Academic Integrity: A “Threshold Value” for Higher Education?

Abstract

For researchers and sector agencies around the world, poor academic integrity is seen as a significant risk to universities (Bretag & Harper, 2017; QAA, 2020; TEQSA, 2019). Given the existential threat that acts of academic misconduct are deemed to pose to higher education, interest in ways of developing academic integrity is correspondingly high and often invokes the concept of values (Macfarlane et al., 2014; Morris, 2018). However, to ascribe to academic integrity, the status of a self-evident, perhaps universal, value of contemporary higher education is contentious on many levels. This chapter takes in turn three of the most common ways in which students and scholars infringe on the principles of academic integrity – plagiarism, collusion, and contract cheating – and explores what the prohibiting of each of these acts reveals about the values of contemporary higher education. It argues that, far from neutral or universal, the values of academic integrity appear both normative and culturally specific, promoting a particular conception of higher education which risks excluding large sections of the global population. To counter this, the notion of threshold values – borrowing from Meyer and Land's (2005) notion of the “threshold concept” – is proposed, identifying the development of shared values as crucial to ensuring that contemporary, globalized universities are inclusive and accessible spaces.

Citation

MacLachlan, R. (2024), "Academic Integrity: A “Threshold Value” for Higher Education?", Rao, M.B., Singh, A. and Rao, P.M. (Ed.) Worldviews and Values in Higher Education (Global Perspectives on Higher Education Development), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 69-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-897-520241005