Responsible but powerless: staff qualitative perspectives on cheating in higher education

Abstract Teaching staff play a pivotal role in the prevention, detection and management of cheating in higher education. They enact curriculum and assessment design strategies, identify and substantiate suspected cases, and are positioned by many as being on the ‘front line’ of a battle that threatens to undermine the integrity of higher education. Against this backdrop, the experiences of teaching staff with contract cheating were investigated by a large-scale Australian survey across eight universities. This paper reports on the qualitative findings from the survey’s only open-text question: “Is there anything else you would like to tell us?”. Of the 1,147 survey respondents, 315 (27.5%) completed this item. Respondents most commonly described contract cheating as a systemic problem, symptomatic of an increasingly commercialised higher education sector. Staff narratives revealed their distancing from, and powerlessness within, their universities, yet clear feelings of responsibility for a problem they struggle to address. Responses did not echo much of the existing literature in reflecting the construct of integrity as a battle between staff and students, but instead framed cheating as an unfortunate, ancillary issue of transactional teaching and assessment practices. This data illustrates a need to re-centre the educative role of teachers when designing institutional strategies that address contract cheating.