sbayneDiscussions of context on #ChatGPT and #assessment in #HigherEducation are a bit thin on the ground: the structural state of universities are a big part of why many commentators see it as a challenge. A short thread with readings 1/9
high student numbers, precarity and crushing workloads mean there is rarely time for academics to gain the familiarity with students’ writing approaches needed to support good practice, or to innovate with form: @ucu workload survey 2021 (pdf) https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/12905/WorkloadReportJune22/pdf/WorkloadReportJune22.pdf 2/9
across the UK sector, the volume of summative assessments being set has risen steadily over recent years:. HEPI Student Experience Survey 2022 (pdf) https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-Student-Academic-Experience-Survey.pdf 3/9
this is part of a broader culture of growing student performance measurement which also includes contribution grading, attendance monitoring and the normalisation of surveillance architectures: Bruce Macfarlane on student performativity https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/198140/1/content.pdf?accept=1 4/9
commodification and the ‘student as consumer’ ethos has created a focus on the ‘policing’ of misconduct to protect the ‘exchange value’ of the qualifications universities provide: Sioux Mckenna on plagiarism and commodification https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-022-00926-5 (sorry, paywall) 5/9
Plagiarism and the commodification of knowledge - Higher Education
Universities have put in place various policies and punishments to manage plagiarism and it is an issue of significant interest. This article looks at how plagiarism is discussed in the 55 Higher Education articles between 1982 and June 2022 that make some reference to the term. Many of the articles focused on a police-catch-punish approach and imbued a strong moral charge to the issue. In contrast to such articles were those that presented citation as a complex academic practice that needs to be engaged with educationally. Our understandings of and responses to plagiarism emerge from a number of causal mechanisms but I argue that a key mechanism is the commodification of knowledge. Where knowledge is a product to be packaged, bought, and sold, then ownership and attribution become more important than engagement and personal meaning making. Instead of our obsession with a police-catch-punish approach to plagiarism, at a more micro-level, we should be inducting students into the many roles citations serve, and at a macro-level, we should be engaging in considerations of the purposes of a higher education and how we might better enable students to enjoy a transformative relationship to knowledge.
this gets in the way of other understandings of the value of assessment – eg as being developmental, authentic or demonstrative of students’ transformative relationship with knowledge: Jan McArthur on rethinking authentic assessment https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/165545/1/Rethinking_Authentic_Assessment_CLEAN_REVISED_after_review.pdf 6/9
there is moral panic around ChatGPT misconduct in public forums but, as with essay-writing services, we have little evidence of the extent to which students are actually interested in using generative AI to ‘cheat’: Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research on contract cheating https://www.sccjr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/SCCJR-Criminal-Grades_FINAL.pdf 7/9
partly due to all the above, dependence on data-extractive platforms for policing plagiarism are normalised in HE: these directly profit from the panic while their use drives a wedge of distrust between students and teachers: see our @CRDE book https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/manifestoteachingonline/ 8/9
fix all the above and we can get on with imagining creative, scholarly, profound and fun ways to use ChatGPT and other interesting new technologies in our teaching 9/9
