Negotiating the Maze of Academic Integrity in Computing Education

Abstract

Academic integrity in computing education is a source of much confusion and disagreement. Studies of student and academic approaches to academic integrity in computing indicate considerable variation in practice along with confusion as to what practices are acceptable. The difficulty appears to arise in part from perceived differences between academic practice in computing education and professional practice in the computing industry, which lead to challenges in devising a consistent and meaningful approach to academic integrity. Coding practices in industry rely heavily on teamwork and use of external resources, but when computing educators seek to model industry practice in the classroom these techniques tend to conflict with standard academic integrity policies, which focus on assessing individual achievement.We have surveyed both industry professionals and computing academics about practices relating to academic integrity, and can confirm the uncertainty and variability that permeates the field. We find clear divergence in the views of these two groups, and also a broad range of practices considered acceptable by the academics.Our findings establish a clear need to clarify academic integrity issues in the context of computing education. Educators must carefully consider how academic integrity issues relate to their learning objectives, teaching approaches, and the industry practice for which they are preparing students. To this end we propose a process that fulfils two purposes: to guide academics in the consideration of academic integrity issues when designing assessment items, and to effectively communicate the resulting guidelines to students so as to reduce confusion and improve educational practice.

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

“…The 2016 ITiCSE Working Group of Simon et al [614] investigated academic integrity in relation to computing courses. A key finding of the study was that academics often take different approaches to prevent and deal with academic integrity violations depending on the level of the course.…”

Assessment and Plagiarism

“…For instance, Gibson (2009) recommends introducing a code of practice, requiring reused code to be clearly acknowledged and submitted in a separate file to new code intended for marking. A difference between the acceptable practice expected by industry professionals and computing academics has also been observed (Simon et al, 2016). An alternative approach, used by Baugh et al (2012), has seen students assessed based on how well they repurpose provided code.…”

“…It has been proposed that computing assessments should be accompanied by learning outcome-linked considerations that are about what constitutes expected academic practice for that assessment (Simon et al, 2016). That would allow students to see a link between the different skills that they are expected to develop at each level.…”

Academic Integrity for Computer Science Instructors

“…For Computer Science, Simon et al (2016) recommend that exactly what students are allowed to do and what they may not do is spelled out for them on the assignment brief. This may include detailing which individuals and services they can and cannot get help from, which resources they may and may not use and what aspects of the assessment they can and cannot solicit help with.…”