Introduction

Introduction

When I got my first permanent  job as a university faculty member almost ten years ago, I noticed a lot of posters on my campus offering writing and editing services. I had seen ads like this for most of my adult life at the various universities I’d attended, but I started looking more closely at these, because I’d heard whispers among colleagues that there was a lot of cheating happening at my university.

Many of the posters were written in Chinese, and my limited knowledge of the language only left me with more questions – I could tell that some of the posters mentioned writing, or studying, or tutoring, but I didn’t know exactly what else.

With the help of some Mandarin-speaking students, I soon learned that a wide spectrum of “services” were on offer, from seemingly innocent tutoring services, to the more grey area of “writing and editing help” to definitely not-at-all-sanctioned ghostwriting and online class-taking services.

This led me to launch a research project about what I came to call “paid/private academic support services” (PASS), and subsequently an undergraduate course, currently called EDUC 388, Perspectives on Academic Integrity. The course is not, as one or two students who enrolled in it assumed, one in which students simply learn the “rules” of academic integrity and how to not engage in academic misconduct; instead, the goal of the course is to explore theory, research, and practice in academic integrity at a variety of levels, from elementary to secondary to higher education, and from a variety of perspectives, including those of students, teachers, professors, principals, administrators, school district officials, politicians and policymakers, and the general public.

In any given section of the course, about half or more of the students are aspiring educators. Many are education majors or minors, and some plan to enter teacher training after completing bachelors’ degrees in other fields. A handful come from disciplines like psychology or criminology which have some overlap with the field of academic integrity; another handful find their way into the course simply because they find the subject matter intriguing. It has been one of my favourite courses to teach, in large part because the students take charge of presenting much of the material through creating and responding to  real cases of academic misconduct – cases which you can read in this resource.

Teaching academic integrity with case studies

Cases are probably best known as a teaching resource for business schools, but their use in education about academic integrity is not new. Many universities use cases as cautionary tales to teach beginning undergraduates about the “rules” of academic integrity. Cases involving academic integrity have also been used in teaching about business ethics (Hannah et al., 2019), and ethics in general (Ethics Unwrapped, 2023).

The focus of the case studies presented here, and the course they come from, is a bit different than the traditional “what not to do” cases presented as cautionary tales to would-be cheaters. They focus on the educator’s perspective and are designed to get readers to think about what the various actors – administrators, principals, teachers, and so on – within educational institutions could or should do when put in difficult situations like those depicted in the cases.

Case studies strike me as one of the best possible methods for teaching a course about academic integrity, because there are, by design, no easy answers. I think it’s vitally important for aspiring educators to be aware that they are likely to encounter a number of difficult situations across their careers, situations that will require them to think on their feet and make decisions that may not please everyone, doing the best they can in the circumstances they find themselves in.

I give the Education 388 students several resources about creating teaching cases, the most helpful being Gina Vega’s The Case Writing Workbook: A Self-Guided Workshop. Teaching cases are “about the problems that people in organizations experience” (Vega, 2017, p. 130). When they begin to sift through the sometimes endless media reports, legal documents, and social media posts, I encourage my students  to focus on one or more people who had to make a decision, since a good case should concern “at least one major issue that is usually simple to identify but not necessarily easy to resolve” (Farhoomand, 2004, p. 104).

Vega also offers a helpful distinction between “decision cases” (which don’t have an “ending”), and “illustrative cases,” in which the writer of the case reveals what happens and invites the reader to evaluate the course of action that was taken by the decision-maker in the case. She writes: “If this is a decision case, the protagonist will conclude this section with some kind of request for assistance. It will be clear to the reader what kind of help the character needs. If this is an illustrative case, the protagonist’s actions and, possibly, the outcomes of those actions will be described and will generate a response in the reader” (p.139). The cases we have created are perhaps something between decision and illustrative cases, but the goal is the same: to get readers to think critically about the decisions that were made, and to put themselves in the shoes of one or more decision-makers.

About these cases and how to use them

The cases in the “first edition” of this open educational resource (OER) come from the second and third offerings of EDUC 388, which took place from January to April, then September to December, of 2024, respectively. (The first offering was a 2021 COVID-era online-only course, and due to the vagaries of that time, I wasn’t able to get my act together to compile those cases for publication. I can only apologize to those students, because their work was very good!)

There is a possibility that by publishing this OER, we are diminishing the opportunity for future students to write their own cases uninfluenced by those that have already been published. This is always a risk, but we live in a time, as one of the patron saints of our course, Dave Cormier (2024) writes, of “information abundance,” and we have to teach that way. Our hope is that others will be inspired by this collection not only to reflect on and respond to these cases, but to continue to find new cases to research and present.

Unlike many teaching cases, those presented here are not fictional nor even fictionalized; they are real cases of academic misconduct, drawn from publicly available documents such as media reports, legal proceedings, published or leaked reports of private investigations, and/or personal accounts from social media sources. In some cases, the case authors engaged in personal communications with real people involved in the incidents. The fact that we are discussing real events that in some cases had enormous and devastating effects on individuals’ lives is not something we take lightly. Every effort is made to treat the people in these stories with respect and dignity while laying out the facts of the cases as best we can.

In our course, before their classmates respond in writing, the students working on the case present it formally, often supplementing the written case with additional background information about the social, historical, and cultural context the case took place in, and usually ending with a kind of “where are they now” section which reveals the aftermath or fallout of the case after the focal decision was made. Invariably, there is a lively debate about what could or should have been done in the case.

You may want to use the cases to prompt written responses and/or in-class or online discussions for education courses. These can focus on the specific discussion questions written by the authors of the cases, or you can solicit a more general response to the question “what would you do if you were in the protagonists’ shoes?”

Here are the requirements I gave my students for what I call “case reflections” in 2024:

The case reflection should include your own views and opinions about the case, but should also be supported by scholarly perspectives (e.g. course readings) as relevant. Reflections will be graded based on: 1) engaging with the material presented, 2) offering your own views on discussion questions from the group or other relevant issues as you see fit, 3) whether/how views and claims you advance are supported by concepts and readings from the course, and 4) whether the reflection generally is insightful and readable (e.g. clear, concise, grammatical).

I often work together with the case authors to choose a relevant scholarly reading to pair with their case; we have not listed those here, but a great starting point is the Handbook of Academic Integrity edited by Sarah Elaine Eaton, which is available as an electronic resource at many university libraries.

As of this writing, we are just finishing up the third and final Special Topics offering of the Perspectives on Academic Integrity Course: now  it has to either become regularized or go away forever to Special Topics Heaven. I hope for the former, but if it’s the latter, this resource will still exist.

Feel free to contact me by email (which can be found at this link) if you have any questions about this resource, and thanks for checking it out! We hope you find these cases as interesting and worth discussion and debate as we did.

Joel Heng Hartse
(on behalf of the students of EDUC 388 at SFU)
Burnaby, BC
November 2024

Further Readings on Academic Integrity Case Studies

If you would like more resources on academic integrity cases and/or teaching cases in general, I can recommend the following:

The Case Writing Workbook: A Self-Guided Workshop by Gina Vega

Building Honor in Academics: Case Studies in Academic Integrity edited by Valerie P. Denney, Camilla J. Roberts

Scandals in College Sports: Legal, Ethical, and Policy Case Studies edited by Shaun R. Harper and Jamel K. Donnor

Ethical Leadership and Decision Making in Education: Applying Theoretical Perspectives to Complex Dilemmas by Joan Poliner Shapiro and Jacqueline A. Stefkovich

The Ethics Unwrapped website by the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin

The Journal of Case Studies and the Journal of Critical Incidents published by the Society for Case Research

References

Cormier, D. (2024). Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community is the Curriculum. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ethics Unwrapped. (2013). https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-studies

Farhoomand, A. (2004). Writing teaching cases: a reference guide. The Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 13, 103-107.

Hannah, D. R., Lord Ferguson, S. T., & Parent, M. M. (2019). Accounting Exam Irregularities in an MBA Program. Case ID:Ivey ID: 9B19C00

Vega, G. (2017). The case writing workbook: A self-guided workshop. Routledge.