This calendar year I had been spending a lot of time on issues of academic integrity. Most of it is just students who copy sentences over from the sources they use, which is not what they are supposed to do. But there is an increasing percentage of it that has to do with artificial intelligence. And a lot of people within the academic world are pondering this.
One day my colleague Dei pointed me in the direction of an online conference about this topic. That sounded interesting! And I registered. It was funded by the Higher Education Funding Council Wales and organised by the Quality Assurance Agency.
The day before, they sent information about how to join. I needed some technical support they're; somehow something seems to have gone wrong with my registration. But they sorted it. I was glad I had sorted this beforehand. The program was also available; there were two parallel session so you had to choose which talks to you wanted to attend.
And the day came! The technology worked. And soon I was in the first session. Basically it was about how you avoid cases of academic integrity arising. It was delivered by people from the Open University. They said they had seen a big increase in cases of academic integrity, and we have too. There were people from other universities in the chat who confirmed that they had seen it as well. I'm not sure if this is a global thing, but I think at least it is a UK-wide thing. And they weren’t merely thinking about how to deal with them; they wanted to get the numbers down. And they figured they just needed more education. And I am thinking about the same thing. I have already requested a lecture slot in our first year tutorial module. I figured I am the person best placed to tell the new students how to avoid coming into contact with me the hard way!
The second session I attended dealt with software with which you can detect an awful lot more than the software we use for detecting lack of paraphrasing. This software scrutinises all the edits that have been made to a text, and makes them visible. And the idea is that there are patterns in how humans write. And if you spot strange patterns, what you might be looking at is bits of text having been brought in from elsewhere (for instance an AI tool) and incorporated into the self-penned text. It was quite cool! Unfortunately, this software is not currently available to the wider community.
The third and last session what about how to deal with use of AI in assessments. The people who delivered that session had polled their students; anonymously, I assume. A really big percentage had admitted to using AI in assessments. It is clearly happening! And I see quite a number of examples of that too. It does mean we need to deal with that. Some people fight back; they ban its use all together, and go back to in-person exams. I personally don't think that's the way. But if we adapt our assessments to this new phenomenon, we need to keep adapting them, because the technology progresses so fast!
The last part of the conference was a panel discussion, but I wasn't impressed by that. It was short, and it was mainly the panel talking. But altogether it had been a useful half day!
And then it will soon be the new academic year. I think I will have quite a lot of work on my hands regarding academic integrity!
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