students as creators by leveraging creative technologies. Although I believe that these strategies transcend geographic location, cultural setting, and particular subject matter, critical educators should consider their own conceptualization of what striving for academic integrity, or “doing the right thing,” means for their own contexts and goals.

Key Takeaways

• Digital technologies used in the service of “promoting” academic integrity create and reproduce a panoptic gaze premised on distrust and surveillance.
• The discourse of academic integrity unfairly responsibilizes students for maintaining academic integrity in high-stakes contexts that promote lower-order thinking over resourcefulness and authenticity.
• Academic integrity can and should be reimagined to responsibilize teachers to create learning environments that promote creativity, expression, synthesis, and dissent.
• An approach grounded in critical digital pedagogy provides a space for this reimagining by privileging learning over grades, honouring a plurality of experience, embracing open-endedness, and enabling students as creators.

References