Academic integrity often gets reduced to ‘don’t plagiarise‘ – but are we missing the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of what students truly feel about this subject? Too often, academic integrity research studies look at the perceptions of students and rely on them truthfully filling out answers to surveys. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that survey answers in this field may be wrong.
At the International Center for Academic Integrity Conference 2025, I shared an alternative approach that I’d used with undergraduate students taking my academic integrity research module. The slides are available here.
I asked students to write a one-page reflective summary about what academic integrity means for them, in their own discipline, and to think about how their own beliefs had been shaped. Then I analysed the reflection with both human and AI-driven methods.
The outcomes were used mainly for class discussion, but I didn’t tell the students this when they originally completed their summary. This was intended to remove any temptation for them to try and “shape” answers that they might have thought that I’d have liked to receive.
This post explores some of the findings.
Analysing the Reflections
There are more details in the slides, but I took 17 reflective summaries submitted the students, anonymised them, uploaded the reflections to GPT-4, then directed the model to identify themes in a systematic manner. This did take a lot of prompt tweaking and restarting, as it’s easy for AI tools to drift off track, but once properly guided, I had access to a useful summary of repeated concepts, and I was even able to explore the sentiment behind the student answers.
I also provided the students with audio feedback and further analysed my own thoughts, but that goes beyond the scope of this blog post.
What Students Really Focus On
Despite the students having signed up for a module exploring the role of AI in academic integrity research, very few students mentioned artificial intelligence as an academic integrity risk. Perhaps some reframing of this discussion is needed? Instead, students focused on a more traditional association of academic integrity with plagiarism and cheating, showing this was the view they’d most commonly been exposed to earlier in their studies.
Many students were able to pick up on implications for a lack of academic integrity in their own discipline, although this had a heavy focus on research integrity, through issues like data manipulation, as well as the societal impact and professional implications of a lack of integrity in field such as medicine.
Policy: A Disconnected Document?
One unexpected finding was that students found policy documents frustrating, with negative lists of things student shouldn’t do, almost leading by fear. The students thought that policy documents didn’t describe what good practice looked like, and that these documents didn’t align with their personal values.
While clear rules are important, students wanted policy documents giving them more guidance in everyday learning contexts. They wanted these documents to go further than just something they referred to at a point of crisis.
Next Steps
I found the analysis of reflective summaries to be a revealing exercise, one that might challenge assumptions about what students really know, value, and fear.
Reflective writing won’t replace surveys entirely, but this does provide an alternative and arguably more authentic lens to use to explore student attitudes to academic integrity. The more open opportunity to write can lead to richer insights. I’d encourage all educators to explore if this approach will work with their own students in their own unique situations.
