The last time I mentioned the amount of academic integrity cases I had to deal with after coming back from the Netherlands, things weren’t looking so bleak. I had barely written the blog post or the floodgates opened. There are clearly a lot of members of staff who only now found the time to look into their marking work, or maybe already had done the marking, but had forgotten to look for possible cases of academic poor practice or even academic malpractice. I basically got a year’s worth in four days! Just before the marking deadline. I did manage to keep up with evaluating the cases and informing the students and supervisors, but at the end of that I was behind on documenting everything. Obviously.
As one of the people who had flagged cases with me was the assessment officer anyway, we had a little chat to see if we could think of a clever way to avoid this thing happening in the first place. You don't have to wait with evaluating academic integrity after you have marked! You can do that straight away. Because nobody benefits from me getting that many cases in such a rush. There were assessments that had been set in April, that I was only alerted to in June. That just isn't necessary! And we did have a plan. It's not a perfect plan, but it is better than what we have. We'll see in January, at the end of the first semester of the next academic year, if it works! Although the real proof of the pudding will be in a year time. The vast majority of students graduate in summer, so there is much more pressure on getting all the grades in at the end of the second semester than at the end of the first one…
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