Clues to Fostering a Program Culture of Academic Integrity: Findings from a Multidimensional Model

Student Insight on Academic Integrity

“…In a companion study to this chapter we reported survey results from 852 students (45 percent of all students) in the same program in March 2019 (Packalen & Rowbotham, 2020). The results from that survey provided us with a general and representative understanding of the population and thus the environment in which our research participants were situated.…”

“…The results from that survey provided us with a general and representative understanding of the population and thus the environment in which our research participants were situated. Specifically, 85 percent of those surveyed selfreported engaging in at least one questionable behaviour in the 2018-2019 academic year and their average rate of academic misconduct was 7.05 (standard deviation Packalen and Rowbotham (2020) we suspected that the lower rates of academic integrity violations among third year students, despite the linear decrease in the culture of academic integrity and linear increase in estimated percent of peers who violate academic integrity from first to fourth year, was a result of the fact that the third years who remained on campus during winter semester of their third year were students who were among the minority who did not go on exchange during the winter semester of third year and who, based on other survey measures, were generally less connected to the school and their classmates. b The Kruskal-Wallis equality-of-population rank test with ties indicated that for all three variables the averages per year values differed significantly across years at p < 0.05 (two-tailed) = 6.50).…”

“…1 Respondents thought that on average 78 percent of their peers violated academic integrity and their assessment of the culture of academic integrity within the school, as measured by an 11-item scale, was just above neutral (3.46 on a five point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, standard deviation = 0.73). Table 18.1, which was adapted from Packalen and Rowbotham (2020), highlights the differing behaviour, beliefs and attitudes in each of the four years of the program.…”

“…In the third year, students were beginning to perceive that the system in which they were operating was broken and by the fourth year students were struggling to manage recruiting, interviewing and coursework (Packalen & Rowbotham, 2020). Thus, we saw a movement in the students' suggestions from suggestions that were individually-focused to suggestions on what they could do to improve the for and culture of academic integrity more broadly.…”