Marking time, so also: academic integrity time

Pretty much all the teaching is now over! But that also means that there is a lot of marking work to do. The exams haven't been yet, but there is a lot of coursework to mark. Especially essays and dissertations. And these can be slow to mark!

With much marking comes much work on academic integrity. I had been getting some piecemeal cases, but the big job so far has been the second year students and their essays. Every single student in that cohort is on that module, and it is a big cohort at that. And it is marked by lots of different members of academic staff. And the problem with that is that I am reluctant to let the situation happen that in a module like that, academic integrity monitoring becomes some sort of lottery. In other words; that it just depends on who has marked your work whether you will or will not be pulled up for poor academic practice. I know some of my colleagues have never flagged a case of academic poor practice with me. Some people are very diligent. And the solution to such unequal treatment unfortunately is that I look at all of the scripts myself.

We always get quite some essays about turtles. Pic by Roberto Costa Pinto

It was a lot of work to evaluate all potential cases! And save the documents in the suitable folder. And then write an email to all of them. And write a documentation form for all of them. And put the emails and the documentation on their university webpage. And keep track of all of that. If it's just one or two students in a module that is quickly done. If you have 200 students, and you have to contact more than 10 of them, it becomes time consuming.

I will also have to do the dissertations! Traditionally, these have lower percentages of students whose work I need to check. And it is a smaller cohort as well. Let’s hope that like last year, it isn’t a big job. 

A good thing about all this work is that I suggest to every student that they make an appointment with me. A fair percentage always takes that up. That means: more time! And the discussions can be difficult. I am, after all, probably telling them that I have reduced their mark because they were using someone else's words instead of their own. But sometimes you have a really constructive discussion with the student in question. And that makes my day! And I always hope I never have to email them again. Not about academic integrity, anyway…