Raise or stick? Should I penalise cheaters or ignore cheating?

Academic honesty is fundamental to effective education and learning within degree programmes and to students’ future workplace success. However, academic dishonesty, or ‘cheating’ is growing in scale and scope with more means and forms of cheating being identified by educators. This is only partly due to the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Educators’ attitudes toward cheating and the impacts it has on them personally and professionally appear to be influencing their response to suspected cheating. In turn this may be contributing to changing attitudes of students towards cheating. Educators must decide whether to focus on academic enforcement or avoidance. Enforcement requires acting on suspected cheating to formally raise work for an academic dishonesty review which results in additional work and potential stress and harassment, whilst avoidance allows the educator to stick to an informal ‘see no evil’ response which addresses the cheating by manipulating marking to fail the work, marking the work as if there is no issue, or not reviewing papers for academic dishonesty. This choice leads to an inconsistent response which can encourage students to play Assignment Russian Roulette by evaluating the risk-reward of cheating and create a difficult raise or stick decision for educators. Choosing ‘raise’ may open an academic Pandora’s Box that can affect workload and wellbeing; choosing ‘stick’ is self-protective but may encourage academic dishonesty and limit learning.